Ben and Nina's Farm: June 2013

Sunday, June 30, 2013

The Garden

We moved in at the end of April which left us the tough decision... Do we try to have a garden this year? We thought we'd give it a try. It has been a little difficult since we had to start a new vegetable garden and some live plants came a week early. The garden that the previous owners had was far too small. We made that one into an asparagus patch and planted greens (kale, spinach and bok choy), peppers and brussel sprouts.

Kale

Brussel Sprouts

Peppers

Toscano Kale

Spinach

Asparagus forest.

Yes, it's a forest. And it's taller than either of us.

We are doing succession planting so there will always be some ready to eat! We are doing it with both kale varieties, beets, carrots, kohlrabi and bok choy. This is baby kale.

Any one want spearmint? Come and visit and receive a free transplant of it! We have a lot and it grows like a weed. Ben has been making fresh spearmint tea. Right along side of it, the purple flowers, are chives.

Grapes!

We were very blessed to have established fruit trees. All are bearing fruit except for the cherry trees...

Plum

Pear

Peach

Apple

Hazelnuts! We have quite a few hazelnut bushes. They are a bush that blooms in winter and it takes all summer to grow the nuts. We can harvest them in fall, when the bush turns brown. They grow in the clump of leaves, shown in the middle of the picture.

Black Walnuts

We bought 75 raspberry plants (2 red varieties and 1 golden) and 200 strawberry plants. The plants arrived a week early, the first week we moved in. We just picked a few spots randomly and planted them. Looking back, I wish we would have thought about better placement of them but the plants don't seem to mind their new home. They are doing great!

Raspberries

Strawberries

We decided to make the new garden where the old horse pasture used to be. It was difficult to start up. We had to till up the grass and then painstakingly sift through the soil to really get it all out. Then it was a mad dash to try and get all the seeds in. Unfortunately, a lot of the seeds never sprouted. There are two reasons for this...

1. I used seeds from last year. I stored them in a cool, dry and dark place, so I thought they would all be fine. But most of them didn't sprout.

2. Little did I know, I had a couple smart chickens who quietly followed behind me eating what I had just dropped into the row. I have to say, I have no idea how long they had been following me...

Here is a photo of our seed started tomatoes in our new garden.

Beets

Carrots

Dry beans

Squash or pumpkin. I had a plan at first, where I knew what mounds were what, but I had to replant some of them and now I have no idea. So it will just be a surprise!

Sweet potatoes

Chicks at 3 Weeks!

Our chicks are now 3 weeks old. Their wings are all feathered and more feathers are coming in on their tail, back and chest. They love to run and jump and try to fly. One of them really likes to sit on top of the feeders.

They started getting treats this weekend. They are quite apprehensive about the new food and it takes a while for them to taste it. But once one of them finally decides that its good, they start grabbing pieces and chasing each other around!

I decided to put the fruit on the ground instead of the bowl. It seemed they were unsure of the white bowl and that prevented them from getting to the strawberries.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

The chicks have arrived!!

There's two ways to try something new. You can have a plan and have every detail worked out. With chicks, that means having the brooder ready well in advance, have the next home already in the works, and knowing exactly when the chicks should have their next experience. There are no doubts in your mind about how this could go because you've thought of everything! Then there's the way where you just decide to do, and work out the plan as you go. That's us! If we had waited until we had a procedure on how to do this, it would probably be 2 years before we felt like we would be ready for the chick commitment. So we decided to make a brooder (I think that is what it's called, lol) and learn the rest as we go.

We ordered 5 Dominique chicks to go with our existing adult Dominique flock and 15 Salmon Faverolles. We bought them from MyPetChicken.com

Here is a stock photo of what our Faverolles will look like when they are adults.

For our brooder, we took a large wire cage that found in the barn. It is a cage that has a middle piece that separates it into 2 sides. We have 3 heat lamps on it. We are keeping them in the basement, so 3 heat lamps should be enough to offset the cool temp down there. We cut some cardboard and taped it to 3 sides. The cardboard is to help hold the shavings and heat in.

The very nice mailman from the Adell Post Office dropped off our peeping package while we were at work. Here they are in their box!

I didn't realize how red the pictures would turn out... We're using 2 red heating lamps and 1 white heat lamp. Red is better so they can sleep.

The dark ones are the Dominiques. Out of the 5, 3 arrived in poor condition. One of them already died, one seems to have bounced back and the last... not sure yet. We are not out of the woods with her. We bought some save-a-chick electrolyte mix to add to their water. It seems to have helped.

The yellow ones are the Faverolles. They arrived in great condition. They are full of energy and very curious. They don't really enjoy being held... apparently they have things to do... :) Its especially cute when the run really fast and then fall over because they've lost control!