Update on the Garden and the New Chicks

I will post about our other mushrooms soon.  I'm waiting for them to actually start fruiting first.  Hopefully in a couple weeks.  Until then, here is an update of our garden!

I'm trying to be artsy while showing off our first real produce of the year.  Radishes!

Chamomile.  We planted this last year and forgot all about it.  It survived the winter and grew great this spring.  Now we will have to figure out how to make our own tea.

Tomatoes!

Rows of tomatoes

From left to right... Purple cabbage, green cabbage, and 2 rows of broccoli

I'm not sure what this is exactly.  We got a free packet of seeds from the Johnny's Seeds table at the MOSES conference.  I think this might be green mustard.

Baby's breath!

Sunflowers!

One of our winter squashes.

Onions.  We are growing yellow and red storage onions and leek.  The yellow onions are doing awesome.

Our new babies!  They are almost 1 month old.  We have mostly Easter Eggers (which are just mutt chickens), a few Silver Laced Wyandottes and a Blue Ameraucana rooster.

The rooster!  His name is Chuck Norris and he's the littlest one :)

Compost Mushrooms

We are growing two different kinds of mushrooms this year.  This post will show how we did our compost mushrooms.  The real name for them is Wine Cap, which is a burgundy colored button mushroom.  They need to go in a shady place that can hold a lot of moisture.  We thought a good spot would be next to the barn and silo.

When we cleaned out the chicken coop, we put a few wheel barrel loads into the space.  Mushrooms love nitrogen and chicken manure is loaded with it.

After spreading the chicken manure, we added straw.

We spread one bale as the bottom layer.  We didn't want to put the mushroom spawn directly on the chicken manure since the nitrogen concentration is probably way too high.  We want the mushrooms to tap into the nitrogen over time.

Then we spread out the mushroom spawn on top of the straw.

Then we topped it off with more straw and watered it.

We will give updates on how they grow!  We should hopefully have mushrooms by the end of summer!

Starting the Garden!

This year will be our biggest garden yet.  We started with tilling our garden in the fall and planting winter rye as a winter cover crop.  The point of that was to crowd out the spring weeds and create a good biomass to mulch the garden.  While it didn't really work as a mulch, it did a great job of preventing weeds.  In the third week of May, we tilled it in and started getting the plants we were growing inside, ready for the outdoors.

But I'm getting a little ahead.  Let me go back to our seed starting.  We started our first seeds in February.  We did the onions first, then the peppers, then the tomatoes.

Our seeds with the red grow light.

Here are our seedlings at the begining of April.  In the picture we are growing onion, tomato, pepper, artichoke, brussel sprouts, cauliflower, brocolli, cabbage and miscellaneous flowers.

At this point we needed multiple lights.  We have one red and three blue lights.  The sprouts loved the blue lights.  The sprouts that were under the red light turned towards the blue when they were big enough.

Tomatoes in April!

Onions in April...

These are the tomatoes right before they went into the ground Memorial Day weekend.  

My sunflowers!

Cosmos flowers...

Purple cabbage...

Brussel sprouts...

Tennessee Runner Peanuts

The tomatoes 2 weeks after they were planted.

To help cut down on weeds.  We are saving the grass clippings and putting them between the rows.  Hopefully it will cut down on the weeds enough to make a difference.

We will post again soon on the growth!