We’re still here!

Its been quite a while since we’ve posted anything, but here’s a sampling of what we’ve been up to lately:

Here’s the wide view.  The 30×100 foot garden is along the left, pathway for the truck in the center, and then a 30×30 foot squash/watermelon/pumpkin patch on the right.  A few chicken pens are visible way in the back.

Zucchini in the front, cucumber trellis in the middle row with Armenian, pickling and lemon cucumbers.  The lemon cucumbers are by far our favorite.  Behind the cucumbers are runner beans that aren’t climbing, and then two beds of kale, broccoli, cabbage, lettuce and cauliflower.

Two rows of sweet corn, 100 row feet of potatoes and then one row of artichokes.

Here are our leeks and onions.  Looking a little thirsty, but also tasty!  The rest of the three or four beds were failed direct seedings of beets, parsnips and carrots.  Not pictured is our four Belgian endive plants that we’re very excited about.

In the foreground are two large tomatillo plants.  Further back are several rows of tomato plants.  They are struggling terribly.  It’s due to a mixture of a late start, transplant shock and overall bad tomato growing conditions in our area.  We’ve been told that tomato blossoms shatter when the temps are beyond mid nineties.  We do have at least one tomato, despite all this.  Not pictured are two rows of direct seeded herbs that never came up (except for the cilantro) and we think it is that we didn’t water them enough.

Courtney grew a row of Hopi Red Dye Amaranth in front of the sunflowers.  Outside the fence you can see our 15 plants of rhubarb that we transplanted from our friend earlier this spring.  We did not harvest these at all this year so that they could focus on putting down roots.

And now on to the animals.  Well, you missed the broilers – they’re already in the freezer.

Here are our Buff Orpington laying hens.  We have 13 of them, along with 7 Americauna hens.  The Buff Orpingtons are a dual purpose breed that are great for eggs and meat.  We plan on breeding our own and never needing to buy chicks again.  Courtney has an article planned for the future describing in full detail how we chose this breed.

We started the season with four Broad Breasted Bronze turkey poults, which are all now dead.  Three died of supposed genetic disorder where they go lame.   The fourth was lost to a fox… another story for another day… still not over it.  Above you can see a beautiful heritage Bourbon Red turkey that is 20 weeks old that we bought this past weekend along with the three Blue Slate chicks.  The blue slates will breed, so hopefully we’ve got a male and a female in the bunch.

Originally I had planned on buying two pigs for the year.  Courtney convinced me that we needed to tell everyone we have the “Three Little Pigs” so I had to get one more.  I love piggies, so it was an easy decision.  They love their mudhole and eat anything we throw in to them.

And of course how could we forget Cowboy and Wolfey!?  They absolutely love the wide open spaces we have out here in the country.  And how about that lawn?  We have a dirt lawn, and don’t really care.  Grass requires water, a lawnmower and wouldn’t grow anyways with the dog and kid traffic.  We’d rather spend our time on stuff we can eat.

All in all, life is great.  We’re very busy, but doing things we love.

Thanks, Robert.

Chicken Plucker in Action

The chicken plucker I built last winter has finally seen some action.  Sunday afternoon, despite the 25* temp and winds, we were out harvesting ten laying hens that reached the end of their productive life.

The only other type of plucker I’ve used or even seen in action was a table top, drum style plucker, sort of like this one.  Oh my what a difference this made.  My friends commented that this machine took what used to be the hardest part of killing chickens and made it the easiest.

The only difficulty was when we had to wait a little while for the scalding water to come back up to temperature.  The clumps of feathers froze together and seized the drive belt to the pulley.  Running some water from the hose over the feather clumps thawed them out and operations continued.

In his instructional book on how to build the chicken plucker, Herrick Kimball recommended 145* water with a 30 second scald for optimum results.  We weren’t using a thermometer, just the old fashioned finger test.  The plucker pulled all but a few feathers on the heads (which would be discarded anyways) and a few of the larges ones on the wings.  Easy to pull by hand after the plucker was shut off.

All in all, this was a monumental success, so we celebrated with a newly canned Black IPA from our favorite local microbrewery, hence the product placement above.

Thanks, Robert.

Anticipating Laying Hens

One of our goals is to live on a homestead in the meantime we are renting until we find that perfect home.  Okay well, at least a home with it’s own well water.  On that homestead we want to raise all our own meat.  This includes grass fed beef, pasture raised chickens, all natural pork, and laying hens.  Robert has much experience in the grass fed beef department and we have one season of experience with pastured poultry.  While Robert has raised pork we do need more experience with heritage breeds and all natural raising practices.  What he has never raised is laying hens. But my family did raise laying hens.  We lived in the suburbs on a little land and we always had fresh eggs.  We didn’t have a pastured system and I don’t remember the breed but the eggs were brown and the yolk was dark orange.  Just the way it should be.

We will soon be at our new rented home and we have decided that laying hens would be a reasonable and valuable addition to our backyard.  Robert has done some research into breeds and I will let him share that in a later post.  What I am asking for today is your input.  What breeds have you tried and loved?  Who are the good producers?  Who are the gentle girls?  Who are the hardy gals?

In this experimental stage I think it would be neat to try a few different breeds and see how they compare.  I would love to have an egg carton filled with multi colored eggs, not Easter eggs colors, but all those shades between green and brown.  I also think we will probably get started pullets.  This means that the bird is older and ready to produce eggs.  They are more expensive but seeing how this is our experimental stage I think it is necessary.  Truth be told I am impatient and want instant gratification.  It feels like a lifetime ago that we raised our own eggs and I just can’t wait anymore.

Another worry we have is Cowboy.  How is he going to react to new roommates in the backyard?  I have a feeling we will have to be quite diligent about watching him and very strict.  Cowboy is smart and learns rules quickly.  I am just worried about the mistakes he might make while learning.

Thanks,  Courtney