Miss Broody Gets Her Eggs!

I have had a broody hen for a few weeks now and I have no rooster. She is a Buff Rock which is one of the breeds I choose for this specific trait. I had been taking her out to eat and drink daily hoping to break her but everyday she just boomerangs right back to her spot in the nest box hording any eggs available. So today while at my friends' big annual birthday party for their kids I was talking with them about how raccoon have killed 5 of their chickens recently. Long story short I brought home fertile eggs from them and now my broody can live out her dreams. She has made herself a nice hole in the hay I piled in a large dog crate, hunkered down, and has not moved since I stuck her on her eggs. So, if all goes well we will have chicks in about 21 days! Wish us luck!

Homesteading with Children

I did a post on this before nearly two years ago now. Then I had just the two kids and I actually think that I felt like it was more challenging to get my chores done. Go figure. Whether it be continued maturation or better coping skills, I am now in a better place with keeping our tiny homestead going on a daily basis. Yes, my dad sometimes beats me to watering the horse, but other than that, I am pretty on top of things!

First of all, I have changed my mind set a tad. This isn't just my homestead, it's our family homestead and I fully expect my kids to participate as they grow and are able. I'll admit, frequently I shoo them off to play while I focus and 'get'r done', but when my time constraints are a bit more lax, I try to take the time to teach and let them help. This is simple things like letting my three year old daughter scoop her tiny hands full of soil and spread them on a new garden bed, my seven year old collect and count eggs, watering plants or just tagging along while I work. They are sponges at these ages, give them good things to soak up (not their mother's frequent use of a certain word that is interchangeable with 'dung'. Guilty).

But, what about the baby?? Um, well there is something called nap time! I get 1-2 naps out of the little mister. During his morning nap I usually take Mini and Puzzle Boy out with me to play and get fresh air and I get the majority of my garden and barn chores done. Extra projects like weeding a large area, cleaning out the barn, etc. gets done during an afternoon nap where both the baby and three year old are napping. In this case I have my oldest "babysit" for me. Now, I am right outside and I check in frequently, and really all I am requiring of him is while he takes his afternoon down time is to yell out the window when one of his siblings wakes up. When they do, I come right in. This has worked great! He feels important and so big and I get some fairly distraction free time to get my work done. If things need to be done between naps than the stroller or Ergo baby carrier get used. And, Cherrios. Lots of Cherrios!

Another thing that I have started doing is having a 'mother's helper'. Poetically the girl I have help me is the girl who I watched when I was her mother's helper! Isn't that just the cutest? She has been awesome and while I don't have her every week, it helps tremendously when I have something big to do like move the horse's fencing to fresh grass or get all the cleaning that I have ignored forever done.


And, lets be real for a minute. Do you think any of us with young children that homestead get everything done in a day that needs done? The correct answer is... of course not!! I will openly admit that I ignore my housework a lot and then have a nervous break down at the state of things an play catch up. Sometimes I only wash my eggs once a week right before I sell them (which is safe as long as they are dry and at room temperature). And, sometimes, all I do for chores is chuck feed at the chickens and water them and the horse. Yep, I don't even collect the eggs on those days. You know what though? That's ok. I am not perfect and neither is my homestead. Let's give ourselves a pat on the back for getting what we get done regardless. As long as everyone is healthy and cared for, the weeds and dust will be there tomorrow.

Harvest Monday: June 22, 2015

Left to right: peas, lacinato kale, beet greens, broccoli greens, broccoli heads, rainbow chard, onion tops.
This week was primarily still just greens but with the exciting new addition of peas and broccoli florets! They were delicious and went into a lentil pasta primavera along with the kale and beet greens. I love deciding what's for dinner from what needs picked. May it continue!

Now you see it................................................................................. now you don't!
When I was harvesting the broccoli I was expecting the stems to be tough enough to have to really snip hard with my shears. Nope, sliced like butter. And, oh man, what that broccoli sweet and tender! Not one trace of bitter. I am trying to figure out how I can get another bed in over at the barn garden so I can grow more broccoli as a fall crop as well as peas. About the peas, this spring was an experiment with intensive planting using pea brush. What I liked was it stayed well contained and it did seem to work well but I just don't think it's for me. I find picking like a scavenger hunt because of the density. Not a fan. So, I am going to find a spot to plant a fall crop of peas to put in the freezer for winter.

Unrelated to harvesting, we finally got the pole bean support up just in time for the plants to start sending up searching vines.



And there has been a mysterious death in the corn patch! As you can see below, it looks like someone snipped the plant off. No other plants were harmed and I saw no signs of insects. Strange. While I was a bit bummed, I took this opportunity to spy on root development...



Cool, huh? Those are some happy roots! Too bad the plant got shanked over night.


Well, have a good week fellow growers!



This post was shared on Harvest Monday at Daphne's Dandelions.

April Gardening Synopsis

Blush Butter Cos lettuce
April was weird. Just strange and out of sorts. The weather had been cold then warm then really cold then just annoyingly in the 50's... frustrating is what April was. The greenhouse is alive but growing slowly. I wish that the onions were farther along than they are but hopefully they will catch up soon so I might have a decent crop once in the ground.

I have new cole crop starts that will be for both me and joining a few other vegetable starts as a give away in a fundraiser supporting Maine midwives gaining licensure. I also have a few medicinal and culinary herbs that are doing great so far.

The tomatoes are still in the basement under lights but will soon be out in the greenhouse. They are growing quite rapidly! The peppers are slower growing of course but I have a feeling they will take off when the heat comes. I will likely pot them in the black containers to make sure they get lots of heat. I think them growing in the greenhouse last year prevented them from getting enough sun which stunted them. I really need a decent pepper crop with the amount of salsa and hot sauce we go through!

The tomatoes look a little yellow tinted in these pictures but I think that is just the light! They were yellowing just a bit before I potted them on but I think it just because I waited way to long to do so and they ran out of nutrients. They have recovered fine and are ready to be hardened off. According to the almanac we have passed our last frost date but should we have an unexpected one the greenhouse will protect them fine.


The chickens have been free ranging at will but will now be going in a pen for the summer. The poop is getting out of hand!

My Partridge Cochin hen

So there you are! April was weird, lol. I am going to be getting insanely busy in the next few months so likely posts will be erratic but I will shoot for at least once a month to update. Between getting the house finished, the garden, 3 young children, church, helping host a parents support group and a summer apprenticeship with a local midwife I am in for an eventful summer! Pray for my poor brain to keep up!


Til next time!

Springtime Madness Begins

"While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease." -Genesis 8:22 (ESV)

During the winter it's easy to forget God's works in nature because it's bare, cold and where I live it is snowy. What could possibly be happening? But, then the snow starts to melt and I know that even though there is an obscene amount of mud at first, the earth will drink it in and keep it for when the plants need it in the summer. At least that's what the wild plants can look forward to. As much as I like my raised beds, for our long term goals of food independence, the method is somewhat restrictive and expensive. After watching the Back to Eden film again and mentally taking stock of what we have available, the B2E method of gardening really seems to be the smartest approach. I just need to find a place for it on our lot! We have a pretty good pile of fully composted horse manure that will be the base and I will find some wood chips somewhere.

The seedling hotel
The greenhouse is back up and running at about 50%. I still have a couple beds including the big one to get watered up and ready for seeds. Two of the small beds have been seeded with peas and spinach so I am anxiously waiting for little seedlings to pop up! It got up to 68°F in the greenhouse on Sunday with full sun, so with a few more sunny days they should be up. In another week I will put the onion, cole crop and chard seedlings out during the day to start to harden so they can stay out full time.

Poorly germinated onion starts... see the big bauld space in the middle?

Speaking of seedlings, my onions had a really horrible germination rate this year! I thought perhaps it was my fault but when I went back on Fedco Seeds website to see if they had more available it had that variety discounted. So, I am thinking that they may be having general germination problems with it this year. I will email them to let them know my out come and will be ordering a different variety that is a cross of the Copra I have and another onion. These seeds are open pollinated or "heirloom" as most have come to know them as, so I will be able to save seed from them. As a side note: I fully support Fedco. They are a Maine company who get seed from real growers and this is a seed co-op which means they basically are sharing seeds with their customers! I am not at all upset by my onion seeds poor performance because I know they are real seeds that were collected by people who care. My cousin in Michigan gets her seeds from them and if she keeps going back then I know I'm in the right place! Prices are also great and I get free shipping because I am local.

Everything else is nice and healthy!

Along with my new onion seed I will be getting a few other things. I haven't quiet decided on them all but as of right now I am planning on a storage carrot and some winter spinach that I hope to nurse along in the greenhouse this winter with the lacinato kale. My large deep bed in there will get insulated and heavily mulched and hopefully with enough snow to insulate the actual greenhouse we will have greens all winter long. This is optimistic though because it will get down to -10°F at night in January at least a few times most years. Guess we will see!

Tomatoes

I am incredibly thankful for the abundance of eggs we have been getting! I have been selling eggs again and even used 5 dozen to get credit toward my feed cost last week (my feed store buys eggs from small farms to sell to customers at no profit to them). I just opened a new bag of feed for them Monday, so I am going to see how many days it takes for them to go through it and how many eggs in that amount of time to get an average cost per dozen. My hope is in another year or two to do what Paul from B2E does and feed the chickens on nothing but yard and garden waste/produce. My flock right now gets most of my kitchen vegetable waste so it will be a fairly easy transition for them I think. I will then use the compost they make in their run on the garden. I will likely then reduce the price of my eggs because they will basically be free to produce. My heart says to someday make good food easily accessible to those who need it and I truly want to make that happen! I have had that dream for a while, may the Lord make it so. :-)

Just waiting for the peppers now. They might need a few days near the wood stove to come up
Sorry this post is a few days late, but as the title says, the madness is beginning. More spring is ahead! Til next time!

It's August? Already?

It seems it's been a few weeks! I was on a good roll of weekly or more postings but as I expected, I ran into a lack of motivation and brain power to keep up my pace. At this point the days are going so fast I am having a hard time remembering what day it is, it all runs together in my world! Thank goodness for calendars. In order not to bore you I will just post some pictures and give a summary of the madness that is my life.

Eighth month belly
I am 33 weeks and now see my midwives every 2 weeks and just had a prenatal last Wednesday. Baby is head down now but is favoring being posterior at the moment so I am trying to remember to lay on my left side to encourage him to lay on my left side too. Being posterior means that he is facing forward and has his back pressed against mine. While this is not a problem for us right now, in labor it can create quite a lot of unpleasant things like back labor (think of having a bowling ball being pressed with unnatural force against your tail bone from the inside, it hurts like nothing else), a slower labor and much more effort in pushing. Posterior isn't dangerous or really "bad" but it is nothing us mom's who forgo pain medication want to experience! So I am praying and working on getting him to cooperate. Other than that I am measuring right on track, no major things to complain about and am generally functioning a lot better than I expected for this far along. Only about 4-7 weeks to go! I will be doing a post on how I am preparing for my second home birth and what my hopes are for Labor Day (not the holiday, the one where I give birth silly).

This one Rutgers is loaded! The other is catching up.
The garden I have kind of slowed down with. Everything is growing but I badly needed to do some maintenance including a good dose of watering for the indoor plants. All the potted plants outside are getting regular water with the plethora of rain storms and showers we have had but I have neglected the indoor plants a little in the past couple weeks. Everything needs a fresh dose of liquid fertilizer and inside needs a good soaking. I am harvesting a few beautiful ripe Glacier tomatoes now as well as Northeaster pole beans, all my carrots were pulled this last week (I chose to harvest them at what I call the finger size), Swiss chard is still cranking out 1-2 full cuttings a week and the leaf beet really needs a good harvest. Cucumbers are thriving and should be giving us fruits to pick by mid to late this month. My onions are going to be a bitter disappointment this year I am afraid, my fault as they have not had enough full sun to bulb properly. Some have made tiny bulbs about the size of a large marble but most are still strait and no thicker than a fat pensils.

Glaciers

San Diego Pastes
The chicks are 8 weeks old now and are growing like crazy. Most of them have successfully feathered out completely but there are a few that are struggling with this and look a little like awkward teens. I lost two of my Buff Rocks to a mystery ailment that involved a swollen or blocked up sack in their necks, fluffed feathers and sleepiness. They died within 3 days of first symptoms. I have no idea if this was a contagious illness or it was merely a coincidence but they died within a week of each other. None others so far have seemed to come down with what ever it is. One of my Partridge Cochins was damaged either during sorting or shipping from the hatchery and has a malformed leg. Because of this she was being picked on badly as well as my little rare breed Silver Polish who both ended up with open wounds. I separated them from the rest of the flock and since then with more attention to entertainment, I have not had anymore bad pecking problems. I will keep 'Gimpy' and 'Weirdo' in their own space until most of the roosters have gone to the butcher. I will send them by breed not only to make it more manageable money wise (30 birds would cost about $90 all at once) but also so I can keep track of what breeds preformed the best in meat production. The Light Brahmas will likely be the first batch as they are the largest and most in numbers (which I won't do until after I have recovered fully from birth). I will be extremely thankful when we have a freezer full of organic homegrown meat again!

The barn is kind of a mad house
And, last but not least, the house. We have been approved for a construction loan! Thank you and praise to Jesus! While we have a bit of a process to complete until closing, we will be closing hopefully sometime in September and getting back on the fast track. Obviously this means we will not be in our house before the baby comes but we should have the ok to move in before Thanksgiving or sooner depending on... well it's construction so everything! I do see why people who have the means hire crews to build their house! Building it yourself takes about four times as long. But, at the end of this we get to live in a house where we are reminded of the achievement everyday and for what most people pay for a tiny fixer-upper. The best part is we have designed it to be exactly what we want and to be low cost in utilities, a blessing beyond words here in Maine.

I plan on finishing up some more projects in my room and then I will do that home birth prep post!

Til next time.

The Start of Our Sustainable Laying and Meat Flock

Light Brahma chick.

On Sunday I got a text notification that my chicks were on their way. Surprised, I immediately checked their shipping status knowing that they must have been sent out the day before. Normally chicks are shipped Monday and arrive to you on a Tuesday morning. The status said they were in Maine a few towns away. Of course it was Sunday and the USPS doesn't deliver on Sunday, it was hot and I was kind of panicking my poor chicks were suffocating and starving in a tiny little box! With nothing else to do, I just waited. Monday morning just before opening our town post office called to let me know my birds were there and very ready to be picked up! I could hear them peeping in the background so I knew most of them were in good condition. Montana man was heading up town anyway so he said he would get them for me. While he was gone I set up the brooder, in an old truck tool box no less, the only thing we had that was large enough for 40+ chicks without building something!

Again, I had bought an organic chick starter mash with which we had great success with our meat chicks. Typical chick starter from a feed store is medicated and many will try to tell you that without the antibiotics your chicks will most likely die. I had 100% success with organic feed and I thought our chicks were quite robust and lively. If you are raising chicks for meat or eggs and want the finished product to be 'organic' you really do need to start them on organic feed from day one.


When the chicks arrived home we both quickly but gently put them in their brooder an kept an eye for any that were in distress. All were alive thankfully, and soon the peeping sound in the brooder was making my ears ring! I usually teach them to drink as I take each one from the shipping box, but I forgot to tell that to MM and so I ended up teaching about half and the other half seemed to just learn from them. Everyone found the food in a hurry! I thought to look at the box sticker after I noticed our free rare chick (a bantam this time I believe). We were given a free extra Light Brahma male and extra Barred Rock male. So, 43 chicks total, 32 for the freezer in November!

You might notice their water is orange, no we do not have a rust problem! Because of the heat and prolonged time with shipping we got electrolytes for their water to give them a boost. My friend at American Family Now has a post on how they raise chicks and why they choose not to use any water additives. I do agree with her that chicks have survived thousands of years without, yet I find no harm in giving them an initial boost especially after less than ideal shipping period. I would not give additives to chicks hatched and cared for by an actual hen because their stress would likely be much less.

Feathered legs on one of the Light Brahmas, one of the reasons they are so cold hearty.
I don't have a light pictured over them in these pictures but I did put one in before I secured them for the night. Our last red heat bulb broke, knowing it wasn't going to be real cold I just replaced it with a regular 120 watt bulb. I might have gone to get another heat bulb but there are so many of them that a mass huddle seems to do the trick and the light is really more of a light 'blanketing' effect for them. Everyone was eating and drinking well this morning and I think this will be a hearty group!

We do have a barn cat and while he has not ever tried to get at our chicks before, we do take precautions against incidents. My brother's dog is a definite problem and because we do not have the brooder in the stall which has a door, we are keeping the garage door at the front of the barn closed all the time right now.

An old screen door makes a good cover for this hodge podge brooder!
I look forward to watching this colorful bunch grow! I may give away some of our Golden Comets in the fall to someone wanting to start their own small laying flock to keep the laying flock at a reasonable amount for the next year. It may also be advantageous to get rid of my two worst feather pickers who terrorize the rest including my rooster. While I am sure it will get better once they are in a much larger run and coop, it would still be a quick fix if it was still a problem after.

There are several blogs and articles out there on natural chicken keeping (may I just say some love their chickens a little too much!), and I do not feel the need to give a ton detail on mine! I will share our experience with raising heritage breeds for meat and our success or lack there of with having hen hatched chicks in the coming year. Like gardening, chickens take some learning and I am certainly still learning!

Til next time.

Welcoming May

May is always my most impatient month it seems. We are so close to real gardening but yet are still dealing with mud and cold nights. Like most here in Maine I will be waiting for Memorial Day weekend to do any on the real 'planting'. I say 'planting' because due to multiple reasons I need to wait yet another year to have a real garden. Poop. Well, on I plod as best I can and purchased some large planter pots to grow my essentials in. When my cabbage died in an unexpected freeze a couple weeks ago I should have taken that as a sign. So, I am down to tomatoes, peppers and the greens and peas in my raised beds. I have been debating making some cheap narrow but deep boxes to try out my carrot seed tapes I made in since carrots don't need much space. We'll see I guess. I still have a foil pan full of onion seedlings that are slow growing that I haven't decided what to do with. I would love to grow some onions to store but, again, this is a "we'll see" kinda thing.

The spinach seems to be the fastest growing by far and we should be making baby leaf cuttings in another week or two.The peas that are planted at the back of each box are starting to send up wandering vines and I will string up some yarn trellises for them to find this weekend. I will likely move the tomatoes and peppers into the green house in another two weeks as long as the days keep getting warmer. I almost lost all of my tomatoes last year when I ignored watching the weather. With none to be sparing, I don't want to take the chance. The rhubarb plant is up and I can not wait for the first pie! I think I will freeze some this year so we can have pie in the winter!

My chicken have also started to regrow those feathers. They all still look a little like they went for a ride in the washer, but with the regrowth comes hope!

And, last I just felt like posting a picture of these clowns...

Happy May!

Til next time.