Chicken Vent

I am finding it more and more difficult to live in harmony with the chickens. In fact, I am ready to wage war with the ladies. Our mother-daughter relationship is strained because they are deceiving me and hiding their eggs. Even though I am paying to feed them, they are not feeding me. Each afternoon is like Easter morning around here. I troop off to the coop to collect my expected 8-9 eggs and gather 3. Then I have to survey the perimiter weeds and the garden for the remaining eggs, carrying around my half-empty egg carton. All the while they are cackling and chiding me; just daring me to find the latest nest. There are about 4 chickens that have figured out how to consistently get out of the fence surrounding their coop and have declared themselves free-range chickens. This is not as much of a problem now that they can't cause much harm to the mature vegetables, if only they would lay their eggs in the coop. Their nest boxes are clean, dry and sufficiently dark , but aparently it's not good enough. I placed golf balls in the nest to fool them into thinking I wasn't stealing their eggs and that has not worked. I wouldn't mind as much if they laid them outside in the same place every day, but as soon as I find a nest, they make another one the next day. I do not feel safe about selling or eating these eggs, for I can never be sure how long they have been out there; if they have been in the wet fog or bushes for a day, are they still safe to eat? Although we move the coop and fence often, we are looking into electric net fencing and other ways to keep them in. Their wings are already clipped so they aren't going over the fence, but on our uneven surface, they find plenty of room to go under the current fence. It would take a lot of egg-selling to make electric fencing kind of money.

The finer things

Fall is officially here. The weather is changing, the days are getting much shorter, the house is getting colder, and there is a lot more mud. Despite everything going on, it is such an escape to enjoy the finer things nature has to offer (aside from fall produce). This was the view from our porch one morning last week. Sometimes we just stop and take in the beauty that surrounds us. It keeps us going and reminds us who we are.

Curing onions

The destructive winds have encouraged me to perform a few tasks that I have put off and one of them is storing the onions. The tops are mostly dry and after three weeks under the hoop house I think it is time to clean them up for storage. I brushed off dirt and unsightly sections of the papery covering then trimmed off the tops and roots. I will sack them up and hang them in the shed to allow air circulation.

Fall Winds

We had high winds on Saturday that lifted the weed barrier for the garlic and damaged the plastic covering on one hoop house. We need to use more than the few stakes to hold the fabric down, maybe pull some soil over the edge or pile rocks on the fabric.
The ripped plastic on the hoop house will leave the tomatoes exposed to the wet weather we are having. The positive side to this wet weather is that the cover crop that we planted on Sunday should thrive. We seeded austrian field peas with winter rye. Soon after sowing seed, the chickens moved into the field to help themselves.

Compost: great dirt, less flies

We create quite a bit of compost with vegetable matter. Our neighbor also empties his goat, horse and sheep stalls on our pile. One summer of this and "the pile" grew quite large. Vince put old french drain pipes in it to create air circulation so it took on a rather alien appearance. Then when he would turn it with the tractor, the smell was assaulting. The big problem with our pile was that it was down wind and right between our back door and the garden.

It took a couple of months, but "the pile" is now true compost. Vince moved it below the gardens so it is easily accessed and we do not have to walk right by it. It is contained by large pallets and is tidy in comparison to the sprawling pile that used to be. We used it to dress the tops of the new garlic beds and the rest will be used in upcoming plantings. The second pile is now "cooking" and we will keep adding to it. Now hopefully the fly population in our kitchen will diminish.

Backyard Wildlife

No pictures for this post. Perhaps we need a night-vision camera set up outside. Last night the howling of coyotes woke us up. The howling was not unusual, but the proximity to the house was out of the ordinary. We peered through the window in time to see a coyote, startled by the reflection, bound off across the yard just feet from the house. The kittens hadn't come in for the evening yet, and I feared the worst. This morning, peering out the window again, this time to see any sign of the kittens, we spied three deer grazing in the exact same spot of the yard. They were 2 and 1 points and were sampling the flowers and trees under the cover of a heavy fog. When they meandered back down the hill to the thicket they call home, the kittens could finally come out of their overnight hiding spot. This balance between farm and wildlife will be a delicate one.

Fall Preparation

There is something satisfying about breaking new soil for a garden. I am not sure if it is creating order out of the chaos of weeds, the anticipation of discovering what kind of success one might have growing plants, or it might be part of the fun of planning before the hardships of implementing the grand scheme. I have heard that one of the reasons a farmer plows a field is for the satisfaction of creating straight furrows. I have not been able to do that, but I find the challenge causing me to be persistent.
We broke the sod and flipped the soil over four weeks ago. This week we shaped some raised beds with the plow, rake and shovel. We are going to plant garlic in four beds this fall. The others will be ready for early spring planting; they should be drier than the surrounding field and we will be able to work them sooner. We have visions of strawberries on a couple beds and radishes along with leafy greens on another.
After shaping the beds, we spread lime and compost on the surface before covering it with a weed barrier. We planted garlic through a weed barrier last year and it worked out great. We cut an "X" every six inches and planted each clove through the cut. We had to assist a few garlic leaves through the hole, but a lot of the work stopped there and we did not have to weed. The initial investment of time was considerable; we had to make 600 cuts through heavy material, but we lifted the material during harvest and now can reuse it this fall and hopefully a few more seasons.