Early Garden 2012

The first weekend in March I took a gamble and put in a few rows of my spring/summer garden. Planting this year was less effort and more effort than in years past because hubby has decided that tilling is not good for the soil--I'm not exactly sure why it is not good, but I'm willing to give it a try this year. The garden has had a rough time the last two years, we got some produce, just not very much, so a change is probably in order.



Not tilling meant less effort up front because I never had to wrestle with the tiller, but also more effort because I had to use a hoe to loosen the top layer of soil (I'm not exactly sure if that is okay per hubby's 'new idea', but shhh, I know no other way of getting seeds planted without lovely loose soil). Luckily, over the last 7 years we have worked so much compost and organic matter into the soil, we have a really good base, so I don't think we'll be missing out by not tilling in the amendments I have poured on over the winter (4 bales of straw, a load or two of mulch, a truck load full of composted cow manure, 2 huge boxes of horse manure) All of that is mostly broken down into the soil, the larger chunks I just raked into the path areas.

To make room for the new season, all the 2011 garden hold outs were pulled--mostly just turnips and mint (argh my weedy mint is taking over the back quarter of the garden). There is one row of peas and one row of Kale which will remain along the back of the garden.



We have harvested and eaten turnips all winter and there was still enough left over to fill a child's wheelbarrow.

Garden layout wise we went back to planting in standard rectangular rows instead of the more visually pleasing V shaped planting beds. This was a decision based solely on ease of watering. From the looks of things, we will have another dry year and my #1 concern is making it easy for me to water my garden.

With lovely 70 degree weather I put in a 2 x 20 foot row of green beans (tri-color mixed, Jade, and Contender), a 3x20 foot row of summer squash (round, patty pan, caserta, cocozelle, umm.... 5 varieties in all) and 9 tomato plants. In all honesty, it is probably too early for tomatoes. But it is so hard to resist the flats of lovely plants at the nursery.



March 8 and 9th are cold and rainy, 42 degrees, but with a lovely slow drenching rain. I could do without the cold, but the rain is just perfect to kick off the growing season.

The oregano and parsley are doing great



The aquaponics set up is just so so, there is some nice lettuce and a few swiss chards, as well as the lavender I'm starting from cuttings (the main lavender plant is blooming now)




The hens are loving the longer days and have started laying again with gusto. They also love the 'chicken fort' that Andrew built for them from a cardboard box. He loves that they lay their eggs in their fort.



I did not think I was ready (I'm still bummed we 'missed' our winter) but bring on spring 2012.

Chicken Jinxed, part II

The same day I posted about being chicken jinxed, I went back to the coop gather eggs. I reached in and the black hen pecked me hard enough that she drew blood!

I think I fixed her though, I dumped her out of the nest box and took it away for a few days. I had to collect eggs off of the ground, but oh well it seems to have confused her enough to not be so broody anymore. I hope...

Chicken Jinxed

After my bragging about our four-egg-day (four eggs from 3 chickens!) on my blog, via email and maybe even with a phone message or two...my MIL called to ask about our chickens. I told her they were doing great: laying an egg each a day, not fighting, not pecking, not eating eggs, eating all their vegetables, not going broody, not pecking at me... oh my sweet, and perfect model chickens.

The VERY NEXT DAY




Yep, a pecked egg. You can even see the double beak hole where she pecked it. I found this under the perch in the chicken pen.

To top it off, our black hen (one of the infamous mean girls) has been in the nest box a lot, and even pecked at me when I tried to shoo her out yesterday. She has been pulling out the small soft feathers from her belly and under her wings to line her nest with. Gee, going broody? Yep.

Going broody means that she thinks she wants to sit on her eggs to hatch them. In theory, this would not be a bad thing, it is what God intended for the eggs, to be hatched into little chicks, in theory. The reality of the situation is that we don't want chicks, we want eggs. The hen would probably get bored or distracted half way through and abandon the nest, leaving half incubated no-longer-edible eggs for me to deal with. The hen is also preventing the other two hens from using the nest box. Hens also stop laying during the time they are sitting on a nest, so overall production goes down. Some hens make very good mothers, and judging by the history of our two 'mean girls' this one may make a great mother and raise up a flock all by herself. But we don't want that.


By bragging on my small flock, I chicken jinxed myself.

Four Egg Day?!? May 19th

We have three chickens, chickens on average lay an egg every 26 hours... so basically about one per day. So far, we've had a bunch of 2 egg days, a few 3 egg days, but yesterday was a first. We had a FOUR egg day, even though we only have three chickens.

I picked up one egg before work, it is possible that this egg was laid any time between 8pm on May 17th and 8 am on May 18th. I don't think chickens lay eggs at night, but I suppose if the time is right... who knows. Then after work on May 18th, I found THREE eggs in the nest box.


Ignore the giant brown egg in the upper right corner, that is a wooden egg. It is there to remind the girls where to lay, as well as to discourage egg pecking (which we have not had an issue with yet, thankfully).

Here are the eggs with a smashing toddler hand for size comparison






Here they are in my hand after rescuing them from the toddler so you can see the pretty colors, we get a blueish-green, a true white, and a beige-y off white color.

Hooray chickens for your first four egg day.

Portirat of Crazy

Hubby snapped a picture last night that pretty well summarizes most of the crazy stuff we do, so here is my portirat of craziness (not just me, but the guy taking the photo too).

Chicken update

We are in the middle of week 2 with our city hens... still no letter from the city, but the eggs are rolling in.



Here are the first two eggs we got, we have averaged 1 egg per day for the first week. Our three hens lay eggs in 3 subtlety different colors. The Auracana lays pale green eggs, one lays true white eggs, and the other one lays buff or beige colored eggs. In the bright sun, all the eggs just look white, but upon closer inspection, there are definitely three different colors.



The hens have all settled in nicely. At first we were having serious issues with the black and white hens picking on the orange hen, but that seems to have stopped. The first two days (before the run was built) the white hen especially would get her feathers all ruffled up and charge after the orange hen and peck at her. There was never any blood, but I got very tired of breaking up the fights. The poor orange hen would just huddle into a corner and wait for the abuse to stop.


Almost as soon as the hens got access to the open run, the fighting stopped. I"m guessing they were bored in the small coop and also vying for space. The larger run has lots of grass and dirt for scratching as well as piles of mulch for the girls to dig through.



The chickens seem to be afternoon layers, at least almost every egg we have found has been late in the day--even if I check all day long. I was home all day yesterday, sitting in our home office with the window open so I heard every little squawk and peep these girls made during the day. Mostly, they are very quiet birds. Around 4 pm, it sounded like someone was tap dancing on a wood floor and I went outside to see the orange hen in the nest box, scratching hard on the wood. I checked, no egg. At about 5 I left to pick up the kids from school with one last check of the coop for eggs, nothing. I got home 20 minutes later and hubby had collected 2 eggs, I guess they decided to lay eggs the second the van left the driveway.

Our friends chickens have also started to lay eggs, they went 1 week without a single egg. They suspected that the hens were in revolt because they were being terrorized by their lab and their 2 year old son--both would run around the coop to get a better view of the birds. Now the hens have realized that neither is a threat to them and started laying.

Even Further down Crazy Lane

We have some new arrivals in our family that take us just a few steps further down the crazy path... But first lets recap all the ways we are endearing ourselves to the neighborhood:
1) slowly getting rid of lawn and planting edible plants instead
2) keeping 50,000 flying,stinging insects in small wooden boxes
3) storing stinky rainwater in giant plastic barrels
4) hanging my families socks and undies out in the sunshine for the world to see
5) composting every scrap of organic matter in a big smelly pile

So why not add squawking, pooping and mulch decimation to the list too...

Welcome Horton Hens!



The as-yet-unnamed trio are expats from my in-laws farm in Bells. 'Blackie' and "Whitie" (not their real names) are part of the mean girl group of hens my MIL was given. The original 6 hens were deemed too mean and uncivilized to live with her existing flock of 50 pet chickens. One of the six mean girls we butchered and ate last year, the other five came home with us on April 2nd to live a city life. We were also able to scam her out of one of her pet Aurachana chickens. Wait, you say, the math just does not add up... five plus one totals six chickens, but I only see three in the picture. It gets even better, we convinced some friends of ours they too needed to keep chickens in the city... so they got three, we got three and this area of North Dallas just got a bit crazier.



Hubby has been very busy building a great chicken-hutch-house for our new girls. It is framed out with split cedar 2x2s, has 1/4" wire sides and bottom, and a hinged front door leading to a 5x8x5 foot run built with 2x4 welded wire. The main part of the house is sturdy enough that if this whole chicken thing does not work out due to city regulations we can use it to house rabbits.

So why, if they are smelly, messy, and possibly illegal in our city, would we want to do this?



EGGS! Within the first 24 hours of city life, one of our three hens had laid the first egg. We also want this to be an experience for the kids on where food comes from. Since he helps collect eggs at Grandma's house, boy sort of knows that eggs come from chickens, but now it will be a daily thing (we hope).

We also want to use this as 'practice' for when we can get out into the country and have some room to raise a bunch of chickens for eggs and meat. Like so many of our endeavors here in town, we hope to work out the kinks in these small scale systems so we can go with confidence into full blown production when we have the opportunity.

Conversations in our Marriage...

Me to hubby: Sorry to nit pick, but it is C-O-O-P, chicken coop. That is, unless you plan on our hens over-throwing the government.