Winter's Cold

It has been a long time since I posted.  We got caught up in holiday preparations and traveling, a human loss in the family and, sadly, a decline and death of our dear Obie, our 87lb rabbit and garden saboteur.

Celebrations and Losses

The Holidays and January were a mix of wonderful times with family and friends and difficult losses.  Thanksgiving was wonderful with family in Ohio and we decided to plan our first Christmas to be in our home with family.  We were blindsided the sudden death of a family member just before Christmas.  So the normal gaiety of Christmas with our family was tempered by that loss.

We traveled to Ohio to visit more family for the new years celebration and returned for a January consumed by the decline of our beloved Obie.  We were able to find solutions for his pain.  We are not able to find solutions for the neurological issues that left him unable to walk, sit, shift position, or lie comfortably.  In short, he was unable to participate in his life on his terms.  When he had a seizure that left us both lying in the snow on a very cold January morning, he asked to go.  I honored that request. I miss him terribly - I still find myself rushing to be home by 5:00 pm only to find no reason to be here.  I still get up at 5:am only to realize that nobody is hungry and waiting.  This part of winter has be very cold.

Plans

That said we are planning for next year's garden and more infrastructure for the back yard including a laundry line that won't be in the way and adjustable in height and a tomato structure that will allow us to plant more, spread them out better and allow for more height than our stakes did this year.  We also think we may have better ways of protecting our squash and fruits as summer turns to fall and the squirrels become desperate.

We have also concluded that we want to start saving seeds and we will be planting key veggies based on the requirements for pollination that will allow us to make good seeds for next year.

We also hope to choose one or two fruit trees as additions to our yard for this year.  Cherry? Apple? Pear?  We don't know yet - we're debating.  We have more time to make the decision.

We also are signing up for a CSA.  We have chosen Zilke Vegetable Farm based on their delivery to our Farmers Market here in Ypsilanti and location close to an almost daily route.


And Finally, The Chickens are All Right

This is our first winter with chickens.  Some of you might remember that we chose a breed of chicken specifically for our cold winters.  Buckeyes were developed for cold weather in Ohio.  Ours are doing well.  We are still getting 2 or so eggs every day, often 3.  They have adjusted to being in their pen for the most part.  When they do venture out it is clear that they are happy to return to the pen given the lack of grass and greens to eat.  Deep snow befuddles them.  I shovel paths in the yard from our door to our gates and to the door of the coop.  They have learned to stick to the paths.

I am pleased to report that the coop has worked well. I make sure there is fresh water twice a day and have added cottage cheese treats to some mornings. The coop seems plenty warm for them and we have been rewarded with pretty happy chickens.

More coming soon....adventures in a foster chicken...

Fall Happens Fast, Eggs, New Section to the Left

Fall Happens Fast:

This is our garden now.  Harvested and a little bare but not quite put to bed for the winter either.  We have compost to mix in, straw to cover it with and a few more things to do.  We harvested the last of our tomatoes and dug up about 10 lbs of carrots.  Onions are still in place.  We transplanted the sage and oregano to containers and will continue growing them in the basement windows.  We also started containers of basil and cilantro.  We are now reviewing how we felt things went this year with a few corrections.

• Tomatoes need more room and better support. Their carrot companions need to be reachable.
• Zucchini needs more room and protection from the squirrels
• Acorn Squash has the same needs.
• We will be growing corn next year.
• And the chickens won't be allowed in the garden because they add too much nitrogen to the soil. 
• Fencing is in our future.
• And we need a way to put up small hoop house like structures for fall and winter stuff.

Eggs!

All of our chickens are now laying eggs about 5 per chicken week each.  Which means that we will be working to supply eggs to others. They started by laying some of the cutest little eggs I've ever seen.  Yummy too.

"Whats Available":  The New Section to the Left

You will note a new section to the left.  I will be posting egg availability.  For those who want to have eggs, come on by and pick them up.  An email or phone call to me will get it all set up.  Donations for the feed bill will be accepted.

There will be other things available as well - mostly herbs for this winter but next year we'll be adding to the list.

EGGS...Henny Penny and Shirley Goodness and Mercy

Wow, I had no idea it would be this long before I could post about getting our first eggs.  First thing to know is that we brought in a ringer, an older hen who has been laying but finishing up on molt.  She is clearly bigger on all counts.

What fun to watch our younger pullets get to know a new hen and establish a new pecking order but ALSO the differences between the new hen and our girls.  As you can see in previous posts, our pullets are pretty at ease with our yard, our dog, our grass, our garden and all the humans that come walking through.  This was ALL new to the her.  First time we let them out of the pen she was shocked to be on grass (she was on mud previously with some out and about in a wooded field) so she tried to eat the lawn - all of it.  Our dog Obie had to put up with a screaming chicken for the first few times she saw him in the yard.  Our pullets, Obie and just about every other critter in the area stopped and stared at her.  She has now calmed down.  She was very concerned about every person that came through the back yard and would run for cover or into the coop. 

Almonds and a big change.

A few days ago Elizabeth wanted to enjoy one of those last tolerable evenings outside with the chickens hanging around.  We sat with the day coming to an end, birds, squirrels, chickens, dog, cat.  We fed the chickens by hand and the new one figured out that maybe humans are *ok*.   But then, we were finishing up some dry roasted unsalted almonds and we decided to crush 'em up and see what the chickens thought of them.  HUGE HIT - we got mobbed including the new hen.  And, from that moment on, she is like the others.  Confident, curious.  She runs to great us.  She waits at the door for us to come back out.  She makes welcoming noises when she sees us.  Its all about the possibility of more almonds.  

AND...She has since rewarded us with a little bit of perfection as shown in the picture below.

Fall arrived, Ending Summer Projects, Rain Barrels and Planning Next Year

Fall Arrived

Whammo, September 4th, 2010.  The sun didn't come up for forever.  The temperature was in the 40s for the first time since May.  The humidity was down near 50% for the first time since May.  Leaves began to fall.   It turned to fall.  Just like that.  Over night.

Ok, not really.  I know we will have more hot steamy days this year but for this weekend it seemed like it was late fall.

Ending Summer Projects

Elizabeth, with help from our chickens, is finishing up painting our purple fence.  I have to replace and repair a section of it. But we are close to completing that project.  The fence was in need of new paint when we moved in.  It took awhile, and possibly all my butch credibility, to find the correct color purple but there it is.


I have started the process of closing up the chicken coop for winter.  I count that our chickens are about 16 weeks.  So we have another month before eggs start showing up and even then I want them to have enough light and enough warmth to produce through the winter.   That means putting proper frames together for the windows and closing up the underside of the roof.

In the garden we are dealing with the march of the squash.  Acorn squash and Pumpkins have begun winding their way through everything, even through our fence out into the drive way.  We are working to expand the gardens for next spring.  This will allow more planting area that we know we need.

Rain Barrels
 
Finally!  Just in time for fall...rain barrels.  It took awhile to find some that were appropriate.  The installation of them seems to be easy for stage one: a barrel at the end of the downspout with spigot and over flow pipe.  State two will be to hook these together in some way, including our sumps, and feed that water into a barrel where we can use a pump to water our garden.  Sounds easy - I'm getting there, just not as quickly as I would like.

Planning for Next Year

We are planning crops for next year.   We want more tomatoes and better onions, we want to grow some sweet corn and we want more cucumbers.  In short, we need to make more garden so we can have the room we need to plant more food.   I will explain this in more detail later.

Of Sunflowers and Squirrel Wars

My Grandmother lived in a home that had 3 HUGE Oak trees in the back yard in Columbus, Wisconsin.  Those trees formed a cathedral of sorts towering over her home and the large back yard.  They were magnificent. I have been told that my grandparents chose to build their retirement home there, on a lot across from the home where they raised their family, in part to save those trees from being cut down.

We spent hours and hours watching the gray squirrels and song birds that frequented the feeders on her deck overlooking that incredibly beautiful space. The song birds were all identified, adored and welcomed with specific food for their needs.  The squirrels were not.  They were greedy little rascals that provided some limited entertainment but ultimately were destructive. There were many iterations of bird feeders to prevent the squirrels from stealing all the food. When we shooed them away, they would stomp their feet, clearly curse at us and bite a chunk of wood off the railings.  This was a decades long relationship...to the point where she finally had her rails covered in metal.  She was in her mid to late 80s when I brought her a Super Soaker squirt gun.  I can still remember the delight in her eyes when she realized she could load it, pump it up and aim it and shoot the squirrels from 20 feet away.  One my very favorite memories of her is watching her stand in front of the door to her deck silhouetted by bright morning sun in her night gown and slippers with the loaded supersoaker at her side telling the squirrels they better look out, "I'm armed".

So, I am familiar with squirrels and their bad habits and the utter lack of long-term real solutions to the problems they present.

In my home, I love the morning light that comes into the guest bedroom.  I hate the street lamp our neighbors put up over the alley that is now closed off.  They are quite sure it prevents break-ins.  I am skeptical but we pay our share of the bill and maintenance anyway.  It makes for terrible light beaming in the back windows of our home.  The sun never really sets.

To preserve the peaceful light in the guest bedroom and screen out the painful midnight sun, I planted Mammoth Sunflowers right in front of the window.  Those are the ones that grow 15 feet or so, they provide a little bit of  a screen for the evening light and don't shut out the wonderful morning light and won't add too much to the leaves and such in our gutters.  I planted 15 or so of them.  We lost several to our 87lb rabbit (Obie loved the small seedling leaves) and we ended up with 5 that grew big enough to provide the screen.  Beautiful.

These two anecdotes comes together here.  I said I am familiar with squirrels earlier.   It turns out that our chickens have the same opinion I do  about the squirrels.  They have decided to protect our back yard for all manner of rodents including the chipmunks, red squirrels and the gray squirrels.  The chipmunks and red squirrels simply avoid the confrontation.  The grey squirrels, well, they have taken a different approach. After vacation, I discovered that our chickens were running all the rodents out of our back yard.  Some unsuspecting gray squirrel would come into the yard and the chickens would descend on it.  This lead to a great deal of squirrel cursing, stomping of feet etc.  This escalated into a more general declaration of war.

The squirrels took to using our back entry way and sidewalk as their toilet and throwing nuts of all manner at the chickens.

One of the pathways exiting our back yard turned out to be our sunflowers growing up near the back of the house.  The squirrels were using the sunflowers to get from our roof down to the garden.  They would also use them as a quick exit when the chickens chased them out.  And, I am sure, would stomp their feet and take a chunk out of a sunflower on the way out.  They lopped the heads off 3 sunflowers.  The chickens have taken to hanging out under the sunflowers to catch the squirrels.  We have 1 tall sunflower and 1 much shorter sunflower remaining.

Public Note to Self...next year, plant more sunflowers and plant them  farther away from the house so they do not become the squirrel highway.

Growing Chickens, Guilds and Nest Boxes.

Growing Chickens

Our chickens continue to grown putting on a little bit more weight every day.  We are still more than a month away from getting eggs.  We are starting to let them out to wander in the back yard.  I have enjoyed watching them weed the garden (not really go for the veggies just grass and weeds).  They clearly like hanging out by the compost the best because they find more worms and bugs there.

They are also much more experienced with our dog, Obie, and cat, Ralph.  Obie kind of watches over them.  When he is laying down next to us on a quiet evening, the chickens come over to us and pick unseen things out of his fur until he gets up and moves.  Ralph has had thoughts of getting a chick from the time they were inside in their brooder and he was able to watch them grow.  They are very big by comparison and his dreams of getting one vanished in front of my eyes.  He came out back and was sort of stalking one of the chickens.  I was getting ready to grab him when the chicken turned around, walked over to him and given him a significant peck right between the eyes.  That was it, Ralph ran for the door asking to go inside.  From that moment forward, he hasn't even looked at them.  He won't go out when the chickens are out.

We have hawks that are of concern and as a result, we do not let them just hang out on their own.  I have seen a hawk fly by, see me, and leave.  That was enough for me to plan a better roof for the outside pen.



What the Heck is a Guild?

We are using some ideas borrowed from a kind of farming/landscaping practice called "permaculture" in our backyard.  If you remember, I ripped out a Viburnum to build the coop.  I left one in place and since then we have planted a variety of native plants in and around the drip line of the remaining tree.  In our case we planted Spiderwort, Thistle, and Ramps (native leeks).  This community of plants working in harmony with the shrub is called a guild.  There are more of these communities coming was we plant Cherry, Apple and Pear Trees to complete the permanent additions to our yard/farm.


This area is our chickens' favorite place.  Under the Viburnum behind the ramps and spiderwort.  Shady, cool, buggy.  Perfect.  Wish we'd planned it that way.  They are cute in it, I think the plants benefit from the scratching of the earth and the bug removal.  I think the plants suffer from being stepped on periodically but not enough to discourage the chickens.


Nest Boxes

I am simply announcing here and now - more than a month before they are due to start laying.  The nest boxes, two of them, are nearly complete way before they are needed.  This is a victory for me.  Figured I'd just say so.

Garden imps and the 87 pound rabbit.

It has been too long and I am sorry.  My life became a whirlwind of unexpected proportion all of a sudden.  Now, with a couple days of quieter time, I have a moment to write.

Garden Imps:

Our garden has taken off.  I have harvested more peas,  lettuce and strawberries than ever before.  I am currently trying to keep up with the kale, cucumbers ans zucchini. Breads, soups, and kale crisps. 

Each time I walk about the back door there is a chirp or squeak and a trail of moving plants in this garden.  Some significant numbers of strawberries and cucumbers have been eaten but not enough to really make me upset.  

I was finally able to identify the imp by noting the holes in the sand under our chicken coop and patio pavers...5 stripe chipmunks.  Now, that left me with a question:  who is eating the strawberries and cucumbers? They were getting eaten whole.  I've seen a rabbit or two and thought it I had a solution that question too.

The 87 Pound Rabbit

Our home is set up so that the bedroom windows look out onto the garden.  I am usually the first one up and I have a routine.  I check out the back window on the gardens and the chickens and see that all is well in the morning sun.  I like the peacefulness of the space we have back there.  I feed the dog, make some coffee and let the dog out and sit down to my morning emails. Nice, quiet, peaceful before the day gets going.

It happened that walking the dog a week or so ago, I got badly stung by hornets - never saw the nest, 3 maybe 4 stings on my hand.  It blew up to be the shape of a latex glove used as a balloon and caused nights to be uncomfortable.  All of this is relevant because I was not the first up in the morning.  I woke up to hearing my partner in the kitchen letting the dog out and getting something for breakfast.

I went to the window and saw with my own eyes who has been taking the cucumbers and strawberries.  Its Obie our dog.  I watched as he walked over to the garden, poked his nose under leaf after leaf, take that one, and this one, oh, that one is good too.  87 pounds of rabbit.

He likes kale stems, strawberries (they're done now) and cucumbers.  We have to watch him because he really likes the cucumbers and he's sneaky.

Next post: growing chickens, plant guilds and nest boxes.