Back from the beach





Georgia, Harri, and I spent the week up at my folks' house...E was working and Rips can't be trusted off leash so she stayed home too (and moped around the entire time apparently) We had a nice time, but I'm glad to be back on the farm, even if the weeds are a bit daunting. We've had another week of rain so they were able to run wild. This AM, bright and early, I cleaned up the barn a bit- feeding and watering the hens, moving the feathered pullets out of the brooder hutch and into the main pen, sweeping up what I could. Now that the brooder's empty I need to order a batch of Americauna pullets to raise up for next season. After a day or too of dry weather I'll be able to clean it from top to bottom, vital since we'll be milking again soon!

Esme is round as a watermelon and ready to burst....any day now we'll have the first kids of the season. I have names already picked out for does - Flora, Fauna, and Feta are my top three. As far as bucks go, I'll have to see what comes to me. :) Delia is also pregnant, but I think Dharma may have lost her kids early on in her pregnancy. We may breed her for the late fall but I have to see...it would mean bringing her into the barn which I'm not keen on. Two goats to milk per day is more then enough for me!

Tonight I worked on the herb garden, potting up some more herbs for sale - ginger mint, chives, and flat leaf parsley, and planting some basil seedlings and two herb divisions I brought back from my mom's - some common thyme and sage. Weeded the three sister's garden, which is always very rewarding - a year's worth of of aged chicken manure and straw have made that garden soft and rich, weeds just slide right out of the ground, even deep rooted ones like dandelion. Lots of volunteers in there I've let run rampant from last year....at least two types of tomatoes, tomatilloes, cukes, sunflowers, some snow peas and some all blue potatoes. The corn, beans, and squash we planted are also doing well. In a week or two I need to find a spot to plant our pumpkin patch as well.

Trellised a few of the tomatoes not in cages and noticed our first tobacco hornworms of the season, only two and I caught them early, so hopefully I can catch any newcomers as they arrive. We're hand-picking those, but I bought more BT dust (Dipel 150) and some insecticidal soap (we use the Safer brand) for our other problem areas - the new succession planting of squash was set upon by cucumber beetles and stink bugs this week, and they're much too small to survive that type of damage, so I mixed up some soap and sprayed them down tonight, as well as hand-picked as many of the nasties as I could find. The BT will get sprinkled on the kale (which is full of cabbage lopers), and the remaining cabbage and broccoli once a week - the first application did wonders in the main garden, but I ran out in the middle of the kale plantings, so I'll be back out there tomorrow.

At market tomorrow we'll have baby chiogga beets, green snap beans, mesclun with nasturtium flowers, baby summer squash, broccoli, scallions, snow peas, and herbs along with our eggs. We'll be sterilizing the honey extractor, washing jars, and setting everything up tomorrow afternoon - the big day is Sunday, and we're hoping for a nice yield - the super we're harvesting is nice and heavy. We ran out of the fall harvest several weeks ago so we've been eagerly anticipating this spring harvest. I'll be back to report on that this weekend.

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Posted: Sat - July 1, 2006 at 12:22 AM        

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