In the hen house the youngest hens have finally started to lay. The young rooster that lives with the hens has just started crowing too. His crow thus far is very quiet and I am happy that he waited until he was 24 weeks old to find his voice. If he continues to be sweet to me and the hens then he will have a very happy life here. The older rooster is still living in his bachelor's quarters and I am debating if I want to keep him for breeding. He is a very large rooster which is a trait that I want to keep, but he was very rough with the ladies which is a behavior that I am not happy about. I may try to hatch a small batch of spring chicks from him, but I'm not sure which hens I want to put in with him yet. I need to decide soon because I hope to hatch this year's spring chicks in a month or so.
Right now the garden is in a half cleaned up state. I have turned over a couple of beds and added fall leaves and ashes from my fire pit to amend my soil a little bit. Some beds are still harboring the corpses of last years crops. I am trying to clean up the garden one bed at a time, but the weather and my available time to devote to gardening have allowed very little time to get much done. I do have hoop houses set up over a couple of my beds and happily have discovered the tenacity of some crops. I planted spinach and turnip seeds in the warmer days of late November and amazingly they came up despite the overnight freezes. They grew very slowly for the next few weeks and I was amazed to find that they have actually been getting larger even with night time temps in the teens. When things warm up a bit I am sure they will take off. I am looking forward to the first green harvests of the year. I have covered my garlic bed with a hoop house too. Not because the garlic needs protection from the weather, but because it is an easy way to keep the chickens from destroying my crop when I let them out.
Indoors I have started planting seeds for this year's garden. The first things going into the dirt are the things that take a very long time to start like celery and peppers. I also start my broccoli plants early. They don't take a long time to get growing and they are tolerant of cold temps so they can be planted out fairly early if they have a little protection from the weather. I will probably get them out under a hoop house in the early spring once things warm up a little. I will be starting my peppers and tomatoes very early compared to years past. I feel like I wait too long to start them every year and they are never very big when it's time to transplant them into the garden. This year I hope that I can give them plenty of time to get established before the real growing season begins.
When the weather isn't good for being outside I have passed the time working on crochet projects. I have finished a few more hats this month and have a couple more time consuming works in progress. One is a bohemian vest that I am nearing the end on. I started the project last winter but found that it didn't fit right so I started over with it and made some adjustments to the pattern. Hopefully the finished product will be what I wanted, but I won't know until I get to the end. My other long term project is a baby blanket that I am working on for a friend. She isn't due until April so I do have some time before it needs to be finished. Blankets can be very time consuming though, so I will work on it little by little as I can find time.
So far 2018 has been off to a quiet but productive start. It was nice to take some time for myself this winter and I hope to make a habit of doing that regularly. I am looking forward to the new experiences that this coming year will bring.
