Temporary House Chicken

Lately it seems as though my hens are on the local predator menu.  After losing those two hens while I was away at work I was woken up in the middle of the night by the sounds of panicked chickens.  When I ran out into yard with my headlamp I saw black feathers everywhere and one of my buff orpingtons wandering around by the young chicken's pen.  A small animal that appeared to be a cat ran off through my electric fence and stopped to watch me from several hundred feet away.  As I looked around some more I found a black hen bumbling around the yard in a dazed state.  As quickly as I could I gathered up the two hens and checked them over for injuries.  The buff seemed no worse for the wear so I put her back into the temporary shelter that my chickens had been staying in.  The black hen was definitely injured but I had to bring her inside for a better look.  I quickly set up the chick brooder cage for the hen and then went back outside to make some quick reinforcements to the chicken coop.  When I was sure that the rest of the chickens were secure from another attack I went back inside to tend to the injured hen.

Upon closer examination of the hen I found that she had a large wound on her back that was very deep.  I cleaned up what I could and set the hen up with some food and water for the rest of the night.  She needed stitches but I wasn't going to be able to do that alone.  The wound wasn't bleeding much and looked like more of a tear than a puncture. If she made it through the rest of the night I would take it as a good sign.

When daylight came I got to put my vet tech skills to the test.  I called my friend who was also a vet tech to help me sew up my chicken.  We met up at her groom shop and got to work.  I didn't have proper suture supplies being as I no longer worked for a vet clinic, so I improvised with a sewing needle and thread soaked in rubbing alcohol.  The wound was a V shaped gash that was nearly an inch wide and a couple inches long.  My friend restrained the chicken while I stitched her up and we were both impressed by how well she took it.  Chickens can be extremely stoic.

When I was done I was pretty happy with how it looked.  It seemed to close up nicely and hopefully I will be able to pull her stitches in just a couple of weeks.  Until then she is getting her own space in the chick brooder cage.  Here she is limited by how much she can move around so that should help with healing.  She also won't have to contend with the rooster's innuendos of love or be bothered by the other hens.  Once the stitches come out she should be able to return to the flock.  I will have to keep checking the wound daily to make sure that she isn't developing an infection.  I am hoping that I can get away with not using antibiotics on her so that I can keep using her eggs.  She was unstressed enough that she even laid an egg right after we got home from getting sutured up.

Weeding and Mulching

In an effort to lessen the amount of weeding that I will be doing this summer I am covering the garden beds one by one with a thick layer of straw mulch.  Before I lay down any mulch I try to remove as many weeds as I can so that they won't spread under the mulch.  Once I have removed everything that I don't want growing in the bed I lay down a nice thick layer of straw to cover any bare earth between the plants.  The mulch will shade the ground which can prevent new weed seeds from germinating.  The protected soil won't lose moisture to the air as fast so the plants growing in the mulch will be able to make better use of the available water in the soil.  The shaded soil will also be less susceptible to extreme temperature swings which makes for a more stable environment and happier plants in the garden.  I use straw for mulch because it is biodegradable, it allows water to percolate into the soil, and it doesn't contain seeds like hay does which would only make more weeding work for me.

I am also mulching the garden paths heavily because I really don't want to spend any more time pulling weeds than I have to.  Mulching the paths will also help the adjacent garden beds hold moisture better because it adds more volume to the area that is protected from wind and sun, thus keeping more precious water in the soil.

It is slow progress and I am focusing on weeding one bed in the morning before work and mulching it in if I have the time.  Hopefully once I get things under control around the vegetables I will have more time to turn my attention to other areas of the yard like the flower garden and perennial bed.  Summer harvests are just around the corner and will soon be consuming my precious spare time, so I want to clear what I can before I can't.

Chicken News

This week the flock suffered the loss of two hens.   I wasn't home when it happened, but when I discovered that two hens were missing I searched the yard and found no trace of any wrong doing.  They disappeared without a trace.....or very nearly so.  Walking my dog up the street the next morning I noticed a couple of piles of black feathers here and there in the field next to my house.  One of the missing hens was black.  The other was the sweet golden hen that always wanted to hang out with me in the yard.  I didn't find any of her feathers.  I am guessing that the predator was a hawk since the fencing was untouched and there was no trace of a tussle in the yard.  They probably just swooped in and scooped them up to carry them off for a good sized meal.  This is probably the biggest downfall using poultry netting to contain chickens.  They really do need overhead protection from aerial predators where hawks and eagles are common.  This just gives me even more reason to get to work on a new chicken coop to protect my flock.  The current set up isn't very safe in this wild area that I inhabit and if I plan on keeping chickens for an extended period, then I had best make sure they have sturdy shelter to protect them from predators.

In other news, I currently have a broody hen.  This means that she is determined to hatch out a clutch of eggs.  This is my first experience with a broody hen and although I would love to have her hatch out some eggs for me, I am afraid that she isn't very consistent about sitting on the same nest everyday.  I am thinking about moving her to the pen where the young chickens are living so that she can have her own space.  She has become fairly aggressive in the nest boxes, so the other hens seem to be avoiding laying eggs in the usual area.  I was planning on hatching a second round of chicks this year and this is about the right time to start incubating them so I may let her sit on a few to see what she can do.

Volunteers

My approach to gardening might be considered lazy in some ways, but if you really look at the outcome I get twice the return for half the work.  I tend to allow some crops to bolt and go to seed.  This means that I can leave the crop in the bed to act as a natural mulch which deters weeds and as the plants deteriorate through the winter they often plant their seeds themselves.  Other crops just get missed at harvest time and stay in the ground for another season by accident.

One example is my finished dill and cilantro plants that I left standing in their bed last fall.  All winter long the wind blew and dispersed seeds from those plants across any bed that was downwind.  This year I won't have to plant any dill or cilantro anywhere in my garden.  The nearest beds have thousands of sprouts that got there with no extra effort on my part.  They do share the beds with my onion plantings so they will get turned back into the soil when I harvest those crops, but in the meantime they can add flavor to my meals and canned goods.  In my opinion some "weeds" are good, especially if you can eat them.

Another crop that has volunteered itself throughout the garden is lettuce.  I grew multiple varieties last year and when they bolted in the summer heat I let them.  By the time I started turning over those beds they had long ago released their tiny tufts of seed to the wind and planted themselves throughout the garden.  These volunteers may also be allowed to stay where ever they grow unless they begin to interfere with the actual crops that I had planned for that particular area.  I may not allow all of them to reach maturity again, but I think I will continue to have free salad for many more weeks to come.

Potatoes are something that I am still on the fence with when I see volunteers coming up.  I always seem to miss a few here and there and it seems as though once they are in a bed, they are likely to remain there.  I now have potatoes volunteering in the first bed they were planted in for the third year in a row.  I don't mind the extra potatoes, but the plants can get quite large and digging them out is sure to be disruptive to any other crop that they share the bed with.  I often think I will just let them go through the season and dig them out once the main crop has finished for the season, but I always seem to miss some even after I turn the beds over.  My main concern in leaving volunteers is attracting persistent pests to a bed.  I don't use any pesticides in my garden, so crop rotation is necessary to help with pest control.  If I keep allowing them to grow in the same bed year after year the pests might build up to uncontrollable numbers and I could lose my crop and all of my hard work.  For now my methods lean towards letting the potatoes stay.  If things start getting out of hand and I have potatoes coming up everywhere or lots of bugs I may rethink my idea, but I still can't complain about accidentally growing extra food for myself without really trying.

All in all I find that being a lazy gardener works for me.  I am OK with not having a tidy garden plot and actually enjoy the variety of things that manage to thrive despite my neglect.  I also love the fact that I will get to harvest things that I didn't have to plant myself which saves me plenty of time and energy.  I have a feeling that the more crops that I introduce to my garden the more volunteers will continue to show up.  Who knows, maybe someday I will be able to grow a garden that truly plants itself.

Planting More Summer Crops

Things are getting exciting around the garden these days.  The weather has suddenly become very warm and it is time to finishing filling in the garden with the heat loving crops.  The last frost date is behind us now so I took a couple of busy mornings to finish planting my summertime crops.

Some of the crops are directly sown as seeds into the garden bed.  I direct sow cucumbers and squash  in my garden because they don't always transplant well and they grow fast enough to produce a crop before the first frost.  This year the cucumbers are occupying two full beds in hopes that I can make enough jars of pickles to bring a little side income this fall.

Other crops that require a longer growing season were started indoors in January and February.  My tomato and pepper seedlings will be happy to stretch their "legs"  in their spacious new accommodations out in the garden.  The tomatoes were planted on either side of the trellis that runs down the middle of the bed and then mulched in with straw.  The straw will help protect them from any extreme temperature changes and also discourage the growth of weeds around them.   I also planted basil seeds in between the tomatoes.  Basil doesn't take up much space and they will be great to use fresh when I am cooking meals straight from my back yard. 

The peppers were planted on either side of the bed and I planted a mixed row of cilantro and carrots down the middle of the rows of peppers.  I intend this planting of carrots to be my winter storage carrots so they will not be harvested until after the first frost kills off the peppers in the fall.  I am hoping that the cilantro will be ready to use around the same time that the peppers and tomatoes are ripening for salsa making.

Strawberry Dandelion Wine : The Beginning

I made my first batch of dandelion wine several years ago.  Since then I have made a couple more batches and I think I have used a different recipe each time.  There are literally dozens of recipes for making this stuff and they are all slightly different.  Making the wine generally calls for several cups of dandelion petals along with some kind of citrus fruit juice and a few other odds and ends and then some yeast and sugar.  There is a bit of a learning curve to figuring out how to separate dandelion flower petals from all the green stuff that comes with them.  Some recipes call for just petals and others use the whole flower, green stuff and all.  I think the green stuff makes the wine have a bitter flavor so I try to allow as little as possible get into my final product.

This year I wanted to try yet another recipe for dandelion wine.  This one happens to include strawberries too.  I have been wanting to try to make a batch of strawberry wine as well, but haven't had the time to start a large batch.  My compromise was to make a mixed wine.  If it turns out to be as good as my past attempts I will be happy.  The recipe can be found here at Jack Keller's Wine Making Page.  Most of the wine recipes that I use come from this page as it is a wealth of information about the wine making process.

Once I had all the dandelion petals that I could muster, I added fresh chopped strawberries to the mix along with the juice from a lemon and two oranges.  I mixed it all together with the sugar and a bit of yeast nutrient and will allow it to sit overnight before adding the pectic enzyme and finally the yeast after another brief rest.

It will go through the first stage of it's fermentation for about a week and then it will get strained and put into a secondary fermentor for several months to let the yeast do what they do best.  When it is done I am hoping for a light semi-sweet wine that tastes like spring on a sunny day.

Getting Crops In The Dirt : Corn, Bush Beans and Celery

One by one the garden beds are filling with my future harvests.  As the weather has warmed up over the past few weeks I have been starting various crops depending on how hardy they are.  Onions, spinach, potatoes, lettuce, peas, carrots and turnips have all been planted and I finally got the broccoli transplanted a couple of weeks ago.  The last frost date is fast approaching, so now is the time to get the warm weather crops going in the garden.  I tend to plant things that come up slowly a few days before the last frost date.  I try to give things as much of a head start on the season as I can, though sometimes I end up replanting them if a late frost comes and kills the sprouts.

I planted my corn first since I know from experience that corn can still tolerate a light frost if given a little protection.  I want to do a companion planting of squash with the corn, so I want the corn to get a head start before I even plant the squash seeds.  If the corn can get tall before the squash spread out and shade everything then both crops should do well.  This year I am trying to grow Glass Gem corn.  I didn't have much luck with it last year, but there was an irrigation glitch in that bed, so hopefully they will have better success this year.  The squash I intend to plant with the corn is a winter squash named Ute Indian Squash.  The Ute tribe lived in this area in the not too distant past so I think that this variety of squash should do well here.

Planting the beans was the next project.  That was a simple operation of leveling the chosen bed and setting up the irrigation for it before making shallow trenches with a hoe and planting the bean seeds.  I used three varieties in this bed this year.  One was the Calima Bush Bean which is what I planted and replanted several times last year.  One was a purple podded variety that I saved from seed in the past couple years, but I lost the variety name. The third was a white seeded variety called Tenderette that was also seed saved from previous years.  I am interested to see how each variety does this year and based on how things grow this summer I will save seeds for my future plantings from the best plants.

The bed that I transplanted my celery into was the very last of the short beds in my garden.  The celery starts have done quite well since they were planted all those weeks ago back in January.  They were finally big enough to be transplanted to their permanent home for the summer.  Some pots held multiple plants, so I separated them as gently as possible and gave each plant it's own space.  I ended up with a row on either side of the bed spaced about a foot apart and had three plants that I spaced out down the middle row.  In this middle row I generously planted parsnip seeds in the large gaps between the celery seedlings in the hopes that they will provide me with a good supply of tasty root veggies in the winter.

A Change of Plans

The weather has been uncommonly windy this spring and yesterday was no exception.  We have been having such rough winds that I had to use rebar stakes to keep the chicken coop from scittering across the yard as it had in previous wind storms already this year.  Yesterday, not even the stakes were enough.  A thunderstorm blew in suddenly and the wind picked up.  A huge gust of wind tore through my yard, picked up the chicken house and flipped it over the fence and into the road.  I wasn't home when it happened, but I had guests that were and they said it sounded like a tornado came through the yard.  They did what they could to drag the heavy pen back into the yard so it wouldn't blow away again.

When the gust of wind flipped the large pen it also tipped the nesting box over onto it's side with a chicken still inside.  The poor chicken little trapped inside probably thought the sky really was falling.  Luckily none of the chickens were hurt and they didn't seem any worse for the wear after the event.  That night I didn't have time to set up a good shelter for them, but they all managed to squeeze themselves into the nest box by dusk.

I spent what daylight I had left dismantling the ruins of the coop with help from my guests.  The cattle panels that made up the sides and roof of the coop were still in good shape and I will reuse them when I rebuild the coop.  The weak point in this design was the old salvaged wood that we used to build the frame.  Had the chicken wire that wrapped the sides of the coop not been wired on so tightly I think the whole thing would have just collapsed when the frame broke.  There were quite a few things about this coop that needed to be improved and I think this is just supposed to be my incentive to do something about it.  My next coop will still be the same hoop house style, but I am brainstorming ideas about how I want to improve upon the design.

Since I don't want to leave my chickens without much shelter I decided to bring in the first small chicken tractor that I built to use as a temporary shelter for them.  It isn't very big and it's low to the ground, but it will give them a place to get out the elements and a dry place for their food and water.  It will also give them a small space to perch on when they go to roost for the evening.

It isn't ideal, but it is better than nothing and it buys me time to construct a better chicken coop for the future while still providing some shelter.  Thankfully chickens aren't too particular about their living quarters as long as it covers the basics.

Spring Sprouts

It has only been a couple of weeks since the peas and onion sets went into the dirt and already they are making progress.  They both took a little over a week to germinate and I expect them to really take off in the warmer weather we are expecting in the upcoming days.

The onion seeds I planted are looking like a no show at this point, but I will give them one more week before I buy more sets to plant in that bed.  I was really hoping that onions from seed would work for me this year, but it does not seem to be in the cards for this year's garden.  I may try planting seed again in the fall to see if I can make my own sets for next year.  I have read that you can plant the seeds very close together and they stay small and can be saved for sets the following spring if you plant them near the end of summer.



 The carrots are starting to make an appearance and I am finding plenty of dill volunteers coming up from last year's crop too.  Dill is one of those things that you only need to plant once and they will keep reseeding themselves year after year if you simply neglect them.  They also have a small root system and feathery growth habit, so they generally don't intrude much on other crops.  They are something that I will allow to be a weed in any of my garden beds since they don't do much harm and I use it for seasoning many things in my kitchen.

If I look really closely, I think I have seen the first of the lettuce sprouts and a handful of turnip sprouts coming up.  The turnips in this particular bed seem to be having a problem with flea beetles, so this crop may end up being a wash this time around.  I am hoping the lettuce comes in quickly so I can add more variety to my salads, and right now the spinach is producing enough to feed me a small salad nearly every day.  Once the days start to get hotter my salad days will be numbered as these crops tend to bolt in the heat.  I will try to stagger some lettuce plantings to extend their season a little while, but salad generally won't be on the menu once the heat of summer hits.

The potatoes have just begun to show themselves in the last few days.  The purples were the first to make an appearance followed by the reds and then the yellows.  From the looks of things I will have a bumper crop of potatoes again this year as long as I can keep up with watering.

Week by week the variety of things that I have growing in my garden will be increasing.  I look forward to eating my way through the growing season simply basing my diet on what I have available to me.  I am only limited by what I choose to grow and I like to grow a lot of different crops that are ready at different points in the season.  I can extend my harvest by freezing, canning or dehydrating, though none of those things compare to fresh picked fruits or veggies.  I will eat as much as I can straight out of the garden and then do what I can to preserve the rest for winter.