Chicken Escape

Things have been working pretty well with the new fencing arrangement for the chickens.  Most of them seem happy to stay inside the fenced off area close to their coop.  However there are a couple that have made several attempts to escape the fenced area to spend the day in the yard and garden.  The first couple times I caught one of them outside the fence I trimmed back the flight feathers on one wing.  That seemed to keep things good for a little while.  Then one day I came home after work to two escaped hens and the rooster on my front steps.  I was not happy.  They had spent the day scratching up several of my newly planted beds and had removed the new mulch that I had just spread around my raspberry plants.

I decided that was my cue to move them on to fresh ground with their pen because apparently they were bored of where they were.  I took the morning to slowly scoot the coop to it's new position in the yard.  The pen was then moved to cover the other half of the front of the yard.  I am moving the pen incrementally around the yard in hopes that I will be able to plant a pasture mix in the areas that have already been tilled up by the chickens.  In this position they will be sharing the pen with the chicken tractor that is currently housing the littles.  I am hoping that this arrangement will make them more tolerant of the young chickens when they finally get integrated into the rest of the flock.  When I moved the fencing I made sure to make the fence lines nice and tight so there were no low spots that would be easy to fly over.  I also tied some of the fence poles to stakes to help them keep a tight and tall fence line.  So far it seems to be working.  I just hope that it will still work once the chickens get bored of this new area.

A Hat For A Gift

Even though spring has arrived I am still getting requests for crocheted crafts.  The most recent project was a hat that will become a gift.  The request was for a soft hat made with dark royal blue and burgundy colors.  I found the perfect colors, but the yarn that I chose made the project a little more involved that I had anticipated.  The yarn was a soft, thick four ply yarn and when I made my first attempt using the whole thickness of the yarn I learned that I had made a mistake.  I didn't have any crochet hooks large enough to use with two strands of this yarn at the same time.  My solution was to un-ply the yarns and use one strand of each color to make the hat.  Un-plying the yarns became an exercise in patience and I only did a little at a time to keep the single strands from becoming too tangled.  The result was well worth the trouble.  The hat is super soft and still thick and warm and the colors worked really well together.  I really love the end product and I hope the receiver of this gift loves it too.

One More For The Freezer

Raising chickens has been an interesting learning experience.  When I got chickens I had intended on using them for eggs and meat.  Harvesting eggs is easy and fun.  Harvesting meat is my least favorite job in the world, but a necessary evil if I want to eat my chickens.  Taking a life is never an uplifting experience so I try to be as calm and respectful as I can.  My hands shake every time.

I have learned that I prefer to do my butchering at dusk, not long after the chickens have put themselves to bed for the night.  They are easier to catch and handle in the low light and seem much less stressed at this time of day.  On my planned butchering day I will start heating the water in the scalding pot about an hour before dusk.  While that is heating I set up my butchering station outside which consists of a killing cone with a bucket below it to catch the mess.  I also take the time to sharpen my knife (this makes a fast, clean kill more likely).  Once the water has reached 160 degrees it is time to harvest the chicken.

Once I get the gruesome part over with, I move on to the next step - scalding and plucking.  I usually keep a bag on hand to catch all the feathers and extraneous bits like the head and feet.  I just dunk the chicken into the scalding water for a few minutes and swish it around to make sure the hot water soaks through to the base of the feathers and loosens them.  Then a small mess ensues and I am left with a bald chicken that looks a lot like what you get from a grocery store.  The only difference that I have noticed is that my home grown chickens are much larger and have sturdier bone structure than the franken-chickens that come from the store.  The legs are much closer to the size of turkey legs in my opinion, but that is probably because they come from a dual purpose breed that has had time to grow to full size.

I generally part my chickens out before I freeze them and I save the carcass and some of the organ meats for making stock later.  From one chicken I can get eight to ten meals for myself if I include the stock and meat scraps that I glean from the cooked carcass.  These dual purpose chickens can weigh upwards of ten pounds when they are fully grown which is considerably larger than the chickens that can be bought at the local grocery store.  Most of the difference in weight would be due to the heavier bone structure in a dual purpose breed, but they still provide plenty of meat and are well worth the effort of growing them out slowly over a longer time period in my opinion.  Not to mention that the flavor of homegrown chicken is so much better than the store-bought variety.

Starting Some Cool Weather Crops

April is a kind of limbo in the garden.  The weather isn't quite warm enough to chance planting out the heat loving crops, but day time temps are good for starting some cool weather crops.  The weeds haven't really starting being a problem yet and the garden is starting to look neat and organized.  The seeds that I try to plant this time of year are lettuce, peas, spinach, turnips, and carrots. These are things that will germinate despite the still chilly night time temps and can tolerate a few light frosts.
Smaller, faster growing crops like lettuce, spinach and turnips share a bed.  The peas and carrots also share a bed.  The idea is to plant another rotation of crops in these beds this summer when the spring crops have finished.  Some time in mid summer I will start another round of cold tolerant plants like cabbage and broccoli.  These will hopefully be ready to harvest by late fall.

As far as varieties go, I try to choose things that do well in my climate and soil type.   This round of carrots are Scarlet Nantes which have a stout growth habit and can help break up my hard clay soils.  I planted Bloomsdale Long Standing Spinach because it will be slow to bolt in the early heat of summer.  The varieties of lettuce I grow are also heat tolerant and slow to bolt.  This round included a red curly leaf variety called sunset, a green curly leaf variety called Gentilina, and an oakleaf variety called Bronze Arrow.  The peas I planted this year are De Grace Snow peas which are a dwarf variety that produces quickly and doesn't need trellising.  I planted them in a block on half of the bed so they can support each other as they grow.

This year these cool weather crops were planted in beds that do get some shade from the resident pine tree.  When the season heats up I am hoping that the shaded areas will help extend the season for these veggies, giving me a longer harvesting period to enjoy.  I am looking forward to increasing the variety of foods coming from my backyard in the coming months.  Soon the garden will be bursting with life again.

Onions In the Ground

Early spring is the time of the year when gardening slowly begins to take off.  I like to plant early season crops as soon as I can to give them plenty of time to grow before the weather gets too hot for them.  Overwintered crops like spinach and garlic are the first to make an appearance and they are the cue for me to start getting other things in the dirt like my onions.

The weather was looking like we were going to have a string of nice days for a little while so I took the opportunity to plant my onions.  I am still devoting two small beds to onions this year - one is planted in sets and the other is planted with seeds.  This is the first year that I am trying to direct seed some of my onions into the bed in an attempt to save time transplanting onion starts later.  I usually have pretty good luck planting sets, but I don't think they keep as well, so I want to be able to compare onions started from seeds to onions started from sets.  A friend of mine said that she had great success direct seeding her onions in the spring, so I am hoping that I will too.

The bed that I planted with seeds is half yellow onions and half red onions.  The bed planted with sets is about half yellow onions, a quarter red onions and a quarter shallots.  The shallots were the biggest roundest shallots that I had left over from last year's harvest and I saved them for the sole purpose of replanting them this spring.  I don't eat a ton of shallots, but I do like them so I decided that they could have some space in my garden again this year.

When I plant sets I space them about three to four inches apart.  Onions don't have a big root system and planting them close together gives them a better chance of out-competing any weeds that pop up in their bed.  I give shallots a little more space so they can spread out a little more.  I try to plant them with an eight inch spacing.  Planting onions seeds is a little harder and I probably have one to two inch spacing in that bed.  If they need thinning, then I will just harvest them as green onions early in the season to allow others the space they need to grow big.

Completing a Large Project : A Baby Blanket

Several months ago I learned that a good friend of mine was going to be having her first child.  I love to crochet and I have made a point of making personalized baby blankets for several of my friends so I wanted to make something special for her too.  When she first found out that she was expecting she was thinking that they were going to keep the baby's sex a secret so I decided on using gender neutral colors.  Pastel yellow and green stripes make up the main body of the blanket.  In the course of making the blanket I learned that the baby will be a boy, so I decided to use a pastel blue yarn to make the border on the blanket.  I used a waffle stitch to give the blanket some interesting texture.  The border is a variety of a ripple stitch which adds a little more dimension to the blanket.  In making the blanket I learned that the waffle stitch makes a nice thick, warm blanket that will surely keep the baby warm in the cooler parts of the year.  I try to make my baby blankets fairly large so that the child can keep using it as they grow.  As is it, the blanket comfortably covers my lap, so hopefully it will become a keepsake that will be used for years to come.

Planting Potatoes

The beginning of April has been pretty nice this year.  The weather has been cooperative enough that I have been able to make progress on turning over more garden beds.  The beds that I have prioritized are ones that will be getting some of my earlier crops into the ground.  Today that crop was potatoes.

I used my hoe to make two trenches in this bed.  I had such a surplus of potatoes that I didn't eat from last year that I decided that I don't need to plant as many as I did last year.  Some of those uneaten potatoes are going into the dirt to grow more potatoes for me this year. Yay for another year of free potatoes!

They had been stored in boxes in my closet over the winter and it was warm enough that they started to grow sprouts a couple of months ago.  Most of the seed potatoes at the store barely have eyes right now, so it looks like my potatoes are already off to a head start for the year.

When I planted them I laid them down in the trench and covered them with a layer of leaves and dirt.  I added the leaves now because I want them to add organic matter to the soil, but I didn't have time to work them in months ahead of time so they could break down.  Over the growing season they should break down just fine and help to nourish the potato plants that will occupy this space.