Bessie and Rosebud are due in August, and we are hoping for their usual charming additions to the bovine world.
Not in the cooking sense, you understand. Our chickens will live out their senior years in the chicken assisted living facility known as Triskelion Farm.
Having had mixed success with chicks this year, trying to widen our range of both colored eggs and exotic chickens, our ratio of cocks to hens managed to come out too high. Consequently, we have been playing catchup in the hope that the new coop occupants would both play nicely together and not start a "who is cock of the coop" war! Thanks to Heather we have some pretty Marans with a boatload of creative names, and the photos really don't do them justice.
"Little", who spent the first few weeks of his life on everything except life-support, has now caught up with the others and is a very colorful and robust young man. Having tried to save money by designing our own coop (back of envelope design shown below) and getting the ever-handy Todd to build it, we have had to give in and add another coop in the small run, to accommodate the growing (literally) number of chickens. Thus a small village is growing up at the back of the arena, much to the puzzlement of the cows who spend hours gazing into the runs.
As you can see the vegetable choice is much wider than just two, and our color chart for nutrition is well covered. We aren't really self-sufficient but we do have enough produce to last the winter, supplemented with regular eggs and dairy products.
What is more pertinent, we know where they came from, and what went into the ground and onto the leaves. Also thanks to Keith and Michelle, and the "poop barter", we also have a much wider choice of veggies than we could ever grow ourselves. Jorg and I count ourselves lucky in these troubled times that we have the means and the health to use the beautiful space that we have in this way.This year, we decided to experiment with some heirloom varieties of vegetables. Given the limited gene pool from which commercially marketed vegetables are developed, keeping the heirloom varieties going is important in order to increase the chances that we may have alternative food sources should the biological “big one” ever hit, i.e. we get a widespread epidemic of disease or fungus. Plus, the different colors look cool in your garden and growing heirloom varieties makes it sound like you know what you are doing to your less enlightened friends.
We picked Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds ( http://rareseeds.com) because they had the greatest variety of vegetables and fruits that no one has ever heard of. As important, they have a colorful catalog that is just fun to read. We ordered the “Southern Collection.” Within about a week, we received more seeds than we will ever plant in our lives. So we decided to work with just a few at a time.
We planted six varieties of tomatoes. These are: Cream Sausage, Egg Yolk, Arkansas Traveler, Coer de Boef and Heartland. Yes, that was only five, but I have forgotten the other one. We have yet to produce the first tomato from these because the spring was long and cold and they were slow to take off. Germination was good for all varieties (100%). Considering the dry weather the past couple of months, they’ve all made steady progress, despite occasional stealth attacks from Tomato Hornworms the size of kielbasa. But recently, the Cream Sausage, an ivory-colored, banana pepper-like variety has developed blossom end rot on nearly all of the still-forming tomatoes. This is a pity because this variety is my personal favorite. As this is a problem that occurs during blossom set, we hope it will ultimately correct. But we will have to chalk this one up as less resistant to moisture and temperature fluctuations (so far) than the others. The Egg Yolk and Arkansas Traveler are doing especially well.
In my continuing quest to make us more self-sufficient (and because I really, really like to eat in the name of research), I also planted Jerusalem Artichokes and Asian long beans. The Jerusalem Artichokes are a great success. The tubers look like ginger root or cannas. You can leave them in the ground all winter and they will continue to spread, or you can start new plants with very small sections of tuber. They are drought-resistant and the bugs seem to hate them. The big question is whether or not we will hate them, too, as we have actually never eaten one. The long bean seeds (those that did not end up in the washing machine by accident) were very slow to germinate, but as soon as the really hot weather arrived, they were off and running. These are slower growing than green beans, but far more interesting. The longest at the moment is about a foot long and still growing. We’ll stir fry these when we have enough of them
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Note to self: Start seeds inside earlier in the year, in case of cold, long springs. Check lunar planting calendar. Cheat and buy started plants from Dale at work.
