My gardener daughter Anna and I are both sick with a cold today, soooo we are sneezing and watching the movie Back to Eden together. 🙂
If you haven’t seen it, you can stream it at their website Back to Eden. There’s lots of sage advice on mulching, watering, composting, etc.,etc. …incredible film!
I have been checking out my 5 month old chicks to see if they were showing signs that they would be laying soon. I saw pictures that showed how in just a matter of weeks their combs and waddles can enlarge and get red. The day before yesterday I noticed that two of the chicks and Mr. Knightley were checking out the nest behind the hay bales where we found our surprise bunch of eggs not too long ago.
Funny that they would be looking there…This is the pullet that I thought would be the first one to lay…
You can see clearly that she is developing a nice red crown and waddles. But yesterday when I came down with my treat tray I noticed that one of the Black Marans chicks was missing. I looked all over for her and found her up in the sleeping coop. Way back in the corner she had formed a round nest.
Today, this is what I found…
I didn’t put nesting boxes in this coop, because I intended to move all the new chickens over to the big coop. I have been wondering for days how to go about doing this, but maybe the better plan would be to build nesting boxes onto this coop and let them stay there. It is definitely cozier.
So here she is. Her comb is not as red as the other one, but it seems like she laid the first egg. I have been waiting to name them until their personalities developed a little more…Maybe Uno???
Here’s her egg in comparison to the older hens…
I just love this website… Old World Garden Farms. I have been learning so much from them, such as putting in a spring cover crop. “Unheard of” was the attitude of the feed store owner to my husband when he asked about rye grass for a spring cover crop. He didn’t have any so we went ahead and bought clover, and I sowed it into my new pumpkin bed today. I’m excited to see how this works!
Today Old World Garden Farms had a wonderful article about Cutting Back, Dividing and Preparing Ornamental Grasses For Spring. The following picture shows the ornamental grasses behind their patio…just gorgeous and totally inspiring!
One of my sons was into landscaping a couple of years ago and planted some grasses and leftover plants from a job in our backyard still in the pots so he could use them for other jobs someday. He has moved away now and these ornamental grasses have been growing in the same pots sunk in the ground for years. What I did today: cut back the ornamental grasses, pulled them out of the pots, divided them and replanted them. These pictures are not pretty, but we are going to see how they progressively look better as I work on them this year.
I divided 3 plants into 6…Here is what it looks like from a distance…
For years we have talked about putting a gazebo up…now I’m definitely inspired to do just that. So this is the “before” pic. 🙂 Hopefully my “after” pic will look as pretty as Old World Garden Farms.
I also worked over in the greenhouse. Spread compost in all the beds and then put DE over all the veggies. It was 90 degrees in the greenhouse and 60 outside, but we are expecting a storm…rain tomorrow and maybe snow the next day. I say “bring it on”! We need all the moisture we can get.
Sarah used some spinach and pansies from the greenhouse to decorate the tomato salad that she served this evening with lentil soup and rice.
We’ve been buying hydroponic tomatoes from Urban Agrarian. I like supporting these guys. They are located down at the old OKC Farmer’s Market.
Another project in the making is turning our backyard into a fruit and vegetable garden. Here is what it looks like today…another “before” pic…
Pretty boring…Anna and I have big plans. 🙂
OK, now for the weekly update on the grow lights…
Looking good…So, how’s your garden coming along?
This is really strange… Anytime I bring treats all of the hens come a-runnin’ as fast as their little legs will carry them…
Two days ago when I brought treats they all ran out to greet me except for one. When I looked in the coop she was there sitting on the lowest roost. She never moved…never came out to see what was going on. I figured I would wait a day and see if things changed. The next morning I went to let them out and didn’t notice anything unusual. She may have been sitting on the roost, but I was busy breaking ice and getting water. Around 11 that morning I went back down to the coop and there she was dead. She looked as if she had just died and fallen off the roost and was lying there on the floor. I was so shocked!
I never came up with a name for two of the Welsummers…I just called them the Welsummer sisters. She was the one with the smallest comb.
Has anything like this happened to anyone out there?
This is just what we need to do in all our garden beds, new and old. I knew about fall cover crops, but this is the first I’ve heard about spring cover crops. Great post! Thanks!
No matter how healthy your vegetable plants start off in the spring – no matter how carefully you water – how perfectly it rains, or how much of the sun’s rays find their way to your garden  – your plants are only going to turn out as good as the soil you plant them in.  Period.
Vegetable crops like tomatoes, peppers, corn and cucumbers take a heavy toll on the soil’ structure and make-up.  They devour valuable nutrients as they grow to produce the very fruits and vegetables we love to eat.  Eventually, after a few years – even the best of soils will begin to break down and weaken if not replenished and re-energized.  Soil that becomes weak in nutrients will result in successively weaker crop yields that are also increasingly prone to disease and pests.
So what is the best way to keep your garden strong?…
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Mr. Knightley in my chicken coop? See what you think…
This rooster is such a gentle one. He seems to care about the other hens and chicks. I’ve never seen him get in a squabble and every time I look at him the name Knightley comes to mind…hence Mr. Knightley. Partially because of his personality, and partially because he is black like the sky at night.
Now don’t you think he looks debonaire? Kind of like this Mr. Knightley character…
![emma23b1[2]](https://myhandsinfathersgarden.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/emma23b12.jpg)
Just kidding… 🙂
He does have an attachment to one of the young hens and they hang out together…I find this unusual…
You can see them standing together in the top left of the photo above. Perhaps I should name her Emma???
I’m always trying to capture pictures of squabbling chickens, so here are a few…
This guy is a trouble maker, but Attila the Hen will take care of him…
She steps up and there he goes…
Amazing how much excitement there can be in the barn yard…
Got a lot done today, actually yesterday now…completely cleaned up the chicken coops. Put new organic feed in the feeders and water with a little Bragg’s Apple Cider vinegar in the water…Chickens are happy and doing fine. We are getting 3 to 4 eggs a day.
I hauled two loads of pine shavings and chicken poop up to the compost pile. This is what our compost looks like…Wild isn’t it???
This is my husband’s menagerie of compost bins…He really knows how to make excellent compost! The tallest bins are old pickle barrels and then there are two black trash cans, all of which have holes punched in them for aeration and then we inherited the round one from the neighbor next door. He fills them with veggie scraps, grass clippings, manure, and hay and rolls them around. It goes a little slower in winter when it is cold…
The old dried up asparagus ferns needed cutting so I did that and also raked out the leaves from the bed…Can’t wait until we have fresh asparagus!
Inside the greenhouse, I weeded all the beds and picked a couple of handfuls of kale, and handful of spinach and then watered…I just don’t think the Brussels sprouts are ever going to produce…I think that perhaps the best thing to do next year is start them inside the air conditioned house under grow lights in the summer and then maybe they will have a head start in the fall when it’s not so hot. Starting a fall garden when it is 100 degrees outside is impossible, I think.
I transplanted some red lettuce that overwintered outside into the parsley patch… Our parsley has finally thinned itself out. There are not too many plants left.
I already noticed some of those little moths that were a problem last fall. So I need to go back and give everything a good dusting of DE.
Inside the house we set up the grow lights…
This was just a 4 foot fluorescent shop light that costs about $18 at Lowe’s plus two 48″ plant and aquarium bulbs that were about $10 a piece. I will be making up another tray of seeds…
Went out to buy some blueberries and found these at Lowe’s for $10 a piece…
Got all this done yesterday and it snowed today…Yay! We have so much need for moisture here and this is really the first good snowfall all winter!
A little side trip…on our way to get blueberries we went to Cafe Evoke…Yum!
And to Sprouts where we saw the cutest recycled bags…Anyone remember this???   It will really tell your age…; )
For those of you too young to know Dick and Jane. They were the little characters in our first grade reading books back in the 50s.
Signing off again with one of my blurry photos. I can’t figure out why my camera does this…but I like these artsy blurs…
This is it!!! Time to plant those tomato seeds according to a great source… One Hundred Dollars a Month
She actually starts hers the 1st of February…we started ours around the 4th. Which means they will be ready to go out to the greenhouse, or out to the garden under our cut off milk carton cloches about April 1st. I think that should work great.
My goal is to get some tomatoes this year before it turns to the incredibly hot 90/100 degree heat we’ve been having lately. Hopefully the weather will be kinder this year, but I want to be prepared.
I bought a grow light that we will install underneath a bench to put the tomatoes under while they are growing. More on that later…
Mavis over at One Hundred Dollars a Month is an incredible blogger, gardener, cook, frugal living expert, etc…etc…I don’t know how anyone can keep up with her. If you haven’t visited her website…you are in for a treat.
And don’t miss her article…How to Grow Tomatoes { Start to Finish}
I noticed today she has been out buying fruit trees and she said this is the best time to get them… I better get going…
I do have one beautiful tomato growing in my dining room… 🙂
My husband asked me the other day, if I thought all 6 hens were laying. It was the day we got zero eggs. The day after that I got 5 eggs and I very excitedly told him that this meant all 6 hens were laying, because Mara’s lovely dark brown copper egg was not in the bunch.
This morning we took off for a nice long walk at the nearby lake and on the way home, I remembered to ask my husband if he would look at the water spigot that I use to fill the chicken waterers…
He’s such a great guy, by the way, and very observant and as he was inspecting the spigot situation he found this…
Hidden behind hay bales in the barn…a nest of 8 eggs.
As he began to pick up the eggs, Hendrika showed up and started making such a fuss about us finding the eggs.
At first I thought they were all hers, but on closer inspection, I think there are 3 different kinds. So my guess that for some reason they decided to lay over in the barn instead of in their nests.
The eggs were cold…There is no broody hen and I do not think any of the roosters are fertilizing yet.
So, how does one go about getting them to lay in the nesting boxes?
I know this has nothing to do with gardening or chickens, but hey, I’m a grandma and this our new baby Addison, born yesterday… 🙂
Rosemary, Lavender and Thyme 