Chickens, rapid blight, and dark mornings.

Meet our new chickens! I know, it's a horrible blown out picture, but it's getting dark in the morning, and I got home after dark last night. So, for the time being photos are going to be fairly meh for the blog since it's camera phone in the dark, but anyhow. Chickens. After the moving of the coop over a week ago Saturday, this past Thursday night we went and got our new hens. We were given 4 Cinnamon Queens for our wedding, and our friends generously held on to them until we could do more to secure the chickens, and another friend gave us a trio of layers that were older and thus leaving her farm one way or the other. Those are a pair of Black Australorps, and a Rhode Island Red. Hopefully when we start letting them out the Lady of the House can get some photos of them that are worth sharing.
The really nice thing is that they're already producing eggs. Last time we got chickens we started with young girls, and by the time they started laying eggs, they got eaten. This time they are already laying, and hopefully Mr. Bond will keep them safer. Side note, roosters keep hens safer, they often die in the process, but that is in fact, their job. Egg wise since Thursday we've gotten at least 4 eggs a day. At the rate we currently consume eggs we're going to get far more eggs than we can eat, but that's fine. We can share eggs with friends that have helped us, bake as much as we want, and sell eggs if we have that much of a surplus.
 The other things going on right now other than the cold weather is that our formerly lush tomato morass got hit by major blight, and it's just swept through and wiped out all of our tomato plants. On the up side some of the tomatoes are still ripening up, but all of our plants are perishing. It's mostly a bit frustrating because of the fact that it's happening before the cold kills them off. We have already been getting frost advisories every night this week which is a reminder that winter is really and truly on the way. We haven't yet had a frost or freeze, but with my new and improved (?) wake up time of 6:30, I'll be sure to see the first morning that it's true.

For the time being we've been taking a judicious risk and not pulling up our pepper plants outside and trying to let the peppers ripen up. Tevis of Crababble Farm warned us that the reason he focuses on Limon Peppers is that they're much more productive than the other pepper types we were trying in this climate. We went ahead and did others, and he was very much correct. We've had some decent production from the Thai Firecracker peppers you see Below but my favorite in terms of appearance, the Czech Black peppers only set a few peppers per plant despite looking great all season. The habeneros did even worse unfortunately and getting anything off of those plants is going to be a matter of luck being on our side in terms of weather giving us a little more time.

That's fine though, it's a learning experience, and if we decide to keep the house a little warmer this winter with a small person around that isn't good at keeping warm, maybe we'll grow some peppers under the grow lights. We actually have a trio of pepper plants that we grew in pots over the summer we're going to be bringing in and seeing how they over winter, so we'll keep you posted on that.

On the rabbit front, I just couldn't get a decent photo to save my life this morning. I'll see if the Lady of the House can get some photos so I can do a good update on Thursday. Right now we're waiting on kits. I need to go back and figure out the dates we did breedings. I also need to finish killing and processing the last of the teens that I started last weekend so I can shift the kits over away from the moms about to pop.

I'm also hoping to get one last breeding out of Twilight, so we'll see how that goes. We are probably done until Spring though given how cold it is.