Volunteer sprouts.

Looks like I missed picking some garlic last year! Not a big deal, I'll just let it mature and pull it up as I would have if I'd actually planted garlic last year. It's definitely the answer to the question I had of whether I could get away with planting garlic as winter slowly wandered in last year. Turns out, if I'd put it in at the normal time the garlic probably would have been just fine. I am a big fan of hearty varieties for just that reason. Learning curve for the future, make sure that you get those over winter plants in the ground!

Surviving plants, and chicken thoughts.

We have a big surprise coming out of some days in the teens. We though the Kale was done, and were going to cut and blanch the leaves. Before we had a chance to, turns out the Kale is just fine. Some of the weaker leaves aren't doing as well, but overall now that we're back up into the 50s and 60s during the day the kale has fully bounced back.

Some of it is a little worse for the wear of the Critter exploring the texture and general feel of the leaves. These things happen, frankly given how much kale is produced how easily, the Critter tearing some of it up isn't exactly a big deal to me. Either way, we're going to have Kale for a bit longer which is a nice thing. It isn't the only thing that survived the frost, though the other survivor isn't exactly unexpected either.

First taste of winter weather.

Soon the fires will be lit, and we will be warmer inside. But first, we have to make sure it's going to be safe for the small person and that he won't get at the stove. We really want to avoid that kind of burn. To get that safe we're going to have to install the gate around the stove, which I should be able to do Thursday, and re-clean the chimney.

A touch of frost, greens, and more.

On this cold morning, we have lots still on plants, and some that I strongly suspect won't make it through the first killing frost, but won't be ripe by then. Always a bit of a challenge with our location. As for the beans, at this point it just comes down to picking them off the plants. Even with the weather, the beans don't seem to be done flowering as you can see Right. Even the scarlet runner beans set more flowers just recently despite being heavy with beans. 

Moving ahead, leaving things behind.

Today we start with the unlovely, and move on to the lively. This weekend as I mentioned last week we got in a dumpster to clear out things that have turned from treasured personal possessions to trash. Things ranging from books, to only copies of photos, to very practical things like sleeping bags. All of that has been emptied from the barn, and the barn itself is now very much usable again. It has gone from not so much full as too cluttered to use, to organized, and with sufficient room to easily park the car with room to spare for a second vehicle. The shed is also empty of everything extraneous. Oh an emotional level it's tough throwing out things that in the past may have been precious, but let's be honest, our life has changed. There are better uses for the barn now that we're going the direction we are with our life. Once the fencing material is out of the barn there will be even more room.

Misidentified predator, and garden successes.

Well, it turns out we've been blaming the wrong predator for at least some of our chicken deaths. Yesterday the Lady of the House  heard the turkeys giving alarm calls, and saw they were up the tree. When she looked out in the back yard, there, in broad daylight was a first year coyote. She didn't get a photo of it as she was busy chasing it off, but fortunately neither of the turkeys, nor the remaining chicken were killed. We're going to have to do some strong behavioral remediation for this coyote, because as interesting as they are, we Really don't want them around the homestead when we have livestock. At beast they'll scare the rabbits into not wanting to breed (gee, maybe that's why they haven't been accepting breeding) and at worst they can do a Lot of damage as is clearly evidenced by the nearly exterminated chicken flock. At least we know what we're dealing with because a coyote is very different from a fox. Fortunately they're smart enough to be easy to scare, and lazy enough to not want to go to much trouble. But now, let's talk about the garden successes.

Cool summer rain.

A very rainy day is very good for the garden, even if the various creatures around the property don't appreciate it nearly as much. The beans very much needed the rain, as they were starting to wilt a bit after the hail followed by a few hot dry days. Right now the beans are all doing well enough, and we're enjoying watching them grow. The bush beans, while they don't look nearly as good have a good crop already on the plant that look like they're just about ready to pick. Having preserved green beans for the winter is always a nice thing.

Bean trellis, and chickens in the greens.

After an incredibly productive weekend last weekend thanks to much help from friends, this weekend was more focused on family time. It was lovely but meant that as far as the homestead go, it's basically been all about maintenance. The big that that got done was putting in posts (though they could use being driven further in), and dragging over the cattle panel to set up a bean trellis.
The beans had been going a bit crazy, and lacking something more solid to climb, they'd been climbing up the garlic in the front bed. It can be kind of hard to tell in this photo Left but if you look down at the base of the garlic, you can see a darker green wrapped around the base and climbing up. When I put the trellis in, I carefully unwrapped the beans, and re wrapped them around the wire. That should work out well from what I know of beans. The beans growing in that row are scarlet runner beans (I think), and the ones in the bed below are bush beans so they aren't going to need a trellis like this. The Lady of the House picked the beans to plant so I have to admit I'm a little behind the 8 ball on remembering everything that's out there in the garden right now. If they are actually the scarlet runner beans I think they are, every part of the plant can be eaten which is great. I haven't had the greens part of the beans, but at least in theory being able to use everything is good. Even if it isn't very flavorful, or has a bad texture I'm going to be happy to use them at least as something that can be steamed, and mixed in with other things with spices. We'll see when we have a chance to actually use it.

An oops, and starting to look ahead to what we should seed start.

As usual, it is expected to be snowing today. At least today it's expected to be a light snow with only a couple inches. While that is certainly it's own variety of frustrating due to the difficulty of clearing it when I can clear it at all, this time I am glad for a break from the heavy snow that we've been seeing lately. While this isn't an excessive amount of snow for a winter, getting it all at once isn't my favorite method. It's going to be very cold again for the next couple weeks which is to be expected for this time of year.

Frost vs. freeze, healthy rabbits, and standoffish females.

So, what's the difference between frost and frozen? With frozen kale I can come out at 8:15 and get a last minute blog photo of pretty patterns on the leaves. As you can probably guess, winter has come, though I suppose technically it's still fall for a while longer. My thin southern blood still considers 20s to be winterish.

With the wintery feeling we got some things done that really had to be done promptly at this point. Namely pull in the last of the things we care about from the garden.  Pardon the awful photo Left but that's the stevia plant we put in the ground this spring. We kind of ignored it and wandered off instead of doing the care it really should get. If we had it'd have given us a lot more leaves of delicious sweetness. As it is, it's got a fairly good bunch of leaves it looks like to me. We're bringing it inside and drying it. The Lady of the House is trying drying a couple stalks and oven drying the rest of it since oven drying makes for a sweeter result. Apparently one can also do stevia extract much like vanilla extract. We may try doing that with some of it because it sounds interesting. Sounds like the sort of thing to research before trying though just so we don't waste materials. We also brought in the last of the tomatoes. None of what we brought in was really good to eat, most of it was lumpy and going soft. A bit frozen in places. Fortunately we have things to do with such tomatoes. No, nothing awful, we're just saving seeds from them. With saving seeds from tomatoes you can look up any number of tutorials online how to do it, and it's fairly simple. We just cored out the seeds from the tomatoes and put them in a bit of water to get the goop off. Fermented tomato goop. So as you can see for now we have the goopy seed bits sitting on the window sill with labels so we remember what they are. We saved seeds from the paste tomatoes, the cherry tomatoes I don't know the name of, the sun gold cherry tomatoes, and the green zebra tomatoes. The sun golds will be hit or miss with growing them since they were a hybrid. We're going to try breeding them out so they produce the same thing consistently, but that'll take a while. The last thing we brought in was the limon peppers. Tevis recommended we just pull the plants up and dry them on the plants, so we're trying that. We have 3 bushy limon pepper plants covered in peppers hanging over the stove. I look forward to growing those again, and eating the rest of the peppers on the plants!
So I'd promised some baby photos and discussion of the rabbits on Tuesday so here we go! The babies we have on the ground both teen and real babies are doing quite well. The runt of the teen litter is doing well, though it is still very small compared to the rest. As you can tell the teens are very hard to get photos of, and I'm getting fewer and fewer of them that are worth even bothering showing. They move fast, and are very happy to see us when ever we're near by. A friend that dropped by yesterday commented that they run through water fast, which is very true. It's tough to keep them in fresh water all the time. I'm starting to wonder if a 5 gallon bucket feeding the watering points is the way to go with the teens! As for the smaller one, all of the survivors of the first few days out of the Twilight and Halley litters are doing very well. Not having done weight checks I can't give you precise numbers on how well, but they're getting big. Twilight's litter is more friendly than Halley's but that's starting to just be understood as the norm right now. They're not bad kits, they're just a bit more skittish. We've bred Dawn and Sunshine, but when we try to re breed Twilight we've been having something of an interesting quandary. She has been reacting like she did last year when we first tried to breed her. We're wondering if she has a hard cut off of temperature past which she won't accept breeding. Fortunately she hasn't been violent to Starry Night, just standoffish to him. He approaches, they sniff, she grunts, he backs off. She eats his food and waits to go home. He sits in the corner and stares at her, occasionally coming up to sniff at her again. The other option is he's scared of her because she's half again his size . . .
For now we're not sure, and we don't want a late November litter, as much as the idea of "Thanksgiving Kits" sounds nice, I think trying to deal with very young kits during the holiday season when work is in full swing at the warehouse would be beyond what we could reasonably do. Speaking of kits, Sunshine decided it's time to start nest building. Not sure why she's doing so this early, but . . . there it is. I gave her extra hay so she feels comfortable, and I'll probably empty the nest in a week and give her straw. Who knows what goes through the minds of rabbits when it's nesting time.
That's all for this week. Tomorrow we head off to a convention for the Lady of the House to sell, and next week we'll discuss some of the challenges with that and the homestead.

Growing green, and growing up.

All the world is green, and the garden is growing. Life around the homestead is going well with a few challenges ranging from slugs to impending rabbit adulthood.

Our first garden dinner, and digging so much we broke a shovel.

I hope that everyone is doing well, and has gotten work done on what ever garden they have. We've gotten a fair amount done, and are really thrilled with how much good is going on in our garden. But first,baby bunnies are doing well. We don't have much in the way of baby bunny photos today because the light was strange. Twilight is still being modestly aggressive, but she's calmed down a bit at least. All of the babies are growing quickly, and all of their eyes are open. However we don't have weights to relay right now because we lost the scale. Well, let me rephrase, I put the scale somewhere, and I have NO idea where it is. So hopefully we'll have more to relay and more photos of the babies on Thursday.

A quick look at the garden and how it grows.

So, life is very busy right now in the non homestead side of things as the warehouse at one of my jobs prepares to move on Saturday, so my time is more limited than usual. But I didn't get a chance to cover the garden on Tuesday, so here we go! Above is our garlic that's doing amazingly well. It's up at mid thigh level on me at this point which is great.

Hilltown Seed Saving Network seedling swap from Saturday

The seed swap on Saturday was an amazing event, and unfortunately we didn't get the photos of it we should have. We also made the mistake of not getting photos of all of the plants we brought home with us before we set to planting them. Above is just what we have left after a couple rounds of planting. But I figured I'd just give a whole garden update.