Weather for growth, pecking order changes.

First things first, I want to give a shout out to our now 4 Patreon supporters. Thanks to the group of you for your contributions, they have made a difference for us.  A week after returning from the convention, I'm finally feeling fully recovered, and refocused at home. As we were away, the plants got rain and sun, and positively shot up! Many are doing very well, but for today I'm going to focus on the beans, and the potatoes. Other than that I'm going to talk about the turkeys and the chickens a bit.

I hadn't quite understood just how fast beans go Up, or how strong their little tendrils are. Because the cattle panel isn't tall enough for their tastes, I put in twine runners, and drop lines for them to climb up, and within a day they're twining around and going up. It's fascinating to watch. Before I had the twine in place, the beans were growing up beyond their supports by twining around each other, and climbing. The tallest of them was over a foot and a half over the top of the support. I'm happy with how well the beans are growing, and that barring some catastrophe wiping out the plants we should have a good harvest of beans this year. Obviously, as with everything on the homestead, don't count your beans, or anything else before harvest.

A day of recovery, and fox concerns.

Sometimes our homestead is magical, and it seems to often come at times when we really need it. For instance, when we're so tired we can't think clearly, or when we realize that the fox is a bigger problem than we'd thought. Either way, yesterday was a magical day on the homestead with perfect lighting, gorgeous weather, and a cool breeze. It was exactly what we needed to recharge after getting back from a very long weekend that had nothing to do with rest. I'm going to be writing a post about food and travel for tomorrow, today let's look around at other things.

A break for beauty, and a whole lot of chicken changes.

In between the storms that have been rumbling through the area dumping water in copious amounts, and bringing cold temperatures, we've had some gorgeous weather come through. We try to make sure we take the time to enjoy the beauty around us every day, even in the dark days. On days like this though, it's easy to appreciate even the most mundane parts of our home. In this case, even our regular trouble, the driveway, has provided real beauty to enjoy. Even with the pauses for beauty though, we have plenty going on.

Growing kits, growing chicks, and another broody hen?

Ok, I'll be honest, the baby picture up front is mostly just because they're cute, and why not. We've been very busy so we haven't done rebreeding yet, but it's time. We need to get that done this weekend so we can have an appropriate number of litters this year. Especially since we're introducing The Critter to solids, and he finds basically anything we feed him delicious. I didn't know such a small person could drink that much milk AND eat that much food!

Fruit trees, and brave chicks.

The chicks are doing well, and are very brave for such small things. They definitely seem to have quite the learning curve with life, but at least it's going well because they have a hen to teach them everything about being a chicken. I certainly would have trouble doing so! I need to get more rabbit pictures, but we're still enchanted with the chicks right now so, more chick pictures along with the fruit tree information I promised last time.

Chickens: Good news and bad news.

Extra post for the day because a lot happened in the last 24 hours, and I figured I'd make a quick update. Last night the Lady of the House heard peeping from inside some of the eggs under our Australorp. I heard it this morning, and when I checked in a few of the eggs this morning they have outward facing cracking on them. You can see one of them bottom right of the picture Above. I'm not sure how many will hatch, and how many of them that hatch will survive, but we shall see. We already had one egg that didn't make it, and the photo of that and some less good news will be below the cut. The one that didn't make it will be at the bottom of the post so you know where it is, and can read the rest first.