Garlic scapes, and chicken intrusions.

I'm sorry for not having a post up yesterday, with trying to get everything done, I've been running out of time and brain power. This is especially true as we've started packing up the Critter's things and he's getting upset and concerned about why his things are going away. That's led to evenings being a lot more challenging for us, and less sleep. Either way, while we have gotten rid of a lot of the homesteading things with the rabbits and being down to two chickens, there are still things left to do.

First of all, as you can see the garlic is doing very well. I went through and cut all of the scapes, and have put them in a vase. From the experience of a few seed savers this should give them enough energy to get through flowering. Over the next couple weeks I'm going to be keeping a close eye on them so I can pull the bulbules out and try to give the flowers room so we can save actual seed from them. It's one of those things that I really don't want to let go of  since it's been a goal for some time now.
Another thing that's going on is that the chickens are still very much around, and our red girl has survived and is thriving despite the attack from what I assume was a hawk. Unfortunately her desire to stay close to the house lately has led to some interesting behaviors. Including staring in the dining room window during dinner. The other thing that happens with this has become particularly relevant to my sleep. She's been perching there during the night, and as dawn approaches she starts shifting, and the bush taps the window. That wakes the dog up, who given the events of a couple weeks ago, thinks that the bear is back and wakes up barking. The barking wakes me up, and because you can't assume a false alarm I bounce up, run down stairs, and check for intruders. This of course cuts my sleep short when he does this 3 or 4 times from 4 - 6:30 AM.

Something we haven't discussed a lot in our homesteading talking is dogs and dog training. Dogs are an integral part of homesteading in my mind, and good training is an important part of that. We aren't expert dog trainers is why I haven't talked a lot about training. I would say though if you intend to do homesteading in the future, bone up on your dog training, and get good at it so you aren't looking for the best way to train this kind of false alarm behavior out, without eliminating the alerting behavior we do want!

Finally, we really appreciate all of the help we got on the GoFundMe, The push with the doubling met the goal, and it has helped a good bit. We're still struggling but it has made a huge difference for us, and thank you to everyone who has helped.

Moving rabbits and hutches.

I hope everyone had a good 4th of July. If you're in the USA I hope you enjoyed your Independence Day however you chose to celebrate it, and that your livestock, and the humans in your life weren't disturbed by the fireworks. For the most part we weathered the fireworks just fine, but last night it seems that Boris didn't make it back into the coop, and I wasn't able to find him this morning. Last night was a bad night to be out between the thunder storm, and the fireworks.

Otherwise this was a very good and productive weekend, though we also spent time getting to be sociable and relax which is important in the midst of stressful weeks.

Luna moths, leaving rabbits.

I'm always glad to see the arrival of our first Luna Moths, they are a beautiful if fragile species with a short visiting time. To me they have a lot of the charm of fireflies except during the day instead of dusk and night. They are also incredibly sensitive to pesticides so they only survive in areas without any real pesticide use. To me they are a sign of living in a healthy environment.

Wait, it's Friday?

I seem to have gotten confused on days, and ended up not making a post yesterday! I apologize for my oversight. The new chickens that our friend was kind enough to de-acquisition to us have settled in for a couple weeks, and we're starting to get them used to being outside. I need to do a little more mowing and weeding before putting the electronetting up is going to be useful and successful, so right now they're only out when we are outside with them. The Critter really enjoys being outside with the flock, though they break way before him like he's a large ship with a really unfortunate bow wave! He hasn't yet trained these girls that he's safe enough to be around to be able to pet them.

Wind, power, and wood oven class.

Another long night of heavy winds which seems to be more and more common. We get a lot of good cover from our trees, but that doesn't protect power lines elsewhere. We lost power for around eight hours last night which is very inconvenient. Fortunately other than needing to throw out most of what is in the fridge, it's just that, an inconvenience. Sadly part of that inconvenience is not having our white noise machine that helps the kid sleep, so we had a long night.

Before that though, I went to an interesting class last night at the River Valley Market Co-Op that I'd intended to talk about today, so that's going to be below the cut.

Perfect weather for greens.

The grass is getting out of control with the nearly every other or every third day rain we've been having followed by hot sunny days. I'm going to actually have to mow the law instead of using a sickle and feeding it to the rabbits. Just too much greenery! Not a thing I thought I'd be saying, but there it is. We've been trying to keep on top of the weeding. In the bare beds I haven't mulched yet that's tough, though the garlic is going gang busters as you can see.

Chickens, and mulched terraces.

Of all the things we got done this weekend despite the rain, mowing the lawn wasn't one of them, though the rain was why it didn't get done. The rain also made the necessity of doing it all the greater. It's amazing just how fast our grass grows. That said, while I covered most of what went on I missed a few things, and didn't get all of the photos I wanted to share for Tuesday.

Mass weeding.

One of the fun things about a sudden change from normal cool spring to super hot is the explosion of life. That also means an explosion of weeds. In this photo you can see a profusion of god knows what in with our garlic. The quantity of weeding that we had to do was a little intimidating, fortunately it wasn't just the Lady of the House and I working on it. It also led to us doing some calculations and making some new decisions about our gardens.

Quick Hit: House plants and recovery time.

Again, the whole household has been sick basically all weekend. It's a really inconvenient time to be sick, but there it is. On the up side we're going to have a 3 day weekend to work on the homestead with next weekend, so hopefully we'll be well for that. Mostly what we did when one of us wasn't experiencing the joys of gastrointestinal distress was try to get outside and do things that weren't too physically strenuous. Fortunately the Critter's all about going outside and enjoying things even when he is just getting over being sick. It turns out he's also really good at spotting wildlife, and seeing any sort of shift in his environment that would indicate something is there. For an 18 month old he's also super patient waiting for things to come out of hiding. Of course, that means about 2 minutes, but that's a long time for a toddler!

What we did get done this weekend, and by we I mean the Lady of the House, is getting some house plants set up. As we move the seedlings outside, the Lady of the House really wants to have some living plants inside for a number of reasons. One is the relatively inexpensive decor, and another is the benefits to the interior atmosphere. Here's the wiki that includes the chart from the findings from the NASA experiment. One of the plants we set up is Aloe Vera which in addition to being pleasant to look at has medicinal benefits. We're thinking about what other house plants we could have that would be pretty, have medicinal benefits, and only be minimally toxic to both toddlers and cats, since our cat REALLY likes eating plants.

Sorry for the short post, we have other things going on to talk about, so I'll have a more substantial post Thursday!

Weeds and Boris.

The good news is Boris is doing very well, he's about fully healed at this point and only occasionally stumbles. The bad news is, he's the only chicken we have left. Between sickness, fatigue, etc, etc, we didn't get the electric fence up yet, and what was probably a fox again came and took all of our laying hens leaving Boris uninjured, but panicked. The Lady of the House found him panting and hiding in the shadow of the house, he's not well enough to fight a fox again, though the fact that the fox left him indicates that most likely it's the same fox that didn't want to tangle again, and left him alone. I feel really crappy about myself because I let the fact that I've been very tired lately get in the way of setting up the electronetting, and lost 4 hens because of it. The first one, happens. The other four are entirely because I didn't do my job. We're fortunate to be in a situation where we will be able to get more laying hens that are being de-acquisitioned from a friend's flock. Before we do so though, I'm getting that fence installed and running because I don't want to do this again. On the up side though, the world is turning green.

Growing and recovering.

One of the particularly unfair parts of parenting is something called sleep regression. It's when your kid (who never really slept well) stops wanting to sleep at all. The result of this is that I've been living in a fog for a few days. That has impeded us doing much of anything because between trying to get the kid to sleep, and day to day work nothing is getting done. That said! There are things happening. For one, the asparagus is doing very well. Most of the asparagus has come up and is doing well. To fill out the asparagus patch we've been advised to take the red berries they will sprout later and plant them to thicken the bed, which I look forward to doing. There is a lot that's going on though, especially with the weather as warm as it is, though we're still getting frosts at night not infrequently.

Experiments with water, and dances with porcupines.

Well, I had a plan for the post I was going to do for today so I may as well go with it for at least part of the post. I was going to talk about the brilliant idea I had for the seedlings. For the Lady of the House's birthday/Christmas present I got her a 55 gallon fish tank. One of the things that fish tanks need is water changes, even with a vibrant live plant community in the tank. The reason that fish tanks need water changes of course is that waste builds up in the water. Nitrates and other similar wastes that kill fish happen to be really good for plants. Right now using fish water to nourish plants is actually something of a fad that may end up being a good long term plan called Aquaponics. Given that we don't have the money, or space to do a big set up, using a couple glasses of water per day out of the fish tank to water the plants can't hurt. Well, it could, but I suspect it will be nothing but good for the plants so we'll see. We are doing this in the least scientific way possible, that is, without a control group. Either way, I expect it to work well.

Continuing rapid changes.

This weekend we had a really nice time with a fire pit and a lot of good friends visiting, and in the interests of that, we got the cleaning of the yard that was so desperately needed done! It also reminded me of just how much I like cooking over wood, despite how inefficient it is over an open fire. I shifted things around in the fire pit to make a shielded cooking area with a radiating fire box, but it's still much cooler as a cooking surface than if I had a purpose built cooking area. Probably not a project for this summer, though it very well may be given some of the other changes around the house.

The biggest change is we now have a housemate. I offered to use an alias for him, but he's fine with just being himself. Lucas is now going to be living with us, and he's going to be working at one of the local stone quarries. He's the gentleman that provided the tools and expertise on building the stone floor in the kitchen, and in addition to being handy, he's indicated he'd like to help out around the property. With that, we'll see what becomes possible with more help around the property on a regular basis!

Quick hit: Fast growing.

Yesterday was incredibly busy so I don't really have much of a post for today, and didn't get much done homesteading wise. We did go out with the Critter, and he got to look over a corn field that hasn't been plowed yet this year, and was fascinated. 

On the homestead Boris is doing a lot better. We're guessing he must have pulled  muscles or something of the like. He's limping, and struggling to stay upright as you can see from his posture. We're glad to see him recovering relatively rapidly given the degree of fight and injury he dealt with. We just keep making sure that he's in at night, and out during the day when it isn't raining.
Last but not least, the seedlings are doing very well. Perhaps a bit too well honestly on the tomato front. As you can see Below the tomato seedlings are shooting up fast, and some are almost in contact with the roof of the mini greenhouse they're in. When that happens the top will have to come off. The pepper seedlings are still very small, so we'll see. We may have to set up a second working area and transplant to larger pots soon. That's all for today, we'll be back Tuesday!

So many seedlings!

Our seedlings have come up! It's a really joyful thing to watch the first seedlings come up inside, and see them doing well. Right now most of what has been started inside is tomatoes, peppers, or eggplant. We started a good variety of various seeds this year and I'm looking forward to seeing how they come out, and being able to share a lot of seedlings. One of the main differences in our seedling starting right now is that we have the seedlings up on the baby clothing rack that used to be our seedling station. It works though!

An hour here and there.

I figured I'd start with Boris and his hens. He dragged himself all the way over to the garden and back to the ramp a couple times yesterday. He's still badly injured, but it doesn't look like he's going to die of his injuries. Even if this is how he lives the rest of his life, he's earned sticking around and us giving him care for the rest of that time instead of us butchering him for meat as we usually would for a non productive animal on our property.

Thursday? Chickens doing work.

I'm sorry about yesterday, with schedule wonkyness I ended up forgetting that yesterday was Thursday until the evening. Lately the weather has been lovely, and this weekend is going to be thoroughly spring like, and that'll be nice. We may be able to get some good work done around the homestead. Now, of course, 70 degree temperatures during the day doesn't mean we aren't to planting season yet, patience is going to be the best thing for us. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't be getting seeds started inside, and prepping beds outside.

Quick Hit: Rabbit Reflection

Today I'm looking back, and doing a little reminiscing as we come into spring and start rabbit breeding. Three years ago we already had kits on the ground. This year we're starting very late in breeding, but given everything else that makes sense. This year we've been handling a very strange winter, a small person, and hutches that needed serious cleaning. Now that we've done that, we can get started.

Of course, around three years ago we also learned a lesson, one that continued for a few days that has led to us pushing our first breedings back. Of course, we'd meant to breed earlier than this but have just had a lot going on. Interestingly actually the Lady of the House has been making new friends and found someone with an interesting similar experience. She met someone who started doing meat rabbits, and stopped after precisely the same experience we had with Dawn's litter getting killed by the roof springing a leak. It makes me wonder just how frequent deaths due to something like that are in this area.

Of course if everything was hard all the time, and nothing went well we wouldn't have continued, and much like the Lady of the House's friend, we'd have stopped. Instead we have a lot of good time with really cute kits. Of course we also have some really good food too.

All of this reminiscing is to say, breeding starts this weekend. In a month we're going to have new baby rabbit photos to share on the blog at the same time we're also going to be in a waking world of blooming plants, and the early stages of an edible garden.

It's been a hard year, and I'm looking forward to this new spring ushering in rejuvenation of success with rabbits, as well as the earth coming back to life.

Happy Spring! Time for cleaning and snow.

Happy Spring! As you probably know there's been some significant snow fall up here. It was quite a transition for us since it was warm and rainy on Saturday followed suddenly by snow on both Sunday and a Monday.

Windy Spring

High winds aren't new to our area, in fact they're fairly common up in the hills. What is new to us is how much they're affecting us. I know our sample size is only 5 years, but in that time usually the pine forest around us has made a big difference in protecting us from bad winds. Lately the winds have been causing a lot of problems, and today illustrated some of them very well. The Lady of the House woke up last night wondering what the noise was, and eventually I made sure it really was just the wind, not a fire. This morning first thing that greeted me was the results of that wind storm, as you can see above.