Fresh food, and turkey containment in winter.

We have to remind ourselves, Summer isn't over yet. At my job, the students are arriving today which makes it harder to remember it isn't yet fall. The weather is helping at the moment, but the nights have been getting cold, and the leaves as you can see are already starting to come down. We didn't put any effort into tomatoes this year given the string of failures due to blight in the past couple years. Even with that we're seeing a few tomatoes, mostly from the volunteer plants, but some still from the plants leftover from the seedling swap. It's nice to have some brightly colored treats in the garden. For the rest of our tomato want, we're going to be trying to purchase seconds tomatoes from a nearby local farmer and turn those into sauce.

Speaking of treats, as I'd mentioned before we've found an ideal one for the Critter, cucumbers. They've continued being an ideal treat for him, and I'm not sure what we're going to do when they aren't growing outside! While a bit messy having such a healthy and easy treat for him has been very beneficial for us. Sometimes you just need a couple minutes to get something done, and giving him some cucumbers takes care of that quite nicely. Keeping fresh foods on the menu for the Critter is definitely something of a priority for us. I'm not saying he never gets cheerios or goldfish or anything of the sort, he certainly does, but fresh fruits and vegetables are much more our idea of what he should be getting. We may just take the power hit, and try growing food inside so we can keep being able to give him fresh foods over the winter. It's something worth looking into once we're stuck inside more for sure. Another thing I'm a little concerned about with regards to the winter is entertaining the Critter who spends a fair amount of time outside.

Homestead TV will also be less interesting for him during the winter than it is now. He spends a lot of time watching out the window, especially when the turkeys are there. The problem the Lady of the House has been having lately with that is, she sees the Turkeys, informs him they're there and brings him over. After a week of this he thinks he should be able to summon turkeys by shouting turkey over and over. He gets very frustrated when that doesn't work out for him. He will be very disappointed after the first snow when they don't come to visit him. By that point hopefully we'll have been able to set things up so he can safely move around more of the bottom floor.
Back to the Homestead side of things, we need to figure out at least one more turkey, and more chickens. Specifically we need to get at least one turkey hen if we want to breed turkeys rather than just eat a pair of holiday dinners which is what we're looking at right now with two males. The brown one is significantly smaller, so we're intending to keep the black turkey since he's big, dominant, and a really good looking turkey. One of the things that's interesting to me is just how much turkeys actually just look like a walking piece of meat in comparison to the other  livestock that we've had around.  It sounds awful, but turkeys you can See the turkey dinner in them. They are fun to have around, but I'm really looking forward to getting them contained again, which is going to be a bit of a challenge now that they're so used to being off on their own. I worry about their survival over the winter if they're outside during the cold days of winter. On the up side, when it starts getting nasty, and less and less food is out, I'll be able to have a lot more control over their behavior by where we put the food. I suspect that once things aren't so green we're going to be able to just put food in their coop, and close the door while they eat when we need to contain them. That is a job that will likely fall to the Lady of the House since I'm at work all day at least 5 days a week.

Thursday's post may be tardy or non existent due to timing of life right now. If it doesn't happen I'll make up for it Friday or Saturday.