Sending on the coop.

One of the hard things about getting the house ready is how much we'd done to make it ours. Some of that is the chicken coops. Unfortunately when the chickens are gone I'm going to have to just disassemble the big coop in the back. Fortunately, the Lady of the House's father wants to get into chickens so I was able to offload the smaller red coop we used for so long back to him. He actually found that coop for us for free, and hauled it up in the first place. He came up on Saturday, and the two of us moved the coop onto the trailer he brought, took down the chicken run, and packed it up into his trailer. Once that was done we loaded up a lot of the Critters toys, and the electric fencing for the chickens and sent it off to his house. Once that's set up we're going to bring the chickens to his place to watch over until we have a place we can have chickens again.

On the subject of the GoFundMe, we are doing well, and with the donation matching we're getting close to the $5,500 point where we need to be to get the heat and hot water installation begun. Any help you can give before the 1st while the donation matching is still going on would be greatly appreciated. All of the help and sharing we've gotten has been amazing to us. Thank you all.

On the farm side of things, we still desperately need rain.

Short grass problems.

One of the not entirely unexpected consequences of mowing the lawn short relative to our wild grass and perennial woods clearing. With the drought we've been seeing this summer, despite our nice moist climate relative to the valley, after mowing the lawn regularly we're seeing a lot of sad and browning grass. It's not the vibrant greens that I'm used to seeing our lawn, but it is starting to look more like a normal lawn. With a bit of rain it'll look fine.

On the GoFundMe front we are closing in on enough to put the %50 down payment on the furnace. Right now with the donation matching my father is offering we could reach that goal very quickly. We hope to reach it before August 1st so we can get the house on the market with a firm date of installation for the furnace. Thank you all for listening, sharing, and donating. Our community has been such a huge help to us.

Now on to the rest of the gardening situation.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Spring thinking, and sick critter

Most of what we've been focused on over the past week or so has been inside the house more than outside, and we'll get to that in a moment below the cut. Right now though we're watching the rapidly melting snow covering the last areas of the growing areas, and thinking about the strangeness of the weather. We have predicted snow in 7 days, but instead of waiting for Memorial day for anything the way we normally would, we are considering planting early plants such as radishes, lettuce, mustard greens, and cold hearty beans. Given that the weather has been so strange all winter, and we have a bit of a glut of a few varieties of seeds it seems like a situation we can either get something good, or just have to re plant later.

A lovely March morning.

It's a lovely March morning today, the fact that it's December has changed this from being convenient that weather has held off while we weren't prepared to getting concerning. While I personally am not a huge fan of snow, it has a lot of benefits. Especially in regards to agriculture. Obviously it's not like there isn't plenty of winter to come, but I figured I'd mention why it is good to have a long snow season despite my personal feelings on snow.

First things first, the blanket effect of snow isn't just something that's said. When snow covers the ground due to the amount of air trapped in the snow it acts as a significant insulator. That helps maintain soil temperature. Not saying it isn't cold under snow, but it can help keep things like overwintering plants survive the winter. The temperature regulation also makes a big difference for trees. Evergreens in particular if their roots warm up enough attempt to draw up water. That isn't a problem right now because the ground isn't frozen yet. Once it's frozen if they try to draw up water they will potentially dehydrate. More relevant right now given the fact that it's warm, with the snow on the ground it helps prevent nutrients from being evaporated out of the soil. Snow is called "Poor Man's Mulch" by a lot of local farmers.

Second, snow pack helps replenish ground water and as long as there isn't a flash melt is much more beneficial for the ground. I don't know all of the mechanisms on the science side of things but I do know that without a good snow pack over the winter, drought is very much more likely. It can very much benefit early season crops to have a good snow pack.

Third, without snow anything like garlic that's planted to overwinter doesn't have protection from being eaten by birds, or casual consumption by other animals. This is particularly relevant for us because we like garlic, and actually provide the birds that would eat the garlic if it was planted right now. Until we get a projected snow I am going to be holding off on getting the garlic in the ground. Of course, that will require the ground to still be thawed for me to be able to plant. We'll see if that's an option.

So far I've only covered snow. Now we come to the cold. The most obvious benefit of cold, especially snap freezes is that it kills bugs dead. Without a good hard cold winter it's likely to be a very buggy year next year. That of course has benefits for our chickens, but for crops that's not a good thing. What it will mean if we don't get a hard winter for the rest of this winter we're going to have to think about using something for pest control. Probably some combination of neem oil and co planting insect discouraging crops.

Just figured I'd voice some thoughts about my concerns about the lack of winter so far.

Asparagus, garlic placement, and dreaming.

The Lady of the House and the Critter both have a cold, and we're holding up but we're all a bit fatigued the past couple days. Thanks to that we don't have as much going on as we'd like during this week. Fortunately the Critter is fine with it, it's the rest of us that are suffering. Above is a photo of how well the asparagus is doing. It's tough to get a good photo of the asparagus because of just how much it blends in with everything else around it, even when we have brought things down to mostly just be ground cover under it. The entire bed of asparagus is doing great though, and I'm looking forward to seeing how well it is doing next year. Thanks again to Kathy Harrison from Barefoot Farm for the gift of the asparagus. I know that the entire house is going to be thrilled to have easily accessible asparagus next year.

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. 

Starting to focus on fall projects.

Dawn is getting perceptibly later. It's not dark when we wake up yet, but it's getting there, and the plants are getting fewer hours of light day by day. Right now that isn't affecting the growth of any of the plants, but it will within the month. Many of the plants have started fading already and setting their last fruit since they know what's coming well before we do. That said, we're going to want more production than we've gotten this year so we have some new things to try this winter.

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.

Wicked weather.

As I've mentioned many times before, weather is a much more integral and important part of our life now than it was before we were homesteading. Before homesteading weather was something you thought about in terms of should I wear a rain coat, how many layers do I dress in, do I need to shovel to get to work. With our location and focus, weather is important for the health of our livestock, our garden, and . . . you guessed it, our driveway.

Hot and foggy, life keeps going.

I'm sorry for not having a post yesterday. Aside from the post today I'm also going to be posting tomorrow so I keep with the two posts for the week. Life has been very busy and not particularly homestead oriented for the past week or so, leading to falling behind on getting photos, or even having things considered for a blog post. As for not getting it done yesterday, I just forgot to get at least something done. I'm setting up a reminder in my calendar so that doesn't happen again.

On the homestead, the weather has been hot and wet, leading to mornings and evenings of heavy fog, and strange lighting. There's more than that even without us actively working on things, as life keeps moving whether you're watching or not.

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.

Good fortune, and good growth.

Today we have a lovely example of happy accident. Down at the border of the parking area, and the slope we plant on, the Lady of the House planted what turns out to be an Evening Primrose from the seedling swap. The happy accident isn't the planting so much as where it's been planted. Evening Primrose usually blooms in (you guessed it) the evening. Ours blooms all day due to the shade it's been planted in so we've been able to really enjoy it. I'm not usually a flower person, but it's a sweet little flower. Of course lots more is worth noting at the moment.

Seedlings, starts, soil, and the winds of fortune.

It's a rainy, and kind of gross day with the volume of mud out there, but it is most certainly spring now. The Earth is beginning to thaw, and soon I think we'll start to see growing and living things even outside of our little indoor start. As you can see though, the indoor starts are doing quite well. I honestly should probably pot them up now since many of those little potlings have too many seedlings in them, and we don't want them to be entangled any more than they already are.

Starting the first seeds, inside.

I'm going to start by giving a shout out of thanks to our first patron on Patreon, I promise I won't say something every single time someone sponsors us on the blog, but I'm very happy that our first day on Patreon we have a patron.

So, now that spring has sprung, it's time to get started with planting, well, not out here yet, but let's take a look at our planting areas and what they look like at the moment before starting the first plantings. Above is where the garlic is right now. As soon as the snow melts we're going to have to pull up the paper we put down to protect the beds. There's also a few other random beds down the slope that had tomatoes and peppers last year, so this year they are going to have radishes and the like.

It's hard to imagine that in 3 months the world will be so different

In 3 months there will be growing plants, growing edible plants in this front slope garden. It'll probably be Kale and Radishes, but still. With the greater than dog depth snow (dog for scale) it's good to remind ourselves of that from time to time given the seemingly interminable winter.