Everything's growing

 The flowers are growing beautifully....

The corn is growing, thirsty work keeping them weeded....

 Bandit is growing, as are the weeds....

The collection of farm junk is growing... (but this WILL be a nice little trailer someday!)

 and... the piglets are growing!

I love this life.

Spring time bursting forth at the seams

Hills with watermelons and summer squash

 We're trying hills for our squash this year.  Our sons have planted a large watermelon/melon garden this year, it involved a lot of hilling, but they cheerfully got the work done.

Various crops coming along nicely

Sharing a cool drink of water

Sheer beauty

Very protective!  We found they had nested inside a hole in the fence pole.  So sweet.

Chicken Hoop House, Part One

Today we started work on the chicken hoop house for the meat birds who are starting to escape their garage quarters.. not to mention stinking the place up!  I wanted something movable, but chicken tractors weren't quite was I was looking for.  So I found a plan online for a chicken hoop house and gave it to my hubby and told him that was what I would like.  He took the plans, made some adjustments and away we went!

Materials list is as follows:

(2) 8' x 50" cattle panels

(4) 10' pressure treated 2 x 4s

(1) roll chicken wire (ours is 4' x 50', we can always use the extra!)

(2) 8' regular 2 x 4s

(1) package plumber's strapping

(1) 16 x 10 canvas tarp for over the top

(1) 8 x 10 silver tarp for the back

Misc. scraps of wood, or additional regular 2 x 4s

Staples, screws, nails, wire, zip ties, etc.

The hoop house will be covered with a tarp over the top and the back, leaving the front open.  For summer we will also leave a gap at the top of the back part for cross ventilation.  Each day the hoop will be moved to a new section of pasture in our vegetable field.  That keeps the grass and the chickens happy!

First DH and oldest DS notched out the pressure treated 2 x 4s, each one about a foot in from the edge.  They should NOT be flush when you are done.  Also cut the front and back of the side pieces at a 45 degree angle, these will be your skids, and you will attach rope or chain to them for moving the hoop house.  Many plans said to leave a bigger gap on the front and back piece, this is to make moving it easier and also so if you run over a chick when you're moving the house it can roll out the back.  We're more concerned with predators, so ours is lower down.  We'll just move it more slowly.

Our plans said to add brace pieces over the top of each corner, but if we followed the plans, the bracing would have been awful since the pieces are not flush.

 So instead DH notched out the front and back pieces to fit the brace piece.  Beautifully done!

 Bottom frame complete.

Now it's time to add one of the panels.  We first secured the panel with tie downs to keep their shape to make attaching easier.  We attached the hoops to the outside of the skids using fencing staples. 

 Second panel in place.

We secured the two panels to each other with some wire.  Notice the placement of the wire, this will prevent the wire from ripping at the tarp.

The back framing goes up.  This is done by making an upside down V and attaching that to the panel with plumber's strapping.  The 2 x 4 is also attached to the back of the bottom frame. Notice that we put the chicken wire on first before we added the back brace sections.  This makes it easier to pull the chicken wire taut.

 Framing for the door.  We made ours about 2' wide.  Again attached to the panel with plumber's strapping and screwed to the bottom of the frame.  After the door was on we added additional support between the door frame and the edge of the panel.

 Kids working on the chicken wire for the front section.  Our kids are an awesome help to us.

DH notching out the wood sections for the door.   I love those hands.

Almost complete!  We ran out of time and we don't yet have hinges or a lock.  Awesome work guys!  The chicks are going to love their new quarters :)  We retired for the night for a nice Resurrection Sunday dinner - roast lamb and potatoes, yum!

Green chickens and other weirdness

So I have decided that for the amount of chicken feed we go through (even with free ranging) that getting 6 to 8 eggs a day just isn't cutting it from 13 hens. So I'm on a mission. Every so often I went out there this morning to see who was in the nesting box. Now my kiddos can tell every chicken apart.. I can't.. so I've been putting a drop of green food coloring on each chicken who was sitting on a nest. And THAT is why I currently have six green tinged chickens.

Six green chickens.. six eggs in the carton.. that adds up... BUT!

Notice something funny? My kids thought this was hilarious! I have no idea why one chicken laid such a teeny tiny egg.

That's a regular size egg, and the tiny egg. Weird.

Anyway, I have been reminding the chickens about the "You don't lay, you don't stay" policy I first told them about when they joined us last year on the farm. They just look at me with that blank chicken stare though..

And now I better get off here so I can get outside and put the 8.5 lbs of Kennebec seed potatoes that I bought for the bargain price of 99c in the ground! The other potatoes are already sprouting beautifully. I also have to go supervise the tilling DH is about to do, we're getting ready to plant corn!

Around the farm

Today we managed to get the electric wiring done in Pasture 2 so we could move the pigs into that pasture. It took us all day, first moving the shed, then finishing the barbed wire fencing in one area and then putting in the electric. But it's done! I am so glad DH built the pig shed on skids so we could move it from area to area. The Farmall got put to work today!

All we haven't done yet is put a pig water nipple on the waterer on that side, so we left the small gate between the two pastures open and will add the water nipple tomorrow.


This is the double sided waterer we were lucky enough to inherit with the house and land. If you look closely, you can see my wonderful DH has added a pig water nipple on the front and connected it to the waterworks. SO wonderful not to have to carry buckets of water around! The pigs love it too. We installed the green gate on the left last weekend, that is our human gate between the two pastures, we don't have the livestock gate in yet, so the animals use this too. Butterbelle was a bit hesitant, but has since adapted to it quite nicely. DH is going to add another water nipple on the other side of this waterer so the pigs will have water available in both pastures.

Exploring the wonderful green grass. I am pretty excited that our rotational grazing plan is coming along nicely. We still need to divide the third area in two and then we'll have four pastures total, with a possible fifth in our vegetable area.

Our little Daredevil. He has caused a bit of havoc on the farm in the last week! He was climbing on the haybales and knocked one onto the chicks container after I moved them into the garage. They haybale broke the container so I had to figure something else out for them. What we have now is actually better, I'll share a photo of that later. He also rode into one of our newly planted fruit trees today, luckily no damage, but he was grounded from the ATV for the rest of the afternoon.

The tree in question, as you can see it's just fine. Look at those buds! Other things are doing great on the farm as well....

The garlic.

The spinach, broccoli and cauliflower bed. They are doing wonderfully well. We had some really strong winds here the last few days, and a lot of the greenery you see is those "helicopter" seeds blown down from one of our trees.

The gooseberry bush we got from Henry Fields. I cut it down to half its height after we planted it. We've never had gooseberries before.. so we really hope they're good!

Grapes coming along nicely.

DH gave lessons to our oldest DD and oldest DS on how to drive the tractor. They both did great!




The chickens haven't quite been pulling their weight. We have 13 laying hens and only get about 8 eggs a day. They've definitely slowed in production, so we're looking at adding oyster shell to their feed again.

Today was a very busy, but productive and satisfying day!

Tomato seeds have arrived

Today we finally received our tomato seed order from Seven Acre Seeds. I placed the order towards the end of March and they shipped in a timely manner, and I waited.. and waited... Finally after about 10 days from the shipment date I wrote and asked if I should be concerned that my order hadn't arrived yet. They very quickly shipped out a new order, which arrived today! I should add that we currently have temporary mail carriers and the mail delivery has been.. interesting. I am left wondering who got the original order of tomato seeds.

Unfortunately I had decided that it was getting too late, so last week I started tomato seedlings with seeds I already had on hand, so these will probably have to wait 'til next year. I specifically ordered crack free/resistant tomato varieties since so many of our tomatoes cracked last year. Some of the varieties I already had on hand we never planted last year, and they're said to be crack resistant, so I think we'll be okay. We planted out 105 tomato seedlings. According to MO's extension site that should be enough for our family for eating fresh and processing.


Tomatoes should be planted out about May 10th in our area so I'm off to a bit of a late start this year.

Kudos to Seven Acre Seeds for their excellent customer service, as well as for the free seed packet (Golden Egg) which was included in the order :)

Today is a really gloomy day, the ducklings are outside and loving it though! Tomorrow we hope to get Pasture 2 electric fenced so we can get the pigs in there and out of Pasture 1. We will have to move their shed, but that's relatively easy. Right now they have taken over Butterbelle's shed and we need to have that available to her when she calves at the end of May. We still need to get the milk stanchion made and get her used to it before she calves.. so much to do!!!

I also got another package today.. watch our Etsy store for new arrivals happening soon!

Final Summer Squash Harvest?

With the temperatures dropping we headed out to the garden to pick all the ripe tomatoes and summer squash we could find. As you can see, we still had a LOT of squash out there, the yellow crooked neck squashes are really only good for Fall decorations now. The patty pan squashes will be cut in half and baked in the oven, pulp removed and frozen. The zucchini will be turned into various delightful zucchini concoctions :)

And the beans! This is our first decent bean harvest, and we got two baskets full and still a lot of smaller beans out there waiting to grow a wee bit more before we head out to pick them. Today we canned 5 more jars of zucchini relish (the kids love it!) and we canned 8 1/2 quarts of green beans. For this I used the pressure canner for the very first time (yay me!) To say I was nervous would be an understatement! Everything went very well though and the weight jiggled like it should and we had no mishaps. Now I have a bit more confidence and will try out some of those yummy recipes like stew and soups.

As you can see we also got a lot of tomatoes, the children have already finished off a lot of them on sandwiches, but I want to dehydrate some more for "sun dried tomatoes." I need to get a decent food mill so I can more easily make things like pasta sauce and other tomato recipes.

BUTTERBELLE & PIGS

In other news, Butterbelle's next heat cycle has come and gone, and she didn't bellow or run the fence at all, so it looks like we have a pregnant cow! Wooohoooo!!!! :) Her calf will be due towards the end of May.

Also, in mid October we will be going to pay for and collect our Mulefoot boar piglet. The Ossabaw and Mulefoot cross should make a nice meat pig. Our pigs are getting very friendly and enjoy being scratched and patted when we take them their food.

Making hay, yard work and more!

Dan has been keeping the "horseshoe" part of our circular driveway growing so we could try our hand at making hay. It was nice quality grass, with very few weeds. Since we don't have a scythe yet, he cut it with the JD garden tractor and then we let it dry for a bit and then raked it into windrows. We don't have hay rakes, so used regular leaf rakes. The three eldest helped.






Had to add a picture of myself too under grave duress. I hate pictures of myself.

Lots of hard work! Now to leave it to dry so we can bale it.

Today we also played a lot of catch up with mowing and general garden work. The girls and I weeded, mulched and mowed the soft fruit area so now it looks much nicer.


General view of the area


Blackberries


Raspberries


Grapes


Strawberries

Everything growing here looks really good. We haven't had any fruit from any of these plants yet, with the exception of the strawberries. The raspberries are supposed to produce in the fall, but I don't think that will be happening. The grapes had some small little grape clusters but the chickens pecked them all off, so now they are fenced. They're all really healthy though, so hopefully next year we'll have a really good crop.

Oh, while I'm at it, our beans are growing like crazy! Looking forward to picking beans. We planted Blue Lake Bush and Contender.



While we were busy with the soft fruit area, the boys were using the JD garden tractor to move logs, branches and other yard waste to our burn pile area. I don't know what we'd do without that tractor!