Scavenged boards, Onions and Magic Molly

Steve is such a wood scavenger! He harvested a number of old boards from a building that needed torn down and is using them to line our garden beds. The beds need some additional soil and these boards are helping to hold the soil in place and clearly define bed vs. path.

When Steve decides he wants things straight, he makes them very straight...such a skilled guy.

Lovely looking, eh? The perfect soil texture (and the fact that is was ready and others were not) prompted us to plant our onions here. This year we planted Stuttgarter, a good keeper for us, and Red Baron. We ordered sets from Fedco rather than starting seeds since our grow lights are filled to capacity with tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos and 2 shelves of milkweed!

Steve added in many loads of soil from our compost/soil pile into our raised beds. Our initial compost rapidly broke down so it was necessary to add some more material back into the beds...

to make a happy home for our potatoes! We are still eating potatoes from last summer. It's awesome. We have a box full of Red Maria and they've not yet started sprouting! Sadly, I placed our seed order too late this spring so we were too late for that variety. Instead, Fedco sent Strawberry Paw. We are interested to see how they compare. We again planted Blue Gold (we love the texture of this variety and it keeps a long while, but not as long as Red Maria) and tried a new one.

Here's the new variety for us: Magic Molly. She's a beauty! We are so excited to try these!

Happy Belated Earth Day and Arbor Day!

A Spring Trip to Southern Indiana

Spring is here in Ohio and you can hardly keep us indoors! We recently enjoyed a great trip to southern Indiana to visit a very dear, very cool friend of ours. Here's a few photos of our outing to one of The Nature Conservancy preserves she stewards.

Juvenal's Duskywing based on the amount of gray scaling on the upperwings. We did not see the underwings to confirm the two hindwing spots.

Hoary Puccoon! (Lithospermum canescens) What a sunshine little plant. Love it!

Beth and me working on plant ID.

We ate our picnic lunch in this special place - a glade.

This shrub, Fragrant Sumac (Rhus aromatica), was absolutely humming with pollinators!

 A creek ramble topped off this most fun of days...

Who isn't happy exploring a beautiful, rocky stream?

This spring azure loved the salts on my skin and I loved seeing this sign of spring.

 Some member of the Meloe genus?

Beth - always the artist and good Land Steward decided we needed a cairn to make the trail stream crossing more clear.

We enjoyed such a great spring outing and can't wait for our next visit! We hope you all are getting out too...

A Little Deck from Reclaimed Wood

We salvaged some wood a while back from an old building in the woods that needed removing. We had a number of ideas what to do with this wood and settled on a little deck on the south side of our house amongst our pollinator garden. The wood was sopping wet when we started the project, but the additional weight just added to our physical work - not a bad thing sometimes.

Steve trimmed off the rotten ends...

and we ended up with a fair number of usable boards. By the way, won't it be fabulous when we paint the garage?!

Before we put the deck together, Steve added a plastic barrier to our foundation and spread beautiful river rock.

 

We decided to go for a free-form shape defined by the boards. Jennifer screwed the boards down with screws we salvaged from this property when we bought it in 2010! (There were A LOT of screws spilled all around the chicken coop.)

Steve spread stone on all the trails in place of the straw we laid last fall. Now, we have some nice composted straw for the garden as well.

 

Ta da! We finished the little deck and we love it. It's a perfect place to have morning coffee in the sunshine and soon it will be surrounded by hundreds of blooms.

 

 

Happy builder!

The Skinny on the Chickens

We have mixed emotions about keeping chickens so here's a few thoughts:

Positives:

• They are interesting animals and fun to watch. We crack up a lot watching their antics.
• Now that we've had them awhile, they are relatively easy to care for.
• We have more eggs to eat than we ever desired...with just five hens!
• We are the grateful harvesters of all their soiled bedding for use in our garden.
• The chickens are great at eating bugs, though there are a lot of bugs we don't want them to eat so this fits in positives and negatives, I suppose.

Negatives:

• There is a very defined pecking order, which usually works well so all chickens know their place. This results in pecking, which if blood is drawn results in a lot more pecking. These are blood thirsty birds and so we've had to stay vigilant and make sure no one does serious damage to each other. When we coated Rocky the Rooster's comb in Vaseline to protect against frostbite, the hens went nuts pecking it bloody since the red comb with the shiny ointment apparently made them think blood. Ack! Blu Kote usually helps us mask the red when blood is drawn.
• The pecking order at some point early in the move to our place put Little Girl aka L.G. at the lowest of the low. You can see her outside the fence. She can in no way and at no time be with the other chickens anymore. After not too long here, we discovered that she wasn't allowed to eat, drink or roost with the other chickens. During the extreme cold this was a huge problem since all the chickens were in the coop constantly. Once the weather broke and the chickens could be outside more, we tried to reintegrate L.G. BAD IDEA. Rocky the Rooster went after her, knocked her to the ground and started pecking her head. Ugh.
• L.G. now seems to have crook neck or wry neck. This is a problem caused by genetics, head injury or malnutrition. We think she's suffered from the latter two. Google it. It's terrible. She is still kicking, but drinking water is getting to be more and more of a problem. 

Because of the problems with L.G. and the other chickens, we build her a separate enclosure. This works well, but she can be outside only when we are home since she cannot get into or out of this space alone.

She finally gets to roost up high like the other chickens and even has a southern exposure!

She has access to her own food and water and feels safe. Her behavior is completely different than when she had to deal with pecking from all the hens and the rooster.

The increase in food and safety allowed L.G. to finally start laying eggs...monster eggs!

It hardly seems fair to us that as soon as we got L.G. all fixed up she developed this crook neck. Rocky's attack no doubt triggered it. She is still kickin' though and happy to run around in the garden. We will see what happens. We have been told that some of these aggressiveness problems are less when one raises chickens all of the same breed and starting out when they are chicks.

Chickens need space though, that's for sure, and keeping chickens makes us even more aware of the necessity to support humane raising of these animals. We're not sure what we will do in the long run, but we can certainly say this has been a learning experience!