Pictures from Around the Farm

Painted Mountain corn.

These oats are gone. We spoiled the chickens and let them eat the entire mini-pasture.  

Sweet corn is going in next.  We don't save corn seed, so we can plant two varieties at once.

Chicory flowers by the trail.

Gobbles laying an egg in the secret nest.

Competition

When I noticed the finches eating the white mustard seeds, I installed paint strainers as prophylactics.

I felt pretty clever about it until I saw the seed condoms swaying back and forth and realized the finches were able to get inside the nets. Twist ties fixed the problem.  Finches might be our cutest competitor.

Rodents are another story.  

We currently have gophers tearing up the victory garden. Plant casualties have been minimal so far.  I set six gopher traps yesterday morning. It took some research and nerve to start setting traps. (They are buried underground and marked with flags.)

The gopher traps are much gnarlier and more difficult to set than regular rodent snap traps.

Here is what the trap looks like after it's snapped:

Growing fruits and vegetables is not a bloodless endeavor. 

The ants compete with the bees for honey, so we have to put our hive stands   in cans of oil. The bees get cross when ants invade the hive, so we do our best to keep the ants out.

Some might think of these critters as pests, but I will call them competitors. As my neighbor says, these guys are trying to earn a living just like the rest of us.

Late Spring Update / Tomato Frenzy

Juicy meat birds (5 weeks old), and the egg layers in the background.

Tiny tomatoes in the new cinderblock bed.

Tomatoes in the front of the house are much further along.

We went a little tomato-crazy over the weekend.

The Pleasant Hill Garden and Study Club had their annual plant sale.  We bought thirty plants, including Aunt Ruby's German Green, Chocolate Stripe, Black Sea Man, and Pontano Romanesco.  We planted fifteen at a friend's house, and put fifteen in our yard.

The next morning I hit up Kelley and Arti's Plants at the Walnut Creek Farmer's market. It was their final weekend at the market. I got three Tula, one Stupice and two Sudduth Strain Brandywine.

Including volunteers, we have over 70 tomato plants. Last year, we froze a tomatoes. This year we will learn how to can tomatoes.

One of our household goals this year is to make less jam and preserve more vegetables.

Purple potatoes being harvested.  We got about 25 lbs.  Our best crop ever thanks to the dry winter.

More About Lady Gobbles

Gobbles started laying eggs again shortly after I called her lazy.

We are glad she is contributing eggs to the farm economy.

Gobbles is at our side for every chore, especially chores involving power tools.

She is fearless of the lawn mower, and obsessed by its wake of vegetative debris and disturbed insects.

New Brooder - The Juicy 5

We have 5 fast white broilers right now.  This batch is named "Juicy".

We love our meat chickens and we pet them every day.
They are some of the happiest chickens in town.

We can raise them for approximately $3.50/lb. on organic feed, which is much cheaper than most farmers can sell their organically raised birds.

They are ready to harvest in 8 short weeks.  They are ready to harvest before they are "mature" which means they are legal chickens for us.

Most importantly, they are in the freezer BEFORE ANYONE STARTS CROWING.
We want to be good neighbors!

This is a no ad blog, but I will sometimes share a useful farming tool.  This is the Brinsea Eco Glow 20 chick brooder.  It's a heating unit for the chicks.  It doesn't heat the air like a heat lamp - it heats the chicks with radiant heat.

Some call it an "electric hen".  The chicks hang out under it to warm up - just like they would warm themselves under a hen.  The heating unit can be adjusted to three different levels as the chicks grow.  It's set on the mid level in this picture.  It uses less electricity, and is less of a fire hazard than a heat lamp.

Living with Bees Again

We are so stoked to be living with bees again!  

I met another local beekeeper who had a swarm available.  He brought the swarm over last Tuesday and poured the bees into the hive for me.

Last Friday, he dropped off another bucket o' bees.  I was excited to make the transfer myself.

The most challenging part was smacking the bucket on the hive to shake the bees loose.

Thankfully, the bees were pretty mellow about the bucket-smacking thing.  I brushed the remaining bees into the hive with a turkey feather.

We are grateful to have "wild" bees:  healthy bees who have chosen their queen and flown off to make a new home.

We've named the colonies "Iggy" and "Gibby" after the wildest musicians we know.

David is the nice guy who gave us the bees.  He and his partner run a very cool community garden in Martinez.  It's called the Martinez Permaculture Center.  I've been admiring MPC's website, and gaining much inspiration from their garden.

Their site had a useful link to herb spiral instructions, which we tried last year.  We've since dismantled the spiral, but it was a fun experiment.

Reclaim Agriculture

This is my favorite in a series of stickers from Little City Gardens.

Brooke Budner is the artist.  Her illustrations are beautiful and inspiring.  

The series includes other sweet slogans such as "Let's Figure This Out Together" and "Create Positive Spaces".