Hollywood Chickens

Perusing Craigslist as I often do, I came across a posting for year-old Golden Buff layers for sale.  Our housemate Kristen asked a long time ago if she could keep chickens but we laughed it off.  I would joke with my wife about buying chickens but it was never seriously considered.  I admit to being an impulsive person and perhaps not always acting rationally but buying a few chickens really isn't so rash is it?  With time on my hands I spent the morning re-purposing a turkey transport cage and building a nesting box to fit inside.  I called Kristen (who was surprised but enthusiastic) and by 1pm we drove south to a free-range chicken operation just west of Wellington and picked up three hens for $5 apiece.

The drive home and conversation for the remainder of the afternoon was settling on good names.  I have no idea how to tell the three apart but we've settled on Noble, Cascade, and Willamette.  If more chickens are added later, there are plenty more varieties of brewing hops to choose from. :-)

We are expecting 5-6 eggs per week from each hen which doesn't seem to be over-doing it for a single household.  However, I have a feeling the neighbors will be on the receiving end of free eggs now and again.

I put up a large kennel in the backyard last autumn but our dog barks her fool head off whenever she's left alone inside it for more than 5 minutes so it might as well be put to use by the chickens.  It is 7' high but open on top so I hope to clip the chickens' wings to prevent their escape.  Thank goodness for the internet and YouTube.  I feel like an expert already.

Compost Giveaway Day

Oberlin's first compost giveaway of the year was held Saturday morning and I'm exhausted.  In four hours I shoveled about 12 yards of composted leaves and yard waste.  Loading is easily accomplished with the City's front-end loader but once back at the farm there is no easy way to unload the trailer.  It rained hard the day before and I hadn't considered how soft the field would be the next day.  Using Jim's little truck I pulled the first trailer full of compost out into the field but got stuck trying to back out.  I pulled the truck and trailer out with the Farmall and decided subsequent loads would only be taken out with the tractor and uncoupling the trailer from the truck in the driveway.  That worked for the next two loads except that I broke the hitch clean off the trailer trying to back it into the garden. Ooops.  Brent offered the use of a much larger trailer for the final load which took three times longer to unload with broadforks.  Jim continues to search for an affordable dump trailer which couldn't come soon enough.  Compost will be given away every two weeks throughout the summer so we'll have all the compost we can use but it'll take at least two weeks for my arms to recover from all that shoveling.

Ain't as easy as it looks,,,

Today I planted corn.  Dad and I drove over to French's Hybrids and I bought 10 lbs of Incredible sweet corn.

Incredible SE (85 days) A truly gourmet sweet corn for home gardens, fresh market, roadside stands and shipping. Homozygous sugar enhancer gene renders superb eating. Ears are 9-1/2 inches long with 18 rows of yellow kernels with good husk protection and flag leaves

They also let me borrow planting plates to use on our 4-row planter.  Great!  Next step was to learn how to use the planter.  We got back to the farm, took the tarp off the planter, and went to school.  One of the ground-drive chains was broken and Jim had purchased a replacement so after some struggle we put on the new chain.  Next we thoroughly checked each seed hopper.  It was at this point I realized that two of the four hoppers were missing the metal wheel which rotates the planting plate.  No wheel, no functioning planter.  Our four row planter was now a two row planter.  Not to be deterred, the planter was hitched up, two hoppers filled with seed, and I made one pass down the field.  I climbed down the from tractor at the back tree line and walked up the field to checkout my handiwork.  The seeds were nicely laid out spaced six inches apart in two strait rows and glinting in the afternoon sun from atop the soil.  I had failed to adjust the seeder's planting depth.  After some adjustments I made two more passes and continually looked over my shoulder to make sure the seed was underground where it belonged.
That wasn't the worst part.  I then spent the better part of two hours hoeing the two 500' botched rows.
I have a healthy respect for the countless generations of farmers who have come before me.  And while there is value in possessing the knowledge and skills of manual labor farming, mechanization was such a wonderful invention it seems almost disrespectful to turn our backs on it.  If I learned one lesson today it was to work smarter, not harder.

Vertical Gardening

Hours were spent last year cutting young ash trees to use for trellis supports.  Many more hours were spent patiently weaving twine back and forth between the supports into netting for pole beans.  Not this year.
This year I bought ready-made reusable nylon netting 5'x30' and tied it onto 8' rebar stakes.  Total investment was about $60 and 2 hours.  This is the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

The rebar was re-purposed from the hops field where Jim, Wu and I (mostly Jim and Wu) have spent the past week installing over fifty 24' poles to support the aerial cables.  Our task is now to install the cables and run rope down to each hop plant so that the bines will grow skyward.  The whole enterprise looks awfully strange from the road and I'm sure the neighbors and passing traffic are wondering what the hell we're doing.

Quite a few of the potatoes have now sprouted and the peas are generally 4"-6" tall.  I re-potted tomatoes and cabbages yesterday afternoon in my kitchen garden.  Speaking of the kitchen garden,  I did a bad thing about two weeks ago.  After cleverly bending conduit and stretching plastic over the entire raised bed to create a hoop house, I failed to anticipate how hot it could get on the inside with direct sunlight.  Within 24 hours I succeeded in killing all the lettuce that had so far sprouted, three-quarters of the peas, all of the onions I started back in March, and about half of the cabbage.  Boy did I feel stupid.  Fortunately it is early in the season and I just replanted everything.  Lesson learned.

Having lost all my onions I ordered 6 bunches (~360 seedlings) of Super Star onions from Berlin Seed.  About 30 of them are planted in my kitchen garden (4/23) and the rest are planted at the farm (4/18).  The onions at the farm were planted every other row and I plan to place rows of tomatoes interspersed with the onions.  Jim went to the Joint Vocational School (JVS) on Thursday and picked out the tomato and pepper plants he ordered back in January.  I hope to make a trip down to the Mt. Hope produce auction soon to buy cucumber, broccoli, and maybe a few other vegetables.  I wonder if they sell netting?

Beating the Rain

Every forecast I saw this morning called for rain by early afternoon.  Not only that, but after a week of temperatures in the 70's and 80's, a forecasted high of 50' by week's end is not exactly welcome news.  So this morning I coupled the disc to the Farmall and fitted-up a little over an acre in the east field.  Then I dropped off the disc and hitched the grain drill.  As this was the first time out this season, I greased all the fittings and checked it over thoroughly before filling it with Lacey barley (malting barley) and adjusting the seeding rate.  Two passes with the disc and one with the drill took about three hours.

By 5pm it still had not started raining so I decided to fit up another plot in the east field about 30' by 200'.  It was getting pretty dark by 7:30pm when the field was ready to plant but the rain hadn't started yet so I exchanged the Farmall for the two-wheeled tractor with the potato plow and prepped four rows 50' each.  I planted 200' of Kennebeck potatoes and finished hoeing the rows by 8:30pm.

Maybe it'll rain tomorrow.

Surprise, it's summer!

April Fool's Day brought a surprise end to spring with a record-breaking high of 83'.  April 2nd was more of the same.  The past week has been fantastic for working outdoors and I've taken advantage of it as much as possible.  Construction of the raised slab wood beds continued on Thursday evening.  And by the end of Friday the north beds were finished, about 4 weeks after I began.  Hopefully the southern beds won't take as long.

On Wednesday March 30th I planted 24 Rose Finn Apple fingerling potatoes in one of the raised beds.  This is approximately how much I planted last year which I then kept for seed.  Yesterday (4/3) Will and I worked up three 100' rows at the farm and planted it all in Rose Finn Apple potatoes (saved seed).  I used the Farmall to plow and then disc the area.  Will ran the rototiller up and down each row once.  Then I followed behind with the David Bradley 2-wheel tractor with the potato plow.  The wind started to blow just as we finished planting and a band of storms blew through the area for the rest of the afternoon.

The peas I planted two weeks ago just broke the surface yesterday, greens too.  Yesterday I bought another 3-shelf living room greenhouse from Drug Mart and last night I started 200 tomato plants.  So far I've begun:

50     Costoluto Firoentino

50     Roma

50     Rutgers

25     Black Plum

25     Small Red Cherry

With a heat mat on the 2nd shelf the soil is around 85'.  There is no more space in the living room for additional greenhouses so I'll probably rotate the plants from greenhouse #1 out of the living room and into a cold frame.  The warm temps are expected to continue throughout the week so hopefully I'll have plenty of opportunity.

Spring? Not yet.

It snowed last night - the ultimate insult to a gardener convinced that spring has sprung.  Last week it was in the 60's with sun one day and rain the next so I was able to work-in a little outdoor time.  I planted two 10' rows of snow peas in my home raised bed on Friday and ~200' of snow peas in double rows at Jim's on Saturday, two pounds total.  A second 10' raised bed was planted on Sunday with a variety of lettuce, spinach, and swiss chard.  And after a light rain the day before, on Wednesday I put in 100' of Red Norland potatoes at Jim's.  The rhubarb Jim and I planted last year along the northern edge of the field is coming up nicely.  Its still too soon to tell how many of the 200 or so plants survived the winter.

Most of last Saturday was spent pampering our IH Farmall 400 tractor.  Every reservoir of oil was changed including the gear case which my father swears hasn't been done in over 30 years.  The spark plugs were also changed after 30+ years of service.  The 12v change from 6v last year made starting the tractor much easier but with the recent spark plug change, I've never known that tractor to start so easily.  I drove the tractor from dad's place over to Jim's Friday evening.

Will told me yesterday he's heading down to Berlin over the weekend so I'm putting together another order from Berlin Seed Co.

Due to the off-and-on rain this week and now the snow, I have doubts about being able to plant the Lacey malting barley in Early April, the field is a soaked sponge right now.  At least the winter wheat is a happy carpet of green.

Getting Out

The weather was beautiful last week and I tried to spend as much time outdoors as possible.  My brother, son and I drove down to Amish Country on Monday on a quest for a heavy hoe.  Not the cheap flimsy kind with a short handle and the blade that bends on any soil firmer than peat.  I mean the kind with a fat long handle and a wide forged 3lb blade made for serious ground chopping.  Unfortunately, no hardware store carried on in stock.  I bought a nice stainless steel garden fork so the trip wasn't a complete waste.  A quick search on the internet located EasyDigging.com where I ordered two heavy hoes recommended by Gene Logsdon.  They arrived on Wednesday with some assembly required but I couldn't be happier with the quality and easy of use.

While on the hoe quest Monday we stumbled upon Berlin Seeds on County Road 77 east of Berlin, OH.  I stopped in and picked up a catalog and after flipping through it all week I was ready to go back so on Friday Will, Owen and I drove down and purchased potatoes, peas, and a few other things.  Let spring gardening begin!

I dropped Will off at his house and then went home and left Owen asleep in the truck for over an hour while I trundled manure and compost from the pile to the garden.  I managed to work up 1/4 of the garden in preparation for planting before Owen woke up and I had to get ready for meetings Friday night.  All-in-all, last week was a good opener to spring.

Starting Herbs

I've never started herbs from seed.  Local nurseries have made a fortune off of me in the past with my pension for impulse herb buying.  Last year the herbs finally got their own 5'x5' raised bed instead of being squeezed into some unused corner of the garden.  We sold quite a few herbs at the farmer's market last year but I still ended up keeping two flats of sage and thyme.  I set the trays in the herb garden for easy watering and by the end of last season the roots had grown through the tray and are now firmly anchoring them to the ground.  Ooops! 

So yesterday I started some herbs:

26 Parsley
26 Oregano
14 Cilantro
14 Basil, Sweet Genovese
12 Basil, Opal Purple Varigated
12 Fennel

I placed the starting flats in a tray so they can be watered from the bottom.  The tray is on the top shelf of the greenhouse over the heating pad.  The nighttime soil temperature hovered around 80' so they should be off to a good start.

Season Begins

Last week's snowman is still partially standing in the front yard but the bright sun and temps in the 40's (maybe even 50 tomorrow!) tells me that spring is just around the corner.  Every year around this time I begin preparations for gardening season.  Earlier last week I set out a plastic bin full of frozen compost I shoveled from the bottom of the compost bin.  An old storm window laid over the top has gradually warmed the nutriet rich soil after a couple of days in the intense sunshine.  Yesterday, I filled five 128 cell planting trays with the heated compost and brought them inside.  My son Owen helped me assemble a 3-shelf indoor greenhouse and In the past two days I've started:

128 Calabrese Broccoli
128 Walla Walla Onion
128 White Bunching Onion
128 Yellow Globe Onion
32 Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage
32 Bok Choy Cabbage
32 Copenhagen Cabbage
32 Golden Acre Cabbage

Last year I utilized a common medical heating pad set to low temperature to gently and evenly heat the starting trays.  The problem was that it also increased evaporation and it was difficult to keep them consistently moist.  I think the greenhouse will solve that problem but time will tell.

I stopped by the Farm (Jim's house) to pickup all the seeds left over from last year and then spent a hour this afternoon sorting through them.  Even though they are 1-2 years old I expect the germination rate to be alright.  Actually, I have so many seeds left from last year that buying more this year doesn't seem necessary.  But where's the fun in that?  I love variety.  With all the gardening activity going on in Oberlin this year I won't have any problem giving away unused seeds.  I went a little over board last year so maybe this year I'll try to practice some restraint.