Look how big and pretty the Joy-pye weed is! It was just transplanted from a friends house last fall, and already the ones that were planted in the corner of the zip line field are taller than me. One of the best things about this pretty native plant is that the goats don't like it that much. They take a nibble here and there, but so far they haven't chowed down on it.
Did you know that Joe-pye (Eutrochium fistulosum) is a member of the sunflower family?
It has a reputation as a feast for pollinators. I've seen wild ones with blossoms covered in dozens of butterflies. Hopefully in time, the butterflies will find these plants too.
The plants near the goat fence, which are marked by some red tomato cages to keep Brandon and his mower away, are doing okay, but they didn't grow as tall as those planted in the most soil by the zip line.
The native sunflowers in the weed patch wildflower garden in the backyard are starting to bloom. It won't be long before the New England Aster is blooming too. Despite the dry gravel filled soil in this location, the Joe-pye that was planted here is doing all right. I empty the hot hose water onto them before I fill the animal water buckets. I'm hoping that if I water them this year, they will get deep enough roots to live in this poor soil without my attention in the future. Like most natives, I think they are hardy plants.
I have fond memories of visiting with Brandon's mother while we created the perfect chicken haven from bits and pieces we scavenged from the old farm house and out buildings. My brother gave us the small trailer that the mobile chicken coop is built on, and although it has moved from place to place, it mostly lives in the shade by the tree line. The mobile coop sometimes gets criticized for it's scrappy appearance, but it safely housed my first flock, guinea keets, several batches of meat birds, and even a turkey!
It's the perfect place to put a broody hen on her nest of eggs.
This is the little hen that spent so much time with Rufus the donkey. She was determined to sit on a clutch of eggs, so I waited until after dark, moved her and seven eggs to the dog crate, and placed it in the mobile coop on the thick bed of old hay and dried droppings from the last time the flock used the coop.
She was patient for three weeks, and now she has a chick! Just one, but she seems content to scratch in the bedding and cluck at her tiny chick. I haven't been able to get very close to the chick yet, but when I told Brandon I thought it seemed like a rooster, he asked "Why, does it act cocky?" Ha! Here's a link to a short youtube of this hen and her little one searching for tasty bits in the hay - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPFQIujQIhQ
We've been enjoying the aroma of the milkweed blossoms near the back door.
The floral aroma is very strong right now, and the insects are loving the nectar.
We forgive the elderberry shrub for crowding the door because it has such gigantic flower clusters!
The flowers are very tiny, and have a delicate aroma compared to the powerful milkweed scent.
The petals are beginning to drop - it won't be long until there are elderberries!
I wish I could schedule the iris blossoms to coincide with the fireflies and the firefly party. Usually, by the time anyone comes for a visit, the iris have already finished, so we are the only ones to enjoy them. Brandon and I have checked a few big things off of our spring-time, pre-party to-do list, including a new chicken coop door and replacing the sand in the pool filter.
The coop door is now easily latched, so while Brandon and I are on our up-coming trip, the chicken sitters (hi, Mom! hi, Kathy!) won't have to struggle to close it.
The pool filter required one hundred and fifty pounds of new sand! Before the new sand could go in, Brandon had to use the shop vacuum to suck all the old stinky sand out.
It took a while to remove the old sand, as he had to keep emptying the shop vac when it would fill, but the filter sand was changed, the pool cover was removed, the pump is working, and we dumped a fortune's worth of pool start-up chemicals in the water, per the lady at the pool store's advice. In three days, the pool will be officially opened! Now, if only the sun would shine...
Brandon is keeping the mowing under control and I've been working to weed the herb spiral and tidy the greenhouse. It's nice to have a party deadline to encourage us to tidy up. We've been moving all the old lumber, bricks, fencing, and other building supplies we've piled on the concrete slab near the greenhouse. It's been a handy place to store things for many years, but by finding new homes for all that junk, we now have a conveniently paved surface near the smoker that's less of an eyesore.
We bought some square bales of hay so while we are gone it will be easier for someone to feed a flake of hay to the goats and donkeys without using the pitch fork. You can see a few of the rose bushes that we transplanted to the front of the workshop barn in the photo above. These get full sun, and they've lost more leaves than the bushes planted in the shade.
I'll only be away from home for a couple of days, so it shouldn't be too hard for someone else to hold down the fort. If you ask Brandon, the only critical thing that needs to be done is to feed the dog - he thinks the rest can fend for themselves. I'll be glad to have someone there to open and close the chicken coops, because my roosters fight if they stay closed up together too long, but I can't leave the doors open at night because of predators. I saw a skunk run under the wood pile one night last week.
It's also good to have someone there in case one of the little goats gets their head stuck in the fence. It hasn't happened lately, but I think a trapped goat could perish in the sun if no one was there to notice.
And someone needs to gather the eggs. We have so many layers right now that the eggs start to pile up in the nest if they aren't collected every day. The sage is blooming in the herb spiral. Sage and oregano survived the winter and look good already. I'm hoping the basil and holy basil will come back from seed. The milkweed is doing very well, and threatens to dominate the spiral.
I plan to fill everyone's water bowls and hay baskets before I leave, so the animal chores shouldn't be hard to do. The garden may need to be watered. Now that the trip is on the horizon, and we've made such good progress on our list, I'm looking forward to traveling with Brandon and leaving all those hungry animals and thirsty plants for someone else to worry about!
It feels like it's been weeks since I was here, writing to you. I have been traveling for work, spending night hours watching movies on tiny screens and swatting at mosquitoes while waiting for bats to fly into my nets. I got to meet the little brown bat (Myotis lucifugus) above, but also several southeastern bats (Myotis austroriparius), like the one below.
Southeastern bats don't live throughout all of the areas that I work, so getting to catch some and get more familiar with this species was a nerdy treat for me.
While scouting for a good net site, I walked up to this tiny rough green snake (Opheodrys aestivus) on the ground on top of deep layer of golden pine needles. At first glance it looked like a long, thin blade of grass. The snake was calm and never tried to bite me when I picked it up for a photo shoot.
I returned home from a week in Tennessee to a weekend of impressive thunderstorms. Someone was complaining that on our weekend off, it was going to be cool and raining, but I was not disappointed to stay close to home with the breeze and beautiful clouds. I have a list of garden and farm chores that I was glad to ignore.
The cucumbers and green beans are still making food, but the tomato plants have barely given me enough for salads. There are green tomatoes on the vines, but they are not getting ripe and the plants look a bit wimpy. The brussel sprout plants are riddled with holes and I haven't kept up my end of the battle against the caterpillars. The greenhouse is an impenetrable jungle of tall weeds. But the sunflower plants in the herb spiral are blooming!
One of the plants is so tall it reaches the second story of the house and has fourteen blooms!
Bees visit the sunflowers and I counted three monarch butterfly caterpillars on the milkweed plants that grow there. They are munching holes in the leaves but I'm glad to see them.
Our fields are full of the frilly white blooms of queen Ann's lace. It's time to cut the hay again but we are wary of the weather. Of the three big big racks of hay that Brandon put up earlier this summer, at least one and half have gone moldy because the hay wasn't dry enough when it was stacked. The moldy hay will make good mulch, but it still feels like wasted effort since the animals can't eat it. This time we need several days of dry weather so we don't rush the drying time.
A predator got my mamma chicken and her two remaining chicks. She was so canny and hid her nest so well that I never found it. She was the wildest chicken I've ever had, and taught her chicks to fear me and they wouldn't come close even for food. I started to hope that she might actually raise them in the wild, but then they all disappeared. Once again I learn the importance of being locked safely in the coop at night.
Remember how I was saying how ugly our backyard was? Back in February? Well, green grass and some iris blossoms look much better than mud and doggy chew toys!
The little trees that I planted several years ago are starting to look like trees! Even the tiny red bud seedling that kept being lost in the weeds in years past, is as tall as me now. I'm looking forward to the shade these trees will provide someday soon.
The hardest part about moving from our old house was leaving my plants behind. But, now that the bulbs and peonies that I transplanted are beginning to thrive in their new home, I feel like my old friends are right here with me.
The herb spiral is still a work in progress. Cleaning the the green algae from the siding helped me see the backyard with rosier glasses.
We've been moving stones around as we figure out where we want borders and walkways.
Just taking these pictures inspired me to pull some weeds from the perennials that grow around the old cistern. We haven't been taken over by weeds yet, so I'm enjoying all the growing green leaves. We've been hatching plans for a railing around the pool, and we've even hinted to ourselves that we might put painting some of our outbuildings on the list. Oh, boy!
We didn't expect to see a tree frog clinging to the towel cabinet in the bathroom last night, so it's not surprising that my exclamation of amazement when I spotted it was a little alarming to Brandon. Especially since I had just bragged about a video I made of a long black snake that Puck and I had an encounter with earlier in the day. Brandon seemed relieved when he found out it was a tiny frog with suction cup fingers that I was taking pictures of, and not Carlos, our evicted house snake. Frog relocation is less exciting than snake relocation, but also less likely to prevent us from being able to sleep!
I don't think this black snake is Carlos, since it wasn't as long and fat as I remember Carlos to be. But, I think this video shows how docile our black snakes are. As you can see, the snake had plenty of opportunity to be frightened by Puck and myself, but it was never aggressive, even when I petted it. Nice snake. I hope he eats lots of mice.
I hope the snakes do not eat any of the five chicks that the mamma chicken has hatched. This morning I fed them some hamburger buns, removed six unhatched eggs that she was no longer sitting on, and considered releasing them to the yard. In the end I opted to leave them in the brooder with their mother for a few more days. They just look so tiny it's hard for me to imagine that they can be safe, even with a very protective mother. I'm sporting a blood blister on my right hand from daring to pick one of them up. She did not approve.
You can see in this short video clip that the mamma hen does not want me to touch her babies.
This hen reminds me of the funny looking lady chicken from the Foghorn Leghorn Loony Tunes. Remember the hen, Miss Prissy, with the funny bonnet, glasses, and her knitting needles that Foghorn was wooing? Poncho the rooster likes to perch on top of the brooder and make clucking noises at the hen and babies. I keep waiting for him to say "That's a joke, ah say, that's a joke, son." Ha!
I spent some time trimming back the long grass around the two raised garden beds inside my orange garden fence. The potato plants are over a foot high now. Some of the garlic cloves are growing, and the melon seeds that I was sure were so old they were dead, have grown to five inch tall plants and need to be thinned.
This is my second experience growing potatoes, and once again, they are being attacked by flea beetles! The leaves aren't supposed to be transparent, I'm sure. I'm going to try to dose them with some diotomaceous earth, but the last time I couldn't keep up with the treatments because it rained nearly every time I sprinkled it on. I piled up some old straw around the stems.
I tell myself that the extra long grass inside my garden fence is a meadow. It has several different species of grasses and clovers. I've decided to let the seed heads mature so I can harvest them and seed some areas of bare dirt if I need. This will be my first meadow seed harvest.
The onions are doing well, and I have four small kale plants to look forward to. The most interesting thing, I think, are the buckwheat plants. I expected more of a grass like plant, but these remind me of sweet potato leaves, and even though the largest plant is only about twelve inches tall, they are already blooming! Buckwheat is supposed to be good for honeybees. I don't think I will get enough seed to be worth trying to eat, but maybe I can collect the seeds and grow more plants?
Brandon used the rough cut trail mower to cut the tall grass in the west field. We still debate the best way to manage our fields. I tend to want to let everything grow wild as I love the diversity of an older field and want to promote wildlife. Brandon wants to cut it before it gets so woolly it bogs down our small scale equipment, and he wants the grass to be nice and thick like you get when it's mowed more frequently which cuts back the small trees and brambles that sprout. I think our compromises are making some lovely pasture and hay fields. I can tell that we have more lush vegetation than we did three summers ago when we started mowing it and stopped letting people harvest the hay. It drives some people a little nutty to see all our hay "wasted" instead of baled, but since we don't have animals yet, I think it's worth the loss of the small income selling the hay would produce to mulch our pastures with the trimmings.
With our future donkey in mind, we're exploring some low scale hay making techniques that don't require a big investment in equipment. To make hay, you have to cut the grass, let it dry, rake it up a little so it gets good and dry on the bottom of the pile, and then store it somewhere. I spent less than five minutes raking hay from the field and was able to accumulate a giant pile which I used to cover the chicken coop floor.
It smelled so nice, like fresh cut grass, and makes the chicken coop seem like a fluffy bed. Of course, as soon as I put it in the coop the chickens had to come scratch it around and look for tasty bits. The chickens like the hay, so I think the donkey would appreciate it during the winter too, if we can come up with some way to store it out of the weather. Brandon has a home made baler in mind, so expect some pictures of that project soon.
I wish I'd had the presence of mind to take our guests to see the rose and honeysuckle hedge during the firefly party. I'm sure the kids got to see it, but I didn't remember to show it to the adults. The honeysuckle smell permeates the air, and when you look closely you can see the pink rose bushes sprinkled throughout.
The honeybees are feasting on the honeysuckle. I'm afraid the roses might not survive the honeysuckle strangulation, but it smells so nice I can't bring myself to trim it back yet.
Even more exciting than a blue chicken egg, newly hatched baby chicks, or a tree frog in the bathroom - cherries on the little cherry tree! Only three, but still - they are cherries! My heart actually sped up when I saw these little fruits. I've planted five cherry trees over the years, and only one is thriving. I'm determined to eat a home grown cherry some day, and I may tie all my hopes to this little tree.
A journal of creating a home in an old blue school bus, as well as a do-it-yourself farm house renovation, living with backyard chickens, learning to farm, gardening, preserving food, and other projects.
