Stunted

 We have beautiful cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, basil, dill, kale, beans and sweet peas on the stand today...and then we have some of the more 'unique' produce in the house for us to eat. 

The smallest ripe cantaloupe I've ever seen:

 Cucumber - still tasted good!

Teen egg next to a normal egg. This is from one of our landlords' hens - they're almost 5 months old.

Giant aquaponics tomato.

We had some repeat visitors this weekend so we must be doing something right! On Saturday we went tubing down a very lazy and relaxing river where they had recycling containers floating right in the river for any drink bottles. So environmentally aware! We also made pickles and pesto, picked pounds of raspberries and prepared a giant feast. 

Homemade rosemary french bread

Delicious beef roast for dinner - Nathan bought grass-fed beef through his work. 

We finally have enough mint to make mojitos - raspberry mint mojitos are dangerously good.

We found some eye spray and hoof spray for the lambs so we started treating them last night. The eye spray is purple and the hoof spray is blue...it's a good thing they're behind the property where people driving by can't see them. I'll take some photos...

The Debut

Yesterday the farm front stall made its first appearance. 

We have had a grand total of...0 customers. I've seen at least 3 people stop and look and not buy anything. I'm thinking that it will be more popular when we have more than lettuce and herbs available (hopefully!). 

I pulled up the first carrots yesterday. The one in the middle must have hit a rock while growing. They were delicious!

Mmm more basil for pesto - this time it went on a pizza with zucchini, radish, onion, garlic and sundried tomatoes. It was one of our best yet!

The name "Sweet Million" isn't much of an exaggeration for these tomato plants. They are *covered* in vines of growing tomatoes. 

The lettuce (romaine and manoa) that I harvested for the stand yesterday. It's hard to keep it from wilting. I put it and the kale on damp towels on the stand and I stood the bunches of herbs up in some water. That seems to keep it pretty fresh. 

Nathan got some red wriggler worms to add to the aquaponics system. They help to break down the fish waste for the plants. He put them in the grow beds and they tunneled right down into the media. 

Our landlord is digging a trench to lay irrigation pipe from the rainwater pond by the greenhouse to the orchard. Nathan had a small work team of 3 to help him dig.

All of the dogs had had a pre-weekend bath. Back to farm life...

Before and After

The front yard is done! 

Before:

After:

We bought the little bedding plants, lavender and rosemary and our landlord got us tulip bulbs, the rhododendron and two hydrangeas. 

We finally slowed down our egg eating enough to collect a full dozen! 

(friends and family in Vancouver - can you please keep your old egg cartons for us?)

Abby and Ryan have been coming into the chicken yard with us in the morning to help check for eggs. They're really good with the chickens - they just walk around them and ignore them, and the chickens don't seem to care about the dogs. 

The naughtier of these two likes to jump up into the hutch-coop and squeeze through the tiny hole into the nest boxes to sniff around when we aren't looking....guess which one that is...

The chickens haven't escaped since we blocked off the hole they were jumping through, so no need for wing clipping. Now when we walk in there they all run to us looking for worms and usually they let us touch them and pick them up.

Mother Clucker!

Only 3 eggs this morning...we're blaming Mother Clucker but it may have been any of the ladies who slacked off today. 

In other news, finding Tilapia for the aquaponics was turning out to be the hardest part of the setup - Nathan was thinking he was going to have to order them online and have them shipped for a pretty high cost. We were looking through the local newspaper the other day at lunch and just happened to look at the classifieds...and we spotted this! The only ad in the section:

He should be ready for the fish soon, maybe this weekend.

I planted some more bush beans, edamame and butternut squash today. Everything seems to be growing well (the weeds, too!).

Mohawk Chick

 Just sitting down to do some blogging...

Look at Magpie's new head feathers! Very strange.

We got 4 eggs again this morning! Even later though...this time they only laid them around 11. 

The little brown chicks hang out together. They all like running around in the sun in their coop (they come inside after 'play time'). 

Today Nathan worked some more on the aquaponics set up - he siliconed a piece of aluminium mesh over the bottom of the big tank and started building the drain pipe.

I prepared the rest of our greenhouse beds and transplanted the cucumbers, melons and gold nugget tomatoes. Then we got the rest of the drip irrigation set up - it's set up for 40 minutes every morning at 7:00 am.

Morning scritches for Barney.

Eggs!

Look what we woke up to! Well, kind of. It seems that we are up earlier than our new hens lay their eggs. They laid these for us at 10 so we went back inside and had a late breakfast.

Perfectly poached eggs! They were delicious.

Two of the chickens went on a little adventure before going back into the coop to pop out their eggs. They somehow got out of the fenced area (maybe flew over the low fence near the garage) and were clucking around in the driveway. We brought them back into the fenced area and they happily stayed there all day until they (the same two) escaped again in the afternoon. The other two had gone back up into the coop on their own like good chickens...a wing clipping may be in order tomorrow for the offenders. We want to let them free range eventually but we don't want them free ranging over the fence into the neighbour's yard!

Speckles is definitely the ring leader.

We built a door for the playhouse coop today and let the chicks hang out in the sun in there all afternoon. They're fun to watch! 

Everything that we transplated into the greenhouse yesterday looks good today! We woke up to a frosty car and were worried that the tomatoes might have died, but they seem fine. Tomorrow we'll prepare the soil in the other half of the beds and transplant the cucumbers and melons and start some more seeds.