Family Arrangements

 Nathan's family left last night and the house and farm sure feel empty without them! We had a great visit and I think they probably got the best October weather possible with only a few days of rain.

Between both of our families visiting we got the greenhouse all cleaned up (but we'll miss them all for more than just their working abilities!):

Our house might be feeling empty...but Thomas and Zeb's isn't. The girls have moved in!

I guess Thomas is making them feel welcomed? He sure was excited to see them...

Poor Zeb is left out. We want to put him with the goats but he wasn't happy about being away from Thomas on our first attempt. We'll have to make the change gradually. 

The goats were happy to munch on some plants that we pulled from the greenhouse. We may have made a mistake giving them the brussels sprouts plants - it seems that they can be bad for goats and May wasn't feeling very well yesterday or this morning. I don't think they're *too* bad though (unlike the rhododendrons).

Squishy has officially abandoned SoZH at night. I guess 'abandoned' is a bit harsh since he is old enough to fend for himself now. She goes up to her roost and he stays on the ground. Last night I brought him inside to sleep in a box since it was so cold....

Ryan hopes you had a happy Halloween! 

Expansion

We spent a lot of the weekend working on a new winter sheep/llama barn with our landlord. I've never built anything like this so it was pretty cool to start from scratch and end up with the framework for walls and a roof. Eventually we'll make some stalls on one side and a small area for hay on the other, and maybe some shelves on the top for storage. The back will be open and the front will have a door. There should be plenty of room for Zeb, Thomas the the girls in there.

Look what Nathan found! Hidden nest #2.

You may not want to look at the following picture while eating...

Speckles' foot was still swollen and seemed to be getting worse instead of better. I did some more bumblefoot reading and the consensus was that there is almost always a large, fairly solid mass in the foot that needs to be dug out. When we did the surgery before, I didn't cut very deep into her foot because I got scared. This time, I took my trusty scalpel and a whole bunch of resolve and made a deep cut into her foot while holding it under running water so I could see what I was doing. 

Ta Dah! I got a lump the size of a pencil eraser out of her foot. She's already walking around much better and the swelling has gone way down.

This photo is horrible, but Zebra Head made it onto the roost for the first time the other night! Normally he sleeps on the ground with two of his chubbier lady friends. They probably should have decided to sleep on the roost again last night instead of on the porch to their little house...

When we went to lock the chickens in for the night, I had Lexie on leash. She had thrown up her dinner and was lethargic (she's fine now) and just trotting along next to me instead of on high alert like she usually is...so I wasn't paying as much attention to her as I should have been. When I leaned into the coop to check the water container, she lunged from behind me (still on a very short leash, luckily) and grabbed Raven right off the porch. I screamed for Nathan while trying to open Lexie's mouth - it was dark and I had no idea how much of the chicken she had. Chickens apparently (strangely) stay in their trance-like night state even when in the mouth of a dog. We finally got Raven loose and we were very very lucky - Lexie had only grabbed a mouthful of tail feathers and there is no damage. Lesson learned - never get complacent with dogs and chickens!

We've been getting so much produce out of our garden. I think it's time to preserve some instead of just selling and eating it. 

All of those tomato flowers really did produce tomatoes.

Red peppers! My favourite veggie of all.

Basil this morning

Basil after trimming...can't even tell. Grasshoppers have been devouring it but luckily they haven't made much of a dent.

The herb garden isn't exactly neat and tidy anymore...and there's that giant zucchini taking over in the back.

Speaking of zucchini, make this. Or don't...because you'll eat the whole thing within a day of it coming out of the oven, and you'll tell yourself it's ok because it has vegetables in it.

http://therecipecritic.com/2013/08/chocolate-zucchini-bread/

Over-ripe and not quite ripe cantaloupe in their nets.

Pumpkins starting to ripen.

These "Thai Dragon" chillies are so good and hot! Three plants and we'll have more than enough to cook with for a year.

Spaghetti squash using tomato plants as their trellis.

Giant kale and normal kale. Or maybe normal kale and stunted kale. Either way, we still have massaged kale salad almost every night with dinner and we aren't sick of it yet.

Fall veggies planted in the grow bed. Lacinato kale, broccoli, cabbage, peas.

The greenhouse in June:

The greenhouse now:

First Visitors

Happy "Put Your Mother to Work Weeding" Day!

My parents came for a visit this weekend - plus their dog, Lucy, and cat, Darla, too.

Lucy (all 8 lbs of her) tried really hard to intimidate Woolly Bully and the cows but she wasn't too successful. They didn't even blink at eye. It didn't help that she was running away in fear while barking...

We got a lot done in the greenhouse. I weeded everything and staked the smaller tomato plants up using bamboo posts. I also finished planting the rest of the row with some pumpkins, eggplant, more tomatoes and a few of the brussels sprouts (just to see how they do). Our landlord cut a big vent in the top of the greenhouse to try and keep the temperature down on hot days so hopefully it won't be quite as extreme as it was this last week.

Nathan built a strawberry tower with five plants going up the length of pvc. Water trickles down through each pot from the top. I'll take pictures of the completed tower tomorrow - it's really cool.

We were admiring our hard work this evening when we heard a funny noise behind us. Ryan was lunging/pouncing at a Garter snake. He didn't quite know what to do with it (kind of like how we think he would make friends with a bunny, if he ever actually got close to one. All he wants to do with the chicks is lick them...). 

We were all interested in the snake.

Dinner time! Quiche with baby greens, ham, spicy sausage, tomatoes, cheddar and parmesan. Yummy.

Speckles!

Our first attempt at free ranging the chickens this morning didn't go too well. Mother Clucker, Dorothy and Denise stayed near the gate but Naughty Speckles went all the way around the house on her own and was in the neighbour's yard when we went looking for her! When I walked over to her she just stood there waiting for me to pick her up. Silly chicken.

The plants survived the night except for some wilting tomatoes (the gold nuggets - they're only a few inches tall). Hopefully they'll make a full recovery today.

Greenhouse Update

Everything's growing really well (including the weeds).

Clump of oregano (I couldn't bring myself to thin it)

Mulched tomatoes - these are the first ones I started, back at the beginning of March. They're "Sweet Million" cherry tomatoes and they're already about 8" tall.

Peppers

Kale - it's at the end of the greenhouse where it should be cooler. It's doing much better than the kale outside, a few feet away.

Cilantro

We went on a mission today to find a bigger pump for the aquaponics. The volume of the grow beds has to be about the same volume as the fish tank for the filtering/cycling effect of the system to work properly (plus it's nice to have more grow beds) so a bigger pump was needed to supply water to three beds. We finally found one at a pet/pond supply store.

We're going to pick up 50 Tilapia tomorrow! 

Eggciting Gardening

Ok that was a pretty bad pun...but we did have some chicken help the other day in the front garden, no yolk. We were digging out all of the weeds and realized that the chickens could help us move the soil around a bit (and it was full of worms and other juicy bugs). 

We brought Speckles, Mother Clucker, Denise and Dorothy out one at a time on a rotating garden helper schedule. They were pretty content scratching around for bugs.

 We found this guy (I think it's a Western Redback Salamander) before the chickens got him.

Yesterday we went and checked out a livestock auction (no, we didn't come back with any more animals). We never even made it to the livestock part of the day! It took them 3+ hours to get through the farm equipment so we ended up leaving before they started with the animals. We did get to see all the animals in the barn - the lambs were tiny and adorable. Maybe it's a good thing we left when we did...

We woke up this morning to a strange scene - the farm gate was open, the landlord's truck was gone and there was a burn mark in the grass outside the greenhouse with an empty, blackened garbage can next to it. It turns out that our landlord woke up in the middle of the night and realized it was frosty out so he drove over to the farm to try and heat the greenhouse up. He attached a pipe to the heat vent of his truck and ran it into the greenhouse, and he lit a fire in the can outside the door and used a fan to blow the heat in. The seedlings all seem fine today (his and ours) - the thermometers apparently read -1 degree outside and 3 degrees inside at around 4am. The fantastic guard dogs never even woke up in the night...

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.