Tied Up

The newly tied tomatoes all looked good this morning. I drove anchoring stakes in between the squash, cucumbers and melons too so that I won't damage their roots doing it later on. I want to try and get stuff growing vertically as much as possible - I think that will help them get more air circulation in the greenhouse.

Brussels sprouts - too hot in the greenhouse for them. We'll plant a few outside where the arugula is, once it's done. We bought 3 artichoke seedlings to plant outside and a couple of spaghetti squash for in the greenhouse.

Giant broccoli! The outdoor plants that are the same age are maybe 6" tall with a few measly leaves. The greenhouse plants are a foot tall with giant leaves. Hopefully they won't just go right to flower with the hot temps, though.

Avert your eyes if you don't want to feel extremely itchy.

Poultry lice on poor Mother Clucker. The white stuff at the bases of the feathers are their eggs, and you can see the lice all running for cover. BLEH!!! People can't get poultry lice but they still make me feel all squirmy.

Dusting Chickens and a Near Tomato Disaster

Dusting chickens is no fun, let me tell you. We got some lice treatment from the feed store and dusted the 4 girls with it yesterday. We learned how to do it in our usual fashion; find the best youtube video...laugh at it...then end up trying our best to replicate it. They claimed in this video that when you hold chickens on their backs they go into a 'trance-like state', which makes getting the powder all through their feathers easier. Um...our chickens certainly weren't in any trance-like state. If anything they were squirmier than usual. We managed to dust them all but we aren't looking forward to repeating in 10 days. Hopefully diatomaceous earth in their dust baths and nest box will help, too.

Now onto the Near Tomato Disaster. When we went to check the greenhouse this morning everything was fine. We turned the fans on (one at each end) and went back to the house. When we came out again, two of the biggest tomato plants had fallen right over! I guess it was time to stake them, but they had seemed to be standing so well that we hadn't noticed. I don't think the stems broke, luckily. We drove stakes in between pairs of tomatoes (so 4 stakes all together between these 8 plants) and then ran twine from the stake over to the plant and up to the greenhouse roof. We attached the twine to the tomato plant with some old t-shirt, then twisted the plant up around the twine. I'll post a photo of the newly staked plants tomorrow.