Farm report

 Wow, I have neglected this column! It's December 1st and we harvested pounds of greens from Andy's new beds in the greenhouse. The forecast is for not getting above freezing for the week so we were pretty severe in our harvesting.  

We currently have 20 hens and 2 roosters, Chip and Turkey. They have a 3 room mansion that consists of the Poultry Pavilion, the run and the coop. We had 4 roosters but I kept them all out of the coop for a couple of weeks since I suspect they ganged up and killed a hen. Plus Turkey attacked Yvonne and then me. Being in time out solved the problem - predators took 2 and Turkey learned his lesson. I let Turkey back in and kept Chip out for a week and then took pity on him.  They now seem to be behaving. The youngest hens are starting to lay little eggs.  The old guard seem to have retired - no eggs for over a month from Sally who is now molting and looks awful. Nothing from Miss Peacock for a year.  I kicked her out with the roosters but then they starting to gang up on her so back she went. She's less of a grouch now. We have several Olive Eggers that look too similar to identify individuals but one is Elvis because of her pompadour. Miss Peacock's look-alike (Barred Rock) went from being Baby to Daisy. I hope they all figure out that the heated water is in the coop. These are not rocket scientist chickens.

Farm report for July 23

 

Applied to all the trees and vineyard. Tried permethrin and pyrethrum but didn’t work well

Mowed a bit in the blueberries and ate a few ripe ones, put blood meal near small ones. Netted the whole thing

Planted 5 trees in the orchard: plum, 2 or 3 apples, 1-2 pears

Mowed the vineyards

Saw the turtle swimming in the pond

Good bee action outside all hives

Harvested 2 rutabaga. Smells nasty cooking but tasted ok with bacon garlic and in a waffle

Beans (kidney) appearing in the annex!

Potato beetles on the potatoes

Japanese beetles everywhere but chickens eating them

Weeded corn

Girls dumped weeds on the dam

Picked zucchini and summer squash

Picked the last of the June bearing strawberries. Some leaves are red which I think is a fungus

Weather for 7/16/23

 It's been a wild weather ride this weekend.  It was so steamy on Saturday, it was tough to finish chores.  It poured rain in the night and we even had a tornado warning at 5 am.  Still steamy but cooler but so little light, we aren't generating much electricity.  Wish we had a turbine at the spillway for the pond.  We would be making LOTS of power now.  It's estimated we will get about 3 inches of rain. The tornado watch for the day was cancelled early but the flood watch remains. 

Farm report:

Andy fixed the riding mower and used it immediately to tidy up the blueberries and mow a track around the "soccer field." He left a little of vegetation near the gullies feeding into the pond.  It didn't seem to help - the rain brought new brown streams into the pond, both at the gullies and by the beach.  There are new streams from the embankment, on the driveway (a culvert must have broken), behind the chicken coop, alongside the old vineyard and on the road between the vineyards.  The baby vineyard is doing surprisingly well with its new infusion of wood chips.

Blueberries - I gave the first 6 rows of small bushes a 50% mixture of whey.  There are coffee grounds to distribute but it didn't seem to help the red-leafed ones.  Still no blue berries.

Birds - the indigo buntings hatched!  At least I think that's what they were as I just read that catbirds can parasitize bunting nests. I saw 2 juveniles clinging to stalks of grass and staying perfectly still as I observed them.  We won't weed near them for another week at least.  I heard a barred owl yesterday. Plenty of vireos singing and goldfinches flying.

Bees - as I feared, the orange hive swarmed.  The number of workers and brood is much lower than before. There are still a couple of sealed queen cells. The comb drawn below the feeder is full of emerging drones. Because there is so little brood, and there are drone cells and queen cells, we left what was there.  Maybe the new queen will stick around?  The brood pattern is sort of buckshot.  The workers there are making honey. Andy put new screws on the lid to the hive.

The blue hive looks full.  Plenty of workers hanging out in the lounge.  They built comb in the empty right hand frame to half full.  I gave them another empty frame on the right. I didn't dig and didn't see the queen but did see brood.  There is some honey being made.  I saw a dead bumblebee on the top We left the Russians alone.  I saw and heard lots of action from that hive while weeding in the orchard.

Chickens - one of the teen white leghorns laid an egg!  It was smaller than usual but not as tiny as the "wind eggs" we had before.  Annika spotted a gelatinous mass in the carport that looks like it could have been an aborted attempted at an egg.  The other teens look fully mature to me so I wonder where they might be laying eggs.  We put the baby chicks in the coop and nailed up hardware cloth so everyone can smell, see and hear each other but no layers can get in to lay.  It looks like we lost one teen as the teen count is down to 9 or 10.  Annika and I put new sand in the run, hung the bucket feeder back up, and removed the large smelly feeder.  I'll clean the smaller feeder that Andy made earlier this year and finish cleaning the large waterer today.  The broken perches need to be repaired and then it will be homey again.

Elderberries - have fruit forming!  They are so surrounded by weeds, it will take some fortitude to excavate them but so far they are growing up taller than the weeds. 

Vineyards - Andy put little boxes around the new vines and trained them up to the wires he just attached. The boxes seem to be functioning like the weeds in the elderberries - grow tall, little plant, and get some sun! Both vineyards have Japanese beetles so we removed a bunch by hand and fed them to the older chickens and then Andy sprayed permethrin. The mature vineyard has some bunches with a sort of blight in the fruit and something in the leaves.

Blackberries (planted by the orchard hive) - Andy put cow manure on them.  They don't appear to be growing well which I wonder if it is due to excessive water?

Chokeberries (by the vineyard hives) - Andy added wood chips to them.  So far the deer have not munched them badly, but I have been spraying them with deer repellent.

Juneberries (by the treatment pond) seem to be sending out shoots.  Maybe we will have a juneberry hedge.

Strawberries - slowed dramatically once June finished.  They have calendars in their roots, I guess. 

We saw a turtle swimming upstream in the waterfall that feeds the treatment pond. It looked like a snapper.

July 3

Bee report for July 3.

The blue hive has so many bees. They have no place to sit on the comb and they are hanging out in the “lounge” - the space between the division board and the hive wall. They were bearding this morning when it was still cool. A few emergency Queen cells are there, but no full queen cells. Red dot queen is visible. plenty of brood, but very little honey. I gave them empty frames left and right, and a frame with drawn out comb and some honey on the right.

The orange hive seems less organized. Plenty of capped brood.  There were at least 6 Queen cells, full and capped. I destroyed three. I could not find the queen so I didn’t want to take them all away. July is a bad time to swarm but I also want them to be queen right. The top fell off of the orange hive. Probably the bear weakened the screws. Andy has new long screws for it but they aren’t wide enough. We will have to come back and fix that. I trimmed all the weeds in the beeyard. I tested the voltage in the electric fence. The lights is the tester blinked in time with the sound the energizer makes. Probably doesn’t feel pleasant to a bear.

7/1/23-7/2/23

 5 pounds of strawberries!  And we ate them all!

The teen chickens are integrating more and more with the old flock.  One Buff Orpington, Ducky (named after our previous sweet BO) flows seamlessly between the two flocks. The smaller one, Little Miss Sunshine, is way more timid but still seems curious about the humans.

Just to try to remember when we got them, the 6 baby chickens have been with us since June 24. The black ones looked they had just hatched and the fluffy-footed Brahmas looked like they were a week old.  It's amazing how tiny they still seem.  We must have always gotten somewhat older chicks. Or we just stuck them under Mamma Mia and didn't see them again until they were bigger.

Swam in the pond and tried to check the temperature.  It looks like it is 72-75 degrees, not bad for swimming but it won't be good for my dream fish, trout.  There is one really deep pocket - I'll try to get a long string on the thermometer and check it out.

Andy tried to fill in the gullies with more soil.  It was supposed to rain very gently all day.  Instead we got an inch in an hour and the dirt washed into the pond.  His lovely sand beach keeps flowing into the pond, too, but so far that makes for a soft gentle slope. 

No Japanese beetles in the vineyard.  Yet.  There is some leaf roller thing and something that eats perfectly round bites out of the leaves but I looked right after the inch of rain and no one was obviously still chewing. 

One night the frogs all quieted down.  Then the bullfrogs arrived.  The banjo twang is distinctive.

Farm update

 Picked a half pound of strawberries in 5 minutes.  Had to stop because I can't freeze them right now and can't eat more than half a pound of them.  The chickens ate the bad ones happily.

The 2 buff Orpington teenage hens followed me around a little, as did a young Rhode Island Red. The Cinnamon Queens might be the most beautiful of the bunch but they are also the most aloof.  Only 3 eggs today.  Andy thinks the Astralorps may have stopped laying. I was hoping Mamma Mia would get back in the laying game after breaking her broody spell (and leaving 15 rotten eggs).  Maybe not quite.  I still need to finish cleaning the coop and run and get it all cozy for laying or rearing the 6 babies.

The air quality was predicted to get bad today so I got up at 6 and used the most quiet device I have, the battery-powered string trimmer. It was still sort of loud.  I got the blueberries almost completely trimmed up and went a little into the woods.  Such a difference from farm to forest.  Very moist, not much growing on the trail and saw a cute little red eft.

Saw a snake in the big orchard.  I hope it doesn't know about the indigo bunting nest down low in the peach tree. I would love it to eat the mice and voles. 

Doug at Common Table told me that the super cold temperatures we had for a few days in February ruined the stone fruits for the whole area. Bummer.  We saw caterpillars, Japanese beetles, and leaf rollers so there are still pests on the leaves, if not the non-existent fruit. 

Ran the brush hog in the apple orchard where the weeds were taller than the trees.  I left some big mullein plants. It needs weeding and wood chips.  There are a couple of vibrant flowers next to one tiny tree so that tree can stay shaded a little longer.

I also cleared around the chokeberry bushes near the vineyard. The weeds around were so tall but somehow the deer find and trim the chokeberries.  One of the 4 bushes is looking pretty good.  I sprayed deer repellent on them all.

I mowed enough to open the fence around the elderberries.  Very dense in there.

I tried to mow around the vineyard bee yard but it's pretty dense in there.  At least I got close enough to see the wires of the fence.

After that it was time for "work work" and the air quality dropped - good timing. 

 

Updates for 6/28/23

 Pond is completely full and overflowing a tiny bit. The frogs are happy and LOUD.

Snapping turtle nest appears undisturbed.

Bee report (from the outside) - very active in orange hive, even bearding a bit although it is only 70 degrees.  Blue hive less active but not bad.  Russians not as busy.  Need to check for water seeping in there.

Strawberries ready to harvest. Got 2.5 lbs 4 days ago.

Cider orchard totally overrun by yellow nutsedge. Need to cut that out ASAP.

Orchard looking great except no fruit set this year. Found a nest in a peach tree, low but protected by a fence.  I startled the mama off. I think it is a female indigo bunting, judging from Merlin's sound ID.

Small blueberry bushes going red are worse today.  Got coffee grounds last week.  Will try composted chicken manure. The big bushes are looking good.  Will need to net them soon.

The potatoes look great after Andy mounded them a few days ago.  The sweet potatoes are overrun by lambs quarters though.

Can see one good row of cowpeas but we don't remember which type.

Most of garden appears frozen in time.  Except the summer squash, of course.

No more broody mama hen.  Got 8 eggs.  The young hens are getting closer and closer to the old flock, both out and about and in the rafters of the carport.  It really stinks in there now.  Need to finish cleaning the coop and maybe the younguns will lay (and roost) in there?  I was walking eating a graham cracker and shared some with the big chickens - they followed me far today! 

Walked the vineyard with the hens but fortunately no Japanese beetles to feed them. I can see lots of little grape flowers! I think the hot spell we had at the time the orchard should have been flowering messed fruit set.  We didn't even get forsythia this year.  Raspberries in Arlington are doing great.  Not so in Becket - tiny plants by the Russians haven't changed much.

First flowers on the elderberries!  Must weed that patch.

Saw a big brown rabbit hopping away from the garlic. New protein source?

There is one lone hop plant climbing up a stalk.  It won't climb the tree next to it - too fat of a tree?