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Squirt is also laying now! Her eggs are brown, which are easy to distinguish from Squish’s green eggs. Last week, I collected a full carton of their eggs over just that one week. That’s some great egg laying! We enjoyed some … Continue reading
What better gift is there to receive from our chickens than their first eggs being laid on Christmas Day?
It appears that Squish is laying the first eggs. They are a bit smaller right now than store bought eggs, but they will get bigger. They are greenish in color and it really does feel like we are hunting for Easter eggs in our yard!
The chickens like to lay their eggs in the early morning, so most of the time the eggs are found in the nest inside their coop when we let them out in the morning. I have also found a spot behind the greenhouse and compost bin that she seems to like laying her eggs in too.
The eggs tasted fantastic and we made those first two eggs our Christmas brunch. What about Squirt, you ask? She has been searching around the yard and making little nests everywhere, trying to find a spot to do her own egg laying. I know she will start egg laying very soon. 
Check out the eggs!
The first egg!
The eggs keep coming!
See the size compared to a store bought egg
Fresh eggs have these nice dark yolks.
I also realized it has been a while since I have posted recent photos of the girls, themselves. What a terrible mother I am! I hope everyone is having an egg-ceptional holiday season! 
Squish digging for grubs
Wet chicken!!!
Love their feathers
Shaking like a dog! Gotta get the dirt off
Wishing everyone a happy Halloween from the Dinosaur Farm!
(This was our one and only pumpkin from our garden this year!)
It’s Fall! The crops from the summer season have run their course, and it is time to put vital nutrients back into the garden soil that the spring and summer crops depleted.
How do we do that, you ask?
Enter a superhero among gardeners: BUCKWHEAT.
Buckwheat increases the soil structure and the availability of nutrients for the next batch of crops in the garden, including phosphorus. Another great thing about Buckwheat is that it sprouts within days, grows rapidly, and doesn’t require much water.
The first thing you want to do is get yourself some Buckwheat seeds. We purchased ours online.
Buckwheat Seeds
Next, till your garden soil. We also mixed in a couple bags of manure for good measure.
Even out and water down the soil in preparation for the seeds.
Then the soil is ready for seeding! We spread our Buckwheat seeds around by hand.
After that, the seeds do all the work! Within days, we had sprouts coming in! I had also added some dead leaves to the dirt to protect the seeds from birds.
The first sprouts
In just a few weeks, our Buckwheat grew a couple feet tall. Turk, the Tortoises and even the chickens LOVE to snack on it!
Turk, munching
Now that the Buckwheat is growing, there is one final step.
We will need to cut down (or mow) the Buckwheat within 2 weeks of the first flowering and mulch it into the soil. We will mix in some bags of manure for even better results. Buckwheat decomposes quickly, so it won’t be long before we can plant new crops with our new improved soil!
Have you ever introduced yourself, ‘Hi, my name is_____ , and I’ve got worms!’ It’s one of my favorite ways to strike up a conversation. After letting the person make a series of awkward/disgusted/shocked and finally pity faces, I inform them of my red wriggler worm farm. IMO, vermicomposting makes the greatest most nutritious soil ever!
Check out this great compost the worms are making!
Getting your own worm farm is simple. Here’s what you’ll need:
1. Vermi compost bin, you can buy your own or use 3-4, 5-gallon spackle buckets (see illustrated diagram and photo below)
This is our personal worm bin.
2. Red wriggler worms. You can find them at all bait and tackle shops and some pet feed stores or visit findworms.com.
3. Some rotting table scraps. The more rotten, the better. If not yet rotten, it won’t take long before they will be.
Setting up your first worm tray: Throw rotting table scraps (should be at least a week old) into the bucket, include some wet shredded newspaper. Once everything is soggy, add the worms, red wiggler AKA red worms. I’ve heard white worms will also work, night crawlers aren’t ideal as they are much slower to compost.
These worms will start to multiply and turn your scraps into soil. As the contents of the first bin/layer starts to turn into a black mush, it’s time to put your 2nd bin on top of that. Start adding new scraps to that bucket. When the Worms feel like they have had their fill in the bottom layer, they’ll move to the top layer. You can have 3 layers working at one time. When adding the 3rd layer, you can remove the contents from the first layer and continue to rotate the now empty bin to the top layer.
TIP: When we first started, my worms weren’t ‘chowing down’ as much as we thought they would. We kept the pile damp and we added table scraps daily. Stuff was rotting but I wasn’t getting dirt (AKA worm castings) like we expected we would. One tiny living condition change increased production TEN-FOLD; We added layers of wet paper to the top of the pile. These worms like their privacy, so give them cover. You can use layers of news print paper (black ink only) or give them the very best, thick brown packing paper you sometimes get with your amazon/mail orders.
In addition to excellent compost, the worm bin system creates an excellent byproduct: Worm tea. Pour it on your garden plants as liquid fertilizer!
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There have certainly been a lot of squirrel antics around here lately! I am not sure where there in a walnut tree near us, but it must be close because the squirrels are snatching them up and bringing them into … Continue reading
We bought our little Red Haven peach tree back in early Spring. It is not yet 6 feet tall, but it has given us 2 nice big peaches this summer! I call it the ‘Charlie Brown Tree’ because these big plump peaches were hanging off tiny little twig size branches, which has been quite comical to watch! We ate our first one just last weekend and WOW was it sweet! We are waiting for the last one to ripen. Shoudn’t be long now! Just has to have a little squish to it before we can pluck it
This is what our tree looked like when we first bought it. Lots of beautiful pink blossoms all over it.
Now it is full of leaves and giving us peaches already despite its age and height!
And here is the yummy peach we have left on a scrawny branch. We have to pluck it before our scavenging tortoises get to it!
It’s like growing candy!
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You asked, so here they are, more chicken photos! Last week we introduced them to their new coop. Around the coop is an enclosed pen, but we have to keep a watchful eye out for hawks while they are in … Continue reading
Composting, everyone was telling me, ‘It’s so easy, it does it all by itself.’ Yes, every day some astronomical amount of composting happens without any human intervention.
So with that in mind, I setup a plastic compost bin and put all the compostable yard waste and left overs (non-meat) from the kitchen.
I checked it in a year and it seems almost nothing had happened. After some quick research through some old gardening books, (Thanks Carol and Greg!) I made these changes.
Now, I can feel the heat from the compost pile as it continues to cook. When I turn it over, the materials are becoming unrecognizable and more black dirt like.
Having the pile in the shady location without doing any of those things would have worked eventually (say, 10,0000 years) but now, I feel we will have quality compost for the next season.
The Compost Bin. Turk surveys our work
Table scraps, lawn clippings and some paper products get added.
You can see the nice dark soil underneath
Cooking in the sun!
Who doesn’t? You can put broccoli in just about any meal, and it is one of the most nutritious veggies you can eat! This is the first year I have attempted to grow broccoli, and I have had great success so far, other than Turk taking a bite off a few leaves here and there. :p Today I prepped one of my broccoli plants for harvest. To prevent the broccoli head from going all rangy, you have to tie a string or place a rubber band around the leaves to keep the growing head of broccoli in an organized and tight grouping, which will make harvesting easier as well as your broccoli looking prettier I am going to try to get the head of broccoli as big as I can before harvesting. As soon as any of it starts to yellow, that means the plant is going to seed and you have to harvest ASAP. I have two pants growing so far, one is still pretty small, so I won’t be prepping that one for another few weeks. Take a look!
The head of broccoli is growing bigger each day.
Here is the rubber band I placed just under the leaves.
The plant is tied and ready for harvesting soon!
