Harvest Monday

May 11, 2015

Harvests

We’re still harvesting spinachlettuce, and cilantro…more and more each day 🙂

We have enough for a big salad of some sort every night now. Our spring season is so short, we NEVER tire of these greens and are sad to see them bolt. The first planting of spinach is already starting to show signs of bolting (pointy leaves). Sad news. However, I have found that if I harvest in the morning, everything is much sweeter. If I wait until the afternoon, the lettuce is bitter.

This is the last of the sweet potato harvest : (

I baked these for the baby. She eats 1/2 of a sweet potato each day. So for 1/2 a month, we have no potatoes. Now, if I were a good homesteader, that would be it. But I’m not…not yet. So for 1/2 a month or so, I will be buying potatoes from the grocery store

The sweet potatoes I buried in pots have started producing slips! 🙂

Another exciting thing to happen this week: strawberries started turning from this…to thisMy parents came to visit for Mother’s Day so we went ahead and picked our first strawberry, just for them. I knew they weren’t quite ripe but I’ve never been known for my patience so…yeah, it was not ready to be picked. oh well. Lesson learned 🙂 It sure is pretty though.

Some pea harvests seem to be in our future 🙂

Chickens

We finished painting the coop this week so it is finally DONE.

Behind our house is starting to look like a jungle so we are letting the chickens take care of that. They don’t mind 😉

All of that greenery has now been turned into ‘Run #4’

Our egg count for April was down from March and is down for this month as well. The reason? More and more broody hens= less eggs laid! Broody #1 (aka Cute) has 5 chicks. Broody #2 (aka Jealous) just hatched out 4 chicks. We gave her 5 to sit on. One died (didn’t quite get out of the egg). I am very pleased with the success rate this year! We finally have a good rooster (we’ve been through a few). First pic is the 8yo transferring a chick that had hatched a few days early.

This pic was right after we transferred her to the dog crate (the eggs started hatching 2 days earlier than expected). and Broody #3 (aka Little Red Hen) is due at the end of May. And to think, we bought 10 chicks from the feed store in March because I was afraid none of our hens were going to go broody. Well, as I said before, I’ve never been known for my patience 😉

We moved Cute and her baby chicks in with the ‘big’ chicks this weekend so we could move Jealous into a dog crate in time for her eggs to hatch safely. She is a good mama; I’ll give her that! She attacked the ‘big chicks’ any time they came close to her babies. She wouldn’t let them in the coop at night though. We put netting in the cage to keep them apart. Crisis averted…for now.

We have a friend who had a mama hen eat the chicks of another mama hen so we think we need to keep ours separate until the chicks get larger. Now to figure out where to put everyone! We have 3 mamas with babies and ‘big chicks’. That means 4 places to sleep and 4 runs…We have not figured it all out yet – I’ll keep you posted with pics when we do. Of course, I want to do it without spending money at all – now to get my husband on board with that idea 😉

Finally this week, my husband tried to pull up all of the poison ivy in the blueberry patch. If you remember, before we started gardening BTE style, we covered everything with tarps in order to keep weeds away. This is what it looked like after ripping up all of the poison ivy and tarps.

The kids cleaned up all the tarps and I wondered if we needed to worry about them being exposed but my husband says all that was in the tarps was the roots so they would be fine. The 8yo is now covered in poison ivy. Fun times. I would say, ‘At least we got rid of it’ but you know how poison ivy is. There seems to be no ‘getting rid of it’ – it just keeps coming back year after year.

We’re applying peppermint everywhere except her eye. We’re putting tea tree oil there. I’ve heard doing this consistently should get rid of it in about 4 days. Here’s hoping!

What’s going on in your garden? What are you harvesting? I am linking up with Daphne’s Danelions today. Check out what other gardeners are up to.

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