We are not going to have chickens, and we are going to have more chickens than we planned on. How? Well, we found out this morning that although we know people who have chickens locally, you are not allowed to unless you have an acre or more of land directly adjacent to your home in addition to the land your home itself sits on. I called a friend who lives about ten minutes away who has a large garage with an old horse stall built into the back of it. He had wanted some of the chickens anyway. How many hens can he have? 15. (he sits on nearly 2 acres, compared to our small city lot) My girls will be there to clean out the stall and build a fenced chicken run and laying boxes. <smiling> I guess we are going to have a lot more eggs than we had originally planned on. This also gives me room back in my yard that I usually gardened, that was going to be sacrificed for the chicken run. Gotta love that. It is not a set-back, it is a step forward, and a good one. The little buggers are cute though. We will post more on the individual breeds later. Sure hope the kids don’t name them.
Last night until dark, and early this morning before leaving for the office, I got to spend more time dealing with dirt. In addition to the chard up front, I now have two kinds of lettuce (Amish Deer Tongue, and Speckled Trout Romaine) planted, as well as Sugar Snap peas, Amish Edible Podded peas. All of those things are simply for fresh eating here at the home and they mature fairly quickly. Along with one of the plantings of peas are 100 onion sets.
I also cleared an area behind the perennial herb garden for 6 more tomato plants. Tomatoes go there every year, but over the course of the summer chocolate mint sends runners all the way to the fence along the ground and they must be removed or there is no where to put that group of tomatoes. Every year there are more, and I pot up cuttings to give to everyone else that uses mint in cooking, or likes mojitos in the summer but doesn’t want to come to my house or the grocery store to get mint. The stuff is rather insidious if you don’t keep up on restricting it’s travels, readily spreading about 4′ a year if given the chance.
The garlic has emerged from underneath the mulching straw. It amazes me, when I make red sauce, how much garlic I go through, and my stores from last year are nearly gone. I used it medicinally as well on the suggestion of an herbalist when I became ill this last winter, taking doses of a half dozen bulbs a few dozen times a day. Not sure if it was the garlic, antibiotics, or just the course of the disease, but I did get better fairly quickly. Good things my wife and kids like the smell of the stuff, because I was sweating garlic.
Our rhubarb plant is a huge one, and this year I am going to split it. Out at the Red Wing garden I am working on developing what will basically be a perennial orchard, and although rhubarb is technically a vegetable, I cannot stand eating it as such. I eat it as a sweetened fruit and find it amazing that anyone can eat it otherwise. Push came to shove, I will eat it plain before I get scurvy, but it would have to come to that before I would. But rhubarb preserves and strawberry rhubarb pie? Oh my. That is one of the early treats of the summer garden.
The dog’s area of the yard got some much-needed attention. We had a prodigious amount of snow piled up close to the house and garage due to drifts from the winter blizzards, and the fact that the house’s shadow prevents the snow from melting as fast there. It is always the last to thaw, and in it’s myriad layers it gathers everything our dog leaves in the backyard. Besides the obvious, there are toys, bones she had to chew on, socks she stole from in the house, and anything else that fell or blew into there.
Every year, once cleared, we are left with basically bare dirt, because the high-traffic makes the area habitable only by that which can handle a very energetic dog, and that means creeping charlie. Since that plant dies back to the roots every year, it is a project of some futility to clean, cover with straw, and seed with grass, but I do it anyway. It at least keeps the mud being tramped into the house to a minimum before the creeping charlie takes it over again. Perhaps with the removal of the pine tree there, the additional area and sunshine will allow something besides creeping charlie to grow.
