It's been a while since I made a proper update. I've gotten away from the daily posting and the frequent updates.
I picked up materials yesterday for the coop security project. I've got a few ideas for it that I'm excited to try. One is to make a small covered area under the coop as a day shelter for the chooks. I've got some corrugated metal to use as the roof, and I'll ground it to the ground rod on the fence. That'll help increase the effectiveness of the fence by making a solid metal connection for the predator to get zapped with.
Our three sisters garden is doing wildly well. Well, the squash is anyways. This is the North Georgia Candy Roaster from seeds that I bought from @bpangie. Those leaves are over a foot wide! The squash they make can grow 10-250 pounds each, so I'd say we'll be eating good this fall. This is a keeper for sure, and a prolific seeder.
The corn is Golden Bantam 12 from Baker Creek and the beans are anaskazi pole lima beans, also from @bpangie.
I've let some of our green beans go too long so I can get some seeds for them. I also let our line surviving lettuce plant flower so that I can have some seed later.
Next year I think I'll try and keep things a bit more organized so they're easier to keep up with. Nothing super organized, but just enough to make harvest easier.
Borage is also doing exceedingly well! I eat flowers from it daily as a little sweet treat. They've got an awesome sweetness and freshness to them.
Melissa and I are talking a lot about the garden, food forest, chickens and my dreams of farming. I'm slowing down with things so she and I can work on getting on the same page. I'm going to work on developing the layers in the forest rather than growing it. My herbaceous and vine layers need a lot of work, and I've got five fig cuttings turning to trees as well as a bunch of elderberry trees I'm going to harvest and plant. That'll bring us into the realm of excessive planting. Right where I want to be.
To top it off, I found out that the small trees I discovered a year ago up in the top of the south project are black walnut trees! So I'm planning a few guilds there. Cherries and goji do well with them when planted with mulberries which will negate the toxins excreted by the walnut roots. Of course with comfrey and daffodils. I counted fifteen young trees in that corner of about a hundred and fifty square feet, so that'll be a small bit of income for us next year when I sell a handful of them.
So, while we're missing the liveliness of the chickens, things are really going well. The new flock will be starting back up in July after a family vacation with Melissa's family. I don't like that timeline, but that's okay. It'll give me time to build up some time off to take a couple days off work and observe a couple nights out there. One of our neighbors posted in our neighborhood facebook that they caught a video of a raccoon dragging off their 5 gallon bucket of cat food. Bet that's a big enough coon to kill thirteen chickens... And to trip a live trap and be big enough that it won't close on him.
And here's Farmer Sam and his cucumbers, special for @goldenoakfarm. :)
Most things in the North hugel aren't doing super well. The cucumbers though, they're going nuts! There's also various grain crops that got planted there because I used the soil from the chicken run. I wish I'd planned that, but it wasn't my idea. It came in from scratch grains that I gave the chickens in the right months of their work on that batch. Probably accounts for the two tomato plants growing over there too... There's wheat and a few other things there that I'm saving seeds from in hopes of building to a good sustainable chicken scratch garden.
Progress progress progress! Lots going on here at the little aspiring homestead in Texas.
Thanks for sticking around to read all that! What's going on at your place?
All action for the good of all.
Nate.
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