Spring Chickens

A few weeks ago we got 10 little chicks from the kindergarten class at the boys' school. They quickly outgrew the rubbermaid tub in the kitchen, and have since moved to a temporary chicken shack in the back yard. I'm going to move them into the big chicken coop this weekend. So far, they've free ranged in the backyard with the big chickens a few times. Scratchy, the boss chicken, wasted no time waddling over to the chicks and asserting her authority. Aside from a few disciplinary pecks on the head, things weren't too violent. I'm hoping that it will stay that way once they're in the confines of the coop/run. I also hope that the stress of new coopmates won't further hamper their egg production. 4-5 weeks ago I managed to fend off a possum attack in the wee hours of the morning. (My neighbors were treated to a sight of me in my tiny shorts running around my yard with a flashlight and a stick). The chickens escaped unscathed, but the ordeal apparently stressed them such that they stopped laying eggs. I expected this for a week or two, but it's been over a month. I told them that if they didn't get their act together, it would be the soup pot once the chicks start laying. We'll see how that brand of motivation works.

Colossal Pepper Fail

This past Friday I transplanted a bunch of pepper seedlings into the raised beds that wrap around the side of our house. All told it was about 35 plants, mostly red and orange bell peppers with some sweet Italian, paprika and hungarian wax varieties as well. They were mulched pretty well with straw. We're well past the average last frost date for St.Louis, so I didn't think much of it. Then a cold front came along bringing rain and dropping temperatures about 15-20 degrees below normal. The night time low was supposed to get into the low 40's for about 3 nights - no danger of a frost, but I was concerned that it might be a bit too cool for the newly transplanted peppers. What did I do? I used some wire brackets to float a sheet of clear plastic over them. Things were cold, wet, and miserable on Sunday; and the pepper plants looked fine. This would have been no big deal if I had pulled the plastic off of them on Monday morning before I went to work. Alas, this is the last week of the school year - ie, things are a zoo, and my mind was elsewhere. The weather cleared up, and it got into the 60's with a fair amount of sun. Tuesday was the same, and it wasn't until Tuesday evening as I was mowing grass that I realized the plastic was still over the raised beds. I pulled it off and almost fell over.

They were all dead...completely fried.

I was so pissed off at myself. The only possible survivor was one Hungarian Wax on the end of the bed that had a couple wilted leaves left on it. Everything else was a shriveled brown mess. The seedlings had come up so strong this year, that I was really looking forward to salsas, relishes, and all sorts of other stuff this summer. Oh well...I broke down and bought a couple of bell pepper plants at the grocery store today, and I'll probably hit up the nursery for some more this weekend, but it won't amount to anything close to what I had in the ground.

Two things occurred to me as I was putting the store plants in this evening:

1. Growing your own food comes with a definite learning curve. I've been gardening seriously for 5 years now, and I still feel like I don't know what the hell I'm doing most of the time. Anyone who thinks that they can go from 100% dependence on the grocery store to living off the land overnight is in for a rude awakening.

2. It reinforced how lucky we are to have the resources available to us that we do. Make no mistake, the modern industrial agriculture/food system is unsustainable. I fully expect to see it fall apart in some way during my lifetime. Even if it doesn't, I'd want to get out as much as possible anyway. That said, it's nice to know that my family won't go without peppers this year simply because I'm a friggin' idiot.

April Showers bring...Mud Day 2011

The weather here in St.Louis has been miserably soggy for the past 2 weeks. There have been only a handful of days where the sun shined enough to go outside and do much of anything. While this has put a bit of a damper on working i the garden, it did facilitate what has become a tradition here at the 'Burbstead: Mud Day. Every year, before the garden is completely planted, I give the kids one chance to make a big mud hole and wallow around in it. Is this good for the dirt in that spot? Probably not, but I don't mind. A childhood is not complete if you haven't, at least once or twice, gotten so dirty that you must be hosed off before you can enter the house. The kids always have a blast.

Now if we could just get a sold week or so of 70's and sunny...

Counting our Chickens (now that they've hatched)

Back in January, I noted that of all my goals for the coming year, acquiring more chickens was probably the least likely to happen. Life, however, has a quirky sense of humor. It started when the kindergarten teacher at the boys' school asked if my parents could get her some fertilized eggs for her class to hatch. When she also asked (knowing that we already have some chickens) if we would be willing to take the chicks when they were done with the project, Renee surprisingly said that would be ok.

Wow, that was easy.

This all was a little over a month ago. On Friday, we became the proud owners of 10 little chicks. I'll have to check with my parents to see what breed(s) of chickens they might be. I also have no idea about the sex of any of them. We employed the "Ok, who just tried crowing?" method of rooster identification last time around. Because we live in the city, all of the boys get shipped off to my parents' house once they get noisy. Statistically, we should wind up somewhere between 4-6 pullets.

Now for the important part, all of the chicks have been named. Identification for some of them is a little sketchy at this point. The roster is as follows:

Fireball - bright yellow with a sorta orange-ish head

Sunshine - bright yellow

Pikachu - also bright yellow

Mr.Peepers - bright yellow, but louder

Dot - bright yellow with a tiny grey dot on its head

Spot - dark grey with a large yellow spot on its head

Tuxedo - black with white/yellow marks on its chin and belly

Darth Vader - black with an orange face

Ashes - mottled grey

Bones - also mottled grey

I'll give a fabulous prize the the first person who can use those descriptions to correctly identify all of the chicks in picture below. Good luck.

Sweet Potatoes

It has been a few years since I grew sweet potatoes in the garden, and since all 3 of the kids love them, I decided to give it a go again. You can purchase slips at the nursery, but I thought it would be a fun project to do with the kids to sprout them ourselves. I bought 8 at the grocery store a month or so ago. The kids poked toothpicks into them and we set them into jars of water. The jars have been sitting in the seedling window in our kitchen. After a couple of weeks, some of them started to send down roots in the water. A few days later, some of the sweet potatoes started to sprout buds on their top sides. We now have a germination rate of 80%-ish. Not too bad considering that tubers sold in the grocery store are usually treated with a substance that is designed to prevent them from sprouting. Given our success, I might buy some more this weekend since they are on sale for $.49 a pound.

Sweet Potatoes are originally a tropical plant, so they like plenty of warmth. I'm going to put down black weed barrier to help warm the soil. I also recall seeing a video on youtube once where a guy was growing them under a plastic tunnel to boost temperatures. I think St.Louis gets hot enough on its own during the middle of summer, but I might try it out early on.

Darius over at "Gardening Along the Creek" recently posted about trying to start sweet potato slips in potting soil instead of water. She's putting them on top of a heat pad to boost temperatures and promote sprouting. That's an idea I might try in the future. It would be interesting to see how the germination rates/speed varied with and without additional heat. Even if I don't try that, I'm curious to see how many pounds of tubers I get back from a $4.50 investment.

Weekend Work

The temperatures this past weekend were unseasonably warm (the bank sign said 93 today). I took advantage of the opportunity to get some work knocked out around the house. The raised beds that wrap around the Southeast corner of the house didn't amount to much last year. I had some peppers, carrots, lettuce, and herbs in there. The only thing that came out of it were two tough-assed basil plants that defied my repeated attempts to dehydrate them. These are the beds that I want to plant all of my peppers in this year, so I needed to get them in order. I added dirt and compost to fill them up. For the record, a '92 Toyota Tercel with a gimpy 4 cylinder engine and a loose clutch will NOT haul 650 pounds of topsoil and a 254 pound driver at one time. I also improved the chook/rabbit/child defenses with some chicken wire. The beds with the trellis will house some early cucumbers. Now my pepper seedlings just need to get growing.

I also managed to clean and organize my shed - a job that was way overdue. In doing so, I drug out a bunch of pots that were hiding in a corner. I filled them with some potting soil that was laying around, and viola! Instant patio herb garden. More to come on this later.

Lastly, the Grand Rapids and Winter Density lettuce that I planted in February are really starting to come in, so they needed to be thinned. Thinning out a lettuce bed is a lot like weeding, except that you get to eat what you pull up. So tonight's supper featured the first salad from the summer garden. It was a nice finish to a very productive two days.

Spring Beginnings

The best part about Spring is that you get to see all of the new things sprouting, budding, and taking shape after the frozen lull of Winter. Here are a few things coming up around the 'burbstead.

1. The peppers are up. Pepper plants can be incredibly pokey when it comes to sprouting, but they're finally here. Once they get big enough, I'm going to put them in a raised bed along the south-facing wall of our house with a tunnel over them. I'm hoping that the southern exposure and coverage (along with some solar gain from the brick wall) will let me get them in the ground by the beginning of May. The varieties of sweet pepper that I'm growing this year include: King of the North and Wisconsin Lakes (red bell peppers), Orange bell pepper, Veri's Sweet Italian, and Tolle's Sweet Italian. The hot peppers (my favorites) are: Orange Habanero, Tobago Seasoning pepper, Ancho, Black Hungarian, Jalapeno, and Paprika.

2. The first official harvest out of the garden. Tater was excited this past Sunday to discover some Cherry Belle radishes that were big enough to pick. They were some of the ones that we had planted under a low tunnel this past February. That's over 3 weeks sooner than last year! I didn't realize how much earlier that was then last year until I checked my 2010 garden journal. The lettuce and peas that were under cover are also way ahead of last year's crops. A handful of radishes is not something to get too excited about, but it's pretty cool to see what just a little bit of season extension can do. That brings us to...

3. I've finally gotten started on my trampoline frame hoop house. The final dimensions are going to be 14'x15', which is about 5' shorter than originally planned, but it will fit into the garden better this way. It will be about 7' tall in the center, and will have a 3' bed on each side and a 4' bed running down the center. I need to get the conduit or lumber (whichever I can scrounge up) for the runners and ridge pole. I won't put plastic over it until fall, but I'm going to get some stuff in the ground here soon, and I might try putting the low tunnel inside it to get a jump start on some of the Silver Fir Tree tomatoes. Long range, I'd like to be able to overwinter the chickens in there, along with growing food. In any case, it's nice to be making headway on on of my goals from New Years.