vituperation

Would you ever consider posting a diagram of your garden? I know you’ve given us tons of pictures, and I could probably motivate my lazy ass into stitching a representation together (not!), but it’s SO much easier just to ask the Master Gardener! Something like (SQ)for Silver Queen, (T) for Tomato, (N) for Navy Bean, (G) for Green Beans, etc. And amounts, kinda like:

SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ SQ (3 rows of 20 plants each; 2ft between rows, plants 6 inches apart)
N N N N N N N N N N G G G G G G G G G G (1 row of beans, 10 navy, 10 green)
CT CT CT CT CT CT CT CT BB BB BB BB BB BB BB (12 cherry tomato, 12 big boy tomato)

Something along those lines?

Boy howdy. I’m too lazy to do something like that, but I’ll give you all the information I can. The garden is roughly 80 or 90 feet wide, and about 75 feet long. Rows go “longways,” meaning each one is between 70 and 75 feet long. The beans, peas, okra, and corn were planted with a walk-behind seeder that spaced them for me. I try to keep 3 or 4 feet between rows, except for rows of the same thing, like corn. I learned last year that things like squash and eggplant get a LOT bigger than I expected, so I put plenty of room between those plants.

That said, I’m about to lay out a row-by-row pictorial essay of the garden, with comments, so if this sort of thing bores you feel free to skip ahead.

Oh — I spent the ENTIRE weekend weeding, so I’d best be getting some compliments on how damn weed free the garden looks.

The whole garden from the southeast corner. Pictures below are
starting from the far left, where the potatoes are, going row by row.

 

The potatoes, which did NOT get weeded. I put down five pounds of seed
potatoes here, cut into sections and staggered in a zig-zag pattern. I didn’t plant
the potatoes, I put compost on the ground, dropped the tater pieces on, and covered
them with straw. They seem pretty happy, but I’ve no idea if we’ll get any potatoes.

 

There are five rows of corn, from two plantings. The taller (in the foreground)
is Silver Queen, and the stuff at the far end is Golden Queen planted two weeks later so
we’re not overwhelmed with all the corn at once.

 

A row of yellow crookneck squash, with plants about 3 feet apart.
None of the squash germinated really well (I think I got old seeds), so I’ve started
some more in planters to fill in the gaps like the one near the beginning of the row above.

 

The front half of this row is white scalloped squash, and the back
half is zucchini. Plants are about 3 feet apart.

 

The first half of this row is more yellow squash, and the back half
is Black Beauty eggplant. There are 8 eggplant plants.

 

This is a complicated pair of rows. In the front are cukes, with hog panels
for them to grow up. There are about 10-12 plants to each 8-foot panel. Left is
Straight 8, right is pickling. Behind the cukes are peppers: bell, jalapeno, poblano,
habanero, cayenne, and a devil’s tongue. My bhut jolokia didn’t germinate, damnit.
Beyond the peppers is a single row of 10 Ichiban Japanese eggplants.

 

Tomatoes. In the left row, closest to the front, are 5 or 6 SunGold cherry
tomato plants, followed by 5 or 6 Celebrity. Everything else is Roma. There are 27
plants in each row, supported by cages I made out of 47″ field fence. There are t-posts
down each row, and the cages are tied to them. Finally, there are soaker hoses run down
each row.

 

These are soybeans, for Robyn to use for edamame. They also didn’t
germinate well, probably because they’re organic and therefore weak.
I have some good chemically treated seeds I need to plant to fill in the gaps.

 

Rattlesnake green beans, with 60″ welded wire fence for support.
There are so many plants an ant could walk from one end of the row to the
other without touching the ground.

 

A double row of okra, still very small because it’s not too hot yet.

 

Blackeyed peas (left) and navy beans, loosely enclosed with 2-foot
chicken wire because they like to spread out. Probably I’ll regret growing them
side-by-side when it’s time to start picking.

 

White onions, from one pound of sets. I planted them about 4-6 inches apart,
and should’ve gotten two pounds.

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BTW in case I missed it what happened with the dogs that were running over your property?

They haven’t been back.

Have you seen This American Life on Showtime? Part of the last episode of season 1 was shot at a farm in Iowa and is about pigs and raising them. One of the film crew was turned off of meat altogether at the time by the whole process. I just watched it this evening and it made me think of you!

No, we don’t have Showtime. I can imagine that being in a commercial pig farm would turn just about anyone off of eating them.

You aren’t going to eat the fluffy headed chicken, are you?

Not unless we have to. The fluffy-headed ones are for entertainment, and the occasional egg.

I’m seriously thinking of becoming a vegetarian!

If it’s because of me, I feel like I have failed somehow.

Will the momma be as protective of them as the momma kittie is with her babies?
That video was awesome and I have to admit (no offense) that I was suprised to see a gospel song video from you!

She’s pretty protective of them, but I haven’t seen her attack any of the other chickens. She gives them a warning if they get too close, and they move away. As to the video, good music is good music.

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Some random notes:

I went to the doctor and got a cortisone shot in my elbow, which hasn’t helped at all. This does not give me a warm fuzzy feeling about my elbow’s future.

I bought myself a Zojirushi bread maker for my birthday (then told everyone to give me money ), and it kicks ass. Very very good bread this thing makes.

We had a nightmarish trip to the co-op yesterday. All I wanted was some pig feed, chicken feed, cracked corn, and pine bedding. After an eternity of waiting at the loading dock, they came out with everything, only cedar bedding instead of pine (cedar is poisonous to chickens). I checked the receipt and noticed they’d rung it up as cedar (this was the same guy I had a hard time getting the correct refund from a couple of weeks ago). I went back in to the front (the store part) only to find that they only had one bag of pine, so they refunded the difference and sent me back to loading for the single bag. Which the loading guys couldn’t find. Back to the front for another refund, then home. Where Robyn discovered they’d charged my card $40 more than they were supposed to (a typo - $155.55 instead of $115.55). So we had to go BACK to the co-op again.

Right now, we have over 700 pounds of animal food in our garage. Holy shit.

We have 52 chickens. Holy shit.

Building a second trough seems to have eased the pig bullying situation somewhat.

Speaking of pigs, I have discovered a form of alchemy that blows that lead-into-gold thing away. Did you know that a pig will happily turn buckets and buckets of weeds from your garden into sweet sweet bacon? Now THAT’s magic.

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McLovin has finally started earning his keep. As you guys know, we’ve been selling our extra eggs for $2 a dozen. But, it turns out that the fact that those eggs are fertile and can be turned into cute little chickies with an incubator or broody hen means that people will pay more for them.

Considerably more.

I’ve sold two dozen on eBay in the last week, and have another dozen listed now.

Between the free meat babies he provides and the money from eggs he fertilized, McLovin is turning into quite the valuable addition.

Plus, it’s kind of cool knowing babies from our chickens will be all over the country.

Side note: I also list the fertile eggs on Craigslist, and Friday I got an email from someone asking, “What do you have to do to get the eggs to hatch?”

CITY FOLK!

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Mama chicken continues to be a mostly good mother. I kept her penned in a section of the coop with the chicks for a couple of days, then let her out yesterday morning. She took the babies right out and started showing them around. It’s pretty cool to watch her, because she has several different clucks to communicate with them — from “here’s some food” to “you’re getting too far.”

She also feeds them by grabbing food and dropping it in front of them, which is mighty cute to see.

The only thing that I worry about is that she doesn’t want to go back into the coop at night. She spent last night under the coop with her babies under her, despite our best efforts to get them all inside. I guess all I can do is hope that no predators come get them during the night, but nature is nature.

The other chickens pretty much leave the babies alone. There’ve been a couple of minor chasing incidents (minor as in a chase of two or three feet), but that’s it. McLovin couldn’t be less interested in them.

 

 

 

 

 

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I built a playpen yesterday for the meat chicks, and took them out. They really like being outside. Hard to blame them.

 

 

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