Mid Summer on the Farm

Yes, they say it is summer but this is one of the wettest and coolest I remember in a long time.  Several days this week we had thick cloud cover, drizzle, and temperatures never reaching 60 degrees.  Thursday was especially bad as I did pruning off the Island all day in heavy rain.  After we completed our evening walk we were treated to one of the most beautiful rainbows I've ever seen - then a second one appeared.  I was about to feed the goats their evening snack and just couldn't break away from looking at the rainbows, when two ravens flew through it.  Oh my, I thought, this makes up for the crappy weather!

Some of our Garlic ready to hang to cure

Pam dug the garlic out - a very good crop this year of large heads.  She'll tie bunches of six heads or so and we'll hang them on the rafters of our front covered porch to cure in the shade for a month or so, then clean them up and store them in mesh bags.  The garlic will last us until the next harvest.

Our Buckwheat Bed with squash and carrots

Pam watering the corn last night

We have two vegetable beds we never planted this year so I planted buckwheat in them.  Buckwheat is a good summer cover crop and the bees will love the flowers.  Speaking of bees, we have another swarm in our garden.  I sure hope it didn't come from our main hive!

Bee Swarm on our Garden Fence

We decided to replace our drake (male duck) named DJ.  I'm going to miss him, he is so mellow but a great rater.  When rats come into the duck house at night to share in their grain, he grabs them and drowns them in the water bucket, either leaving them in there or throwing them out.  Our problem is that two of our female ducks are his daughters and many of their ducklings have died from unknown reasons.  We are guessing that the cause is inbreeding. 

DJ (Don Juan) our Drake

The new chicken house with a chicken starting to lay her egg in the smallest nest - also the most popular!

All of the chickens are now living in the new house now.  I have the old one locked up and when time permits I'll tear it down.  I'm going to keep two of the posts that are set in concrete and turn them into Scarecrows.  Scarecrows have been successful at our farm in protecting our birds from eagles and hawks.

Steam raising from our compost pile behind the fence

Tomorrow we'll be butchering half of our meat birds - all of the males.  We have about 45 in total.  We'll let the hens grow with the boys for two weeks and then process them.  Tonight I'll remove the feed just leaving them water to clean out their intestines.  We did 45 last August and still have nine in the freezer - so this is a good number for us.

The Broilers in their summer home

The Broiler Chicken Yard

We don't use the popular 'Chicken Tractor' concept.  Though the chicken tractor is better than cages, I prefer to let my birds run in the pasture.  Our birds have plenty of space to search for bugs and weeds and get very good exercise.  I've seen other people's chicken tractors and believe they are not much better than living in a small cage.  We lose very few to predators.