Garden roundup for April

During April, our chickens laid 87 eggs, of which 67 made it to the house.  This is less than the 107 they laid last month.  There are two possibilities for this.  The first is our hens are getting pretty old.  It does seem that whenever we need a bunch of eggs for baking or whatever, we need to crack a few extra because we find some with blood spots in them.  So I’d say their egg laying days are numbered.  The other possibility is, now that the weather is more or less good, they’re running off and laying in some hidden nest.  I did find one nest with three eggs in it that I just threw in the compost because I wasn’t sure how old they were.  My dad is the one who lets the chickens out in the morning, and he says there’s one that immediately runs off to the barn, but I’ve looked in there multiple times and haven’t found any nests.  Of course, something that’s happened in years past, is I’ll stop looking in the barn for nests, and then a month later I’ll go to grab something and find a nest with two dozen eggs in it. 

I finished digging up all of our parsnips.  We have 17 quart bags in the freezer.  One of my goals in the next couple of days is to add some compost to the parsnip bed, work it up, and plant the new parsnips.

Other things I’ve planted so far are some lettuce, which I’m trying something new with, so there should be a post on it in a few weeks if it, hopefully, works.  I also had some potatoes that sat on the porch all winter and were starting to grow.  I planted a couple, but then it froze one night and I didn’t think to cover them.  In years past I’ve planted some potatoes in the fall and let them come up the next spring.  Sometimes these have been hit by a frost or two, but they seem to keep coming back. 

In past months, I’ve said that I planted some onions that had started to grow.  Well, I finally had a spot worked up for them so I transplanted … some.  I think I had planted seven bulbs in three batches over the last few months.  All of them grew, but then they stunted.  I don’t know if they didn’t get enough light, or it was too cold, or what.  But when I transplanted them I found that five of the bulbs had rotted away to nothing.  The other two … might still be alive.  I’ll have to see if they do anything.  I still had five or six little bulbs from last year, one of which had started to grow, so I planted them.  I’ll have to see if they can grow bigger this year.  And lastly, last year for the first time I tried planting onion seeds.  It didn’t go well.  I think all the ones I planted indoors and transplanted out died, and I think few of the ones I direct sowed even germinated, and most of them later died.  I still had some seeds left, so I planted all of them, and again, I’ll have to see if they do anything this year.

There might be something big happening tomorrow.  If it does, I’ll do a post about it, probably in a few days.  If it doesn’t work, I’ll just mention it next month.

A pleasant surprise

Years ago, we filled a couple old tractor tires to make some raised beds for stuff like carrots.  Now, I know some will cry you shouldn’t use tires because who knows what chemicals leak out of them.  That is a concern, but I also know that in the area I live for the past century or so, if you had a pile of brush to burn but it was wet, just throw some used motor oil on it to get it going.  Or, if you had an old tire lying around, even better.  So there’s no telling what chemicals have been raining down on my regular garden for the past century.  And still raining down.  I sadly live in an area where I probably don’t have to go too far upwind to find someone who thinks climate change is all a communist hoax to take away their guns.  They probably burn a tire every weekend just to show the libs.  I am in the process of getting some metal raised beds to grow food in, so in a few years these tires will just be growing flowers. 

Anyway, when these tires were filled, they were just filled with some fill dirt we had.  I wasn’t overly happy with this, because I joked this fill dirt was half gravel, but we didn’t have any good soil to fill them.  Over the years, I’ve added compost and picked out some of the bigger rocks, but I’ve always wanted to screen the dirt to get all the rocks out of it.  But that would mean building a screen.  Which, I just never got around to doing.  One day I was looking online, and I came across these little round pans about ten inches in diameter with three different sized screens you can put in them.  I ordered one, and it works pretty well.  It’s just I have a lot of dirt to screen.  But once it’s done, I won’t have to do it again.

The way the tires were laid out wasn’t that great, so last fall I decided to move them.  Once I get them all moved, the lawn mower will fit between them so I won’t have to use a weedeater to mow.  But with the wet weather last fall, I didn’t get much done.  So I wanted to get them done now, but with the spring wet weather, it’s slow going.  And it turns out my joke that the dirt was half gravel, probably isn’t too far off.  I use the medium screen to get all the sizable rocks out, and then I screen again with the smallest screen, and it seems about a third of what makes it through the medium screen is little pebbles caught by the smallest. 

Besides rocks there have been some unpleasant finds.  I’ve found a couple bits of broken bottles, a couple pieces of metal wire, and an old, rusted latch, or something.  These probably haven’t negatively affected our plants, but it’s better to not have them.

I’ve also found some good things.  There are a bunch of old leaves that fell into the tires as well as small clumps of grass clippings I used as mulch last year.  And there’s bits of old compost, such as flecks of egg shells, shreds of old tea bags, and small pieces of well-rotted wood.  But the biggest surprise are the worms.  It seems about every screen has one or two worms in it.  I don’t know if it’s just because the tires are black and therefore warm in the cool spring, or if there is enough organic matter in the soil for the worms to live on.  One of my biggest worries has been the soil quality not being that great.  Hopefully, I’ve added enough compost over the years to build up some okay soil.  And once I get all the rocks out of it, hopefully plants will grow even better.  Well, the plants I want to grow, not just weeds.

Garden roundup for March

During the month of March, our chickens laid 107 eggs, which is a good chunk of the 250 they’ve laid so far this year.  I guess they’re happier not having to deal with the snow.  But 17 of these were broke.  If there is a hen eating them, I think it is a rare occasion.  I think they’re breaking just because possibly one hen isn’t eating the oyster shells.  There is one hen, at the bottom of the pecking order, who seems to always be off by herself, so maybe the others don’t let her at the feed.  Of course, when I do sprinkle in some oyster shells in their feed, they look at me as if saying, “That’s not food.” I had hoped that warmer weather would let them eat better, and while we’ve had plenty of nice days, we’ve also had rainy, cold spells.  Maybe once spring fully gets going, whoever is laying weak eggs will get the right nutrients.

I’ve started digging our parsnips.  Most are smallish, but I have gotten a couple monsters.  In previous years I’ve dug all the parsnips in a day or two, but this year my mom is having issues with her hand, so she can only peel a few at a time.  So I’ve been digging a basket, then washing them up so she can peel and slice them.  Some we’ve eaten, but at the end of the month we had 7 quart bags of parsnips in the freezer.  And I’ve probably dug up not quite half of what we planted.  Of course, one end of our parsnip patch is shaded a bit, which might be why that end gives smaller ones, while big ones come from the other end.  I’ve been digging at various spots, but I’ve dug most of the ones from the smaller end.  So there might be a few more monsters waiting.  Now I just have to wait for the rain to stop and the ground to dry up some.

The only other gardening news I have is to report our onions aren’t doing so well.  These were ones that started to grow, so I planted them in a pot, hoping I’ll be able to transplant them outside.  They might still be alive, but not so great.  It’s probably just that I have them sitting next to a window and they’re not getting enough light.  We’ll have to see how they do.