I usually start these roundups by saying how many eggs our hens produced. Well, they quit laying towards the end of last year. Between their age and the cold, it wasn’t too surprising. Well, about the middle of January we got an egg. And then about every two or three days we’d get another one. Given that egg prices were going insane, it was nice to have enough eggs for the occasional cake or whatever. Then one morning I went out and found that five of our six chickens were dead. Something had gotten in and killed them. And it came back a few days later and got our last chicken. About a week later we did manage to trap the likely culprit:
So we don’t have any
chickens right now. We need to get some
supplies, and then we can hopefully get a crew together to board up the holes
and do some other, low priority but needed things in the coop. Once that’s done, we’ll get some chicks and
hopefully in a few months get back in the egg business.
Other than the five or
six eggs we managed to get, the only other harvest these last few months were
the parsnips. For some reason, we didn’t
have that many germinate last year, but we got enough for four meals. One with fresh parsnips, and the other three
in the freezer.
The only thing planted so
far this year have been some potatoes. I’m
doing a little experiment where I planted seven smallish potatoes and we’ll see
how many I get in return with minimum work.
I’ve planted potatoes at the end of fall to have them come up as soon as
it warms in the spring, but I didn’t get around to it last year. It’s still freezing a few nights a week, but
it should be a few weeks before they start growing, so hopefully it will be
warm enough by then.
The only other garden
stuff I’ve been working on are my raised beds.
I have three put together – there’s still one more I need to put together
– and two of them are “filled.” I would love to have them fully full, but I’m
trying to fill them on the cheap. I put
logs and sticks in the bottoms, but I’m filling them with regular dirt. I’m screening the dirt to get the big rocks
out, but it is a slow process. I started
last fall, but I stopped once the snow came.
And, of course, it seems every other day it rains, which gums up the
works. My plan/hope is that while I’m
using just plan dirt, I’m also adding in a bunch of organic stuff, from leaves
and what I cleaned out of the coop to banana peels and tea bags that normally
would have gone into the compost.
Hopefully, as this breaks down it will turn my dirt into okay soil. And over the years as I add in compost and
other stuff, the soil quality will only improve. That’s the plan. We’ll have to see how it works out.
