Breather

Oh boy, oh boy, I really DO have hope of getting caught up! I'm almost to the end of March. Just two months to go, sigh.

Meantime, I'll reward myself by indulging in a quickie update of what's happening on the Petris farmstead.

Our 19 Australorps are continuing to grow, though not quite as fast as when we accidentally had them on the 24% protein organic turkey starter mash! I have a beautiful brand new coop that my sister made. It's a "chicken tractor" on steroids: four by ten feet, with the coop 4x4 on top of one end of the run and nice big wheels. I need to lower the wheels a bit though because our ground is pretty uneven and I'm having trouble moving it. Just two days ago we finally separated the boys from the girls. We recently got 4 older laying australorps (too impatient to wait for our girls to start laying in late July)... and judging from the missing back feathers, I'd say our boys are liking older women. So I've beefed up a run I built earlier and moved all 10 teenage boys into it, leaving the 9 teenage girls and the 4 older gals in the main coop.

Oh, and the boys' voices are changing.... I hope they get big enough to 'process' before we start getting a full-blown chorus in the mornings.

The garden is coming along, somewhat slowed by too much rain to finish up my digging.

VEGGIES
Potato plants are visible, though I'm afraid our cats dug up some of them (replacing them with their own kind deposits).
Carrots not doing much.
Radishes of course doing great.
Beets, onions, cucumbers, okra and squash went in too recently to know
Transplanted tomatoes, peppers and eggplants doing nicely. I've still got about 20 or so tomato plants in the greenhouse that I need to dig up some space for.
Loads of peas, broccoli and leeks all doing nicely.
More lettuce and spinach on the way.

FRUIT
Flowers on the strawberries.
Applies all blossoming now, pears and plums all done blossoming.
Misc. berry shrubs blossoming (lingonberry, blueberryx2, and what's the other one?)

HERBS
Got all my herb garden laid out and planted/transplanted - I'd started about half of them in the greenhouse.

OTHER STUFF
I've got all the blackberry roots dug out now around the buildings, except for one small patch. That was one of the hardest things I've ever done. Great for the arms, lousy on the back (back to the chiro).

I also started doing a little pruning. I haven't let myself do much because I'm afraid I'll get carried away and want to do nothing else... there are a ton of old fruit trees that desperately need work. But I shaped up one tree by the greenhouse that was looking particularly sad - what a joy to get the dead wood off and let the beautiful bones of that tree show through.

Well, there's lots more but that's enough for now. For a total rookie doing this about an hour a day for relaxation, I'm feeling awfully proud of my little gardens... hopefully we will have veggies coming out of our ears in the summer and I can put my Christmas-present pressure canner to good use.