Third times a charm?!

So I tried again this morning and I couldn't get my pics to upload so i'm on the third try. I have been so busy lately I wanted to update but just couldn't get around to it, not that its that hard?!

I spent a bit of time potting up in the last week, heres a squash that I thought looked cool, all of my squash have super healthy big roots.

Here are the tomatoes that were started the earliest. They are doing well and are looking to get planted soon.

These are all the tomatoes that I will be selling. I started them about 2 weeks after the others.

We think that this is the biggest egg that we have gotten, weighing in at a whopping 3.81 ounces. When we were at the market some guy actually accused me of selling duck eggs as chicken eggs. 

Molly was defending her empty bowl, she was actually growling and barking but they didn't really seem to be deterred. You know you are small when chickens aren't scared of you.

And last but not least here are the finished gourds. We took them to the Hartville flea market on saturday and did pretty good. We will be going back in a couple of weeks with them again and all the plants. Let me know if you would like to purchase one!

We got some good things done over the weekend, good and productive, I will update soon with pictures!

Sunshine!!

It's nice and sunny this morning, it has been very chilly and dreary here all weekend. Today is supposed to be 60 and sunny so thats a nice change, good for the seedlings too. Heres the spout updates, first off are some of the herbs, some of those seeds are soooo tiny its amazing anything grows out of them.

These are mostly the surplus tomatoes there are also some peppers and eggplant too.

Tomatoes are on the far end, I will post a closer pic of those later on. I think a couple of the earlier really cold nights had stunted some of them, it seemed like some were even burnt and all their leaves fell off. So I figured that what is it gonna hurt to leave them and see what happens, well all but like 9 made it and have mostly all of those damaged ones have caught up with the good ones.

Here is the red raspberry patch, they just started to come up like a week ago and have been growing fast.

Here is the public service announcement of the week. Do not ever use those expandable peat pods with the netting over them to start your seeds. They are marketed as you are to just plant the whole thing in the ground and they will degrade, well this one had grown a season and then sat in my compost for at least 2 years and look how degraded that netting is. Right. Also notice how the roots started growing up through the hole instead of through the netting, not good!

Lets visit the girls. I am pretty sure there was some disappointment yesterday when they realized the compost pile was gone (thank goodness). When I let them out of the run they usually start to walk then full on run over to the pile, they did this and then just kind of poked around the flat ground and wandered away.

Before.

After.

Funny girl found a nice spot where the pool used to be to start a good dust bath.

Heres one days jackpot, of course these were not all in the basket, they were all over the coup.

My dad was talking about how cool he though double yolkers were and that store should sell them, I responded with mine did that all the time when they first started laying and did for a while after but its been many many months since I had seen one. Next day ->

This little sunflower started itself right in the middle of the floor in my greenhouse. Well I am going to see just how far we can go with it! Most of them got way taller than the roof last year so we shall see what happens.

The gourds are clean and I have started painting and staining. This is not all of them, I have about 1/3 more to add. If you wish to see one closer they will hopefully all be for sale at the Hartville Flea Market memorial day weekend. Tell are your richie shabby chic/country lovers to come on out and buy one for everyone they know.

Letting them overwinter in the leaves in the garden produced the most awesome designs on the gourds, I think they are beautiful. I am also a nerd. I want to do a bunch with just clear coat on them, hopefully others will like the natural look. 

Heres the test batch, there will be a learning curve on the stain, the first little blue one showed lots of "brush" marks so I had to figure how to put it on to work with that, there is no way to do it without marks, it does not absorb stain like wood would do. The paint is pretty easy. I just love them, I want to keep them all and hang them from my trees like a crazy collector. Well at least I will just keep the ones that crack or are defective somehow. Drive by in a month and see how that worked out for me.

I had wanted the big compost pile to work so badly but it was just too big to turn and got out of hand. While moving this pile we got to the bottom and look what I found! Perfect black gold, I got a total of 3 full wheelbarrows, enough to spread a thin layer on all the garden veggie beds. I was pretty awesome. Its just what it is supposed to be, crumbly soft and earthy smelling. Just lovely. Its showing up a bit light in the picture as it was pretty black looking in real life.

I will leave you with this picture of the new feature at the chicken spa-dust bath area in my flower beds. Its the hosta salad bar! I think it took 2 whole seconds before the polished off all 4 of them on the side of the house. Opps, small fence now up, the spa is shut down for now!

Birds were chirping this morning

Today was a balmy day in Ohio, in the 50's, which means you don't have to look to hard to find flip flops and shorts. I was on my way out to the chickens when I decided that since we have a bunch of rain on the way I maybe should get the gourds out of the garden and let them finish drying in the greenhouse.

These are some nasty gourds. I wiped a lot of the outer skin off that held all the mold and wet leaves, but they still smelled. Smelled enough that when I tossed a broken one to Mabel she thought enough of it to rub her neck in the guts that plopped out. And that means a lot, she saves the neck rubbing for the especially putrid stank. 

I'm sure that I will be shuffling these around when the seedlings are in full swing. There ended up being about 16 broken/ rotten where they lay/ I dropped on accident- gourds. And about 100 are left now in the greenhouse. I hope they all make it. There weren't too many that were all the way dry where you could hear the seeds rattling inside. There were quite a few that you could shake and tell they were full of guts and liquid.

Since it was so nice I thought I would let the ladies out early and put them back before dark. Usually I let them out about an hour before dark and they make their way back in without going too far. Well over winter they must have grown some courage because they almost sprinted to the outskirts of the yard like right now. So after a bit I had to round them up and get them back in. Mabel decided she wanted to play with one with teeth, not good. She chased her for a minute or so making her fly around until she almost turned into fresh dinner with a side of feathers, time out.

Our yard turns into a swamp in the spring slash anytime it rains. We have like a foot of dirt and then it is straight clay. I have tossed around the idea of building a moat complete with drawbridge at the driveway, we'll see about that, I want to screen in the back deck this year so that may be put on the back burner. This is the slop mess in front of the greenhouse door. 

These are my bad uggs, they used to be good ones a long time ago. The first time I wore them to get eggs and you get some chicken poo in the tread, well, it's all down hill from there. 

Good Monday

The sage has sprouted some tails over the last couple of days. I'm not sure how long you are supposed to leave them in the bag though, so I will have to do some research on that tomorrow.

The red onions and the leeks are taking off also.

My other project for this year is to make birdhouse's out of gourds. I planted about 20 or so plants last year and I harvested around 200 gourds. I have done a lot of reading on how to go about making them and I can't wait to start. If all goes well I will be selling them at a local flea market and saving the cash for a vacation.

 I am going to plant more this year also. I'm not sure if they will be in the same spot on the outside of the garden fence though. I got some other squashes that I may need to plant there. I am planting some of the saver squashes so that I have some fresh vegetables to feed the chickens over the winter when we are low on goodies. I don't like them just eating their feed, I feel like since they can't free range with all the snow that they are missing out on some extra nutrients.