The field has been disced

Well, it has been a busy week here on the farm. Most importantly, the field was disced last Thursday by our neighbors ranch manager. We, the farm, do not own a tractor, we just have a walk behind spader (small, looks like a rototiller). We were so excited when we saw the neighbors tractor out in our field and his ranch manager hooking up the disc to it. He drove the disc around the field about three times on Thursday, which broke up the soil very nicely. He will do the same one more time this week, once some of the biomass has broken down.


The field getting disced the first time around

Another excitment: We got our chickens! We ended up getting three hens and a rooster from a guy that was moving up in Sonoma. We got a pair of buff orpingtons, a barred rock and a sexling. We have already got about 10 eggs from them! The orpingtons are having a little trouble adjusting to their new home though. The female has gone broody (Disposed to sitting on eggs to hatch them), which would be fine, except she has no eggs to hatch! We put some fake, marble eggs in the coop so that the chickens would know where to lay their eggs and she adopted some of these. The reason it is not a desirable state to have your chicken in is because she does nothing but sit in her hen box! She does not eat, drink, lay more eggs, or go outside. So, we are trying to break it by keeping her out of the chicken coop and in a cage in the barn. Our rooster is having some bowel issues. We took him to the vet last week after noticing blood in his stool. We kept him inside for a day and he seemed great; everything was normal. Well, after a day back out, he was constipated again! We did not want to pay to take him to the vet again, so he has moved inside again where we have been feeding him things to try and "lube" him up ( apples, strawberries, peanut butter, and even vaseline). Sounds like a pretty good gig to me! (except the eating of vaseline) He has been waking us up with his crowing now the last two mornings at 5:30am! He then continues crowing until around 10am. We are really hoping he gets back to "regular" soon so that he can move back out!! We built the chickens a little run to play in until they get used to their coop, after which time we will allow them free range into the yard. They always get locked into the coop at night though to protect them from the abundance of wild life out here!


The pair of buff orpintons and the sexling.


The barred rock out in the run we built.

We moved a lot of the vegetables that are ready to be transplanted out of the greenhouse when we saw the field being disced last week. We are hardening them off -- getting them ready for cooler temperatures and more wind. We moved out our cauliflower, kale, some of our tomatoes, and chard. At night these vegetables are covered with remay crop cover, a woven fabric, to help keep them a little warmer. We are hoping these will be planted out by the end of this week or the beginning of next. We did get another 4/10th of an inch of rain on Sunday/Monday, which will delay discing by a day or two, but mostly we were very happy about the rain. It really broke up the soil and saturated it very nicely. We also started half our melons and cucumbers this week along with some watermelon. We are not going to grow a whole lot of watermelon this year, it is more of an experiment. We are trying two seedless varieties so see how they do and growing one big,red one. Oh, we can't wait for those to be ready (probably not until August)!


The plants being hardened off are under the white "box". Our greenhouse behind it and the beautiful disced field in the background.

Anticipation is really starting to build now, and we can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel - the tunnel being an unusually wet and cold spring! With only 6 weeks left until summer, we know that the cool damp weather has to be coming to an end. Mornings are still quite crisp, with temps dipping in to the mid 40's. They say the warm season extends quite late around here, so we'll be hoping for that indian summer to bring hot weather in through September/October. Well we need to get out to work now, but hopefully our next entry will be all about everything we've been planting and transplanting in the field!