Welcome
This year I have a few welcome guests in the main garden out back. There’s a beautiful row of sunflowers. They are certainly very welcome, most likely deposited there from some seed that I fed to the pigs.
Hopefully in the coming years I’ll have space to plant a few rows of these beauties. They’re such happy flowers, they look especially happy in the evening with the sun setting behind them. The nice thing is that these lovelies will also provide seeds for our chickens, that is if the squirrels don’t find them first!
Do you grow sunflowers in your garden?
Share this:
The Great Potato Harvest
Earlier this week, the great potato harvest began. If you remember, I planted about 200lbs of seed potatoes. The ‘Red Gold’ and ‘Dark Red Norland’ potatoes were ready to be dug up. Neither of these will keep for a long time, so we’ll be eating them like mad. Any extras that we don’t eat will be fed to the ducks, chickens and pigs.
The rest of the potatoes are still growing. They are starting to die back, but they won’t be ready for harvest for at least another month or so. That’s the nice thing about growing a 70 day potato, you can harvest them early and be eating potatoes long before your main crop is ready.
I planted a huge portion of the main garden in potatoes. Why? Because they’re fairly easy. Potatoes grow so quickly, they smother the weeds quite well. They also produce very well, calorie for calorie, better than any other garden crop. I planted them in early June, mulched them in early July and that was it.
These ‘Dark Red Norland’ potatoes are quite lovely to look at. The color is quite amazing when you first spot them in the soil, they’re bright fuschia. I’ve grown them before, but I’m always surprised by how bright they are at harvest. Some red potatoes can be difficult to spot when you’re harvesting, not so with these beauties, that bright pink is easy to see.
The ‘Red Gold’ potatoes were planted rather close, this makes them produce a greater number of small potatoes rather than a few large ones. When I have boiling potatoes like this, I prefer them to be on the small side so they cook up quickly. Overall, the potato harvest is going quite well this year. We’ve been enjoying eating potatoes once again.
Do you grow early, mid and late season potatoes?
Share this:
Quote of the Day: Robyn Griggs Lawrence
“I know we’d be nuts to patently give up the machines that permeate our homes and make our lives so much easier. But what if, everyone in a while – especially when the world around us seems crazy and uncontrollable – we submerge our hands into warm, soapy water and hand a towel to our significant other. Or we take ten minutes to sweep the floor, focusing all our attention on that simple task with its ancient symbolic reference to sweeping away the bad spirits and the stale energy that may be lurking in the corners. What if?”
Robyn Griggs Lawrence (The Wabi-Sabi House: The Japanese Art of Imperfect Beauty)
My dishwasher died many years ago and I’ve been washing dishes by hand ever since. It forces me to slow down and enjoy the moment, to think about what I see outside my window, to appreciate the things I have, to cultivate simplicity. Sometimes doing our chores the old fashioned way helps us cultivate mindfulness and it can help us appreciate what we have.
What is one chore you like to do by hand?
Share this:
More Pets – Kind of
This past Wednesday I received 5,000 meal worms from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm.
They’re alive of course, and I put them in a container on the back porch filled with wheat mids. I’ll be using them as my starter colony to grow meal worms for my chickens and ducks during the cold winter months.
After doing some research, chickens are supposed to lay better in the winter if they have a more natural source of protein. I’ve read in various places that people have great success giving their chickens live meal worms and red wrigglers from a worm bin in the cold winter months when they can’t scratch for their own live food. Even if they don’t lay more eggs my chickens will sure enjoy them as snacks and they’ll make the eggs they do lay much healthier! This is all part of my effort to close the loop of what comes into my garden, should be an interesting experiment.
Do you grow any feed for your animals?
Share this:
Friday Favorite: Family Visits
For the past week, my parents have been visiting. We’ve seen a few sights, hiked, visited the ocean, chatted, walked around the garden, drank some coffee and of course we’ve eaten a respectable amount of ice cream.
My parents seemed particularly fond of the menagerie here at Chiot’s Run. They loves giving the pigs snacks and my mom kept a keen eye on the ducklings, herding them back to their pool when they wandered off into the woods.
It’s always nice to visit with family, especially now that we are separated by many miles. Usually we’re the ones that end up traveling back to Ohio where they all live, but it sure is nice to share our neck of the woods with those closest to us.
Does your family live nearby or far away?
