A hail storm

About a week ago, the skies darkened and thunder roared through the sky. When the clouds burst we were pelted with hail of mixed sizes, from pea sized, up to walnut sized hail. All the chickens ran for cover, except the Polish rooster, who was running around the back yard in a frenzy. I grabbed a cardboard box for cover and went out after him. I caught him and put him in the box and put the box in the coop. He screamed and screamed, as roosters tend to do, and when I opened the box in the coop, he was limp. Must be some sort of playing dead, survival technique. Anyway, the hail passed and the chickens were unharmed.

The garden took a good beating. Tomatoes, peppers, chard, collards, pumpkins, and lots of other plants were shredded or dented beyond usefulness.

Hail on the back patio

Pomegranate

One of my pomegranate plants has been laden with about a dozen fruit this year, its first year of fruiting, and the fruits have started to get that nice, red color. Then the rain came and I worried about the fruit splitting. Pomegranates and figs both split their fruit when they get too much water timed with ripening fruit. The figs split, and the chickens didn't mind eating those. A couple of the less-red pomegranates split, so I picked them and tasted them. The variety is called Sharp Velvet, and these two fruits are definitely under ripe, yet edible. I don't mind tartness in certain fruit. I am hoping the other fruits get to ripen more before more rain comes, just so I can find out what kind of sweetness this pomegranate can produce.

I think these are the most beautiful fruits around. The garnet sacs surrounding the seeds are jewel-like.

The Chicken Show

The chicken show. The small ones.

Small chicks

Just a few of the eight smallest chicks in their straw yard.

The smallest chicks have been out in the small straw yard, sharing it with the bigger chicks. There is some definite territorial enforcement going on, which according to the chicken book is normal and doesn't need refereeing from me. The two groups mostly stick to themselves except when a larger chick decides to show its dominance and go after the smaller ones. A lot of peeping ensues and the small ones run off, herd like, to another side of the enclosure. Mostly it is peaceful co-existence.

The small ones still sleep apart from the larger chicks, just because their secured enclosures don't offer much room for escape for the small ones. And I can wheel the small ones into the garage overnight if it is going to be too cool at night, which I've done the past few nights. Tonight I am leaving them outdoors, under the covered patio, with several layers of row cover and a topping of burlap on their wagon. The air is still tonight.

My neighbor asked me what I'm going to do with all the eggs once the new ones start laying. Partly it depends on the size of the eggs, since the ratio might be two of their eggs to one large egg, and I could use up quite a few in making fresh pasta and such. The d'Uccle egg size is listed as "tiny" and the Cochin egg size is listed as "below average." I don't know how that relates to standard egg sizes, so I will weigh the eggs when they appear and go from there.

I sort of realized that I hadn't really put a ton of thought into what happens if I get a dozen eggs every day, no matter the size. Obviously my friends are willing to help out by accepting eggs from my chickens, but I could still have many eggs to deal with. It is several months off, so I will make a preliminary plan, and see what happens. I'm still not sure all the chicks are females, so that could knock a few eggs out of the mix.

At any rate, they are so much fun to watch at this point, I had no idea chickens could be so endlessly entertaining. I guess fifteen years without television can do that to a person.

Figs

Two different types of figs. The purple one is a Mission improved, the stripped ones are Panache. Both are delicious. All the fig trees have been producing this year, the younger ones have made fewer figs than the older trees, but that is to be expected.

I have found that my Polish chickens like figs, so if a scrub jay has hacked on apart and left it on the tree, I'll throw it to the chickens. Also the fallen figs were devoured by the chickens when they were out under the tree.

My oldest fig tree is Conadria and it makes small, greenish yellow-skinned figs with sweet, mellow interiors. They are apparently good drying figs (they'll even dry on the tree, I've read), and I have a tray of them in my solar powered food dehydrator. Hopefully good results will ensue. The dried tomatoes and dried peaches worked beautifully.

I love to eat the figs fresh, right off the tree. During fig season I usually have several figs off the tree throughout the day. They are one of my favorite edibles. They are drought tolerant once established, which is a bonus in our Mediterranean climate. The wild birds also love figs, and this year I tied flashy bird-scare tape to the largest tree, and it has worked better than no tape last year. More figs for me.

More on the new chicks

Partridge Cochin possibly crossed with d'Uccle

All 13 chicks spent their first night together. In the morning the larger five were picking on the smaller eight, so I separated them, leaving the five in the borrowed growing coop and moving the smalls into my yellow garden wagon. They all seemed much happier being with chicks of their own size. 

Today I rolled out some temporary fencing in a small spot outside my office so the five could get out and scratch and dust in the soil. I opened the fold-down door and they were all out on the ground on their own accord, pretty quickly. I threw in some chick scratch and moved their waterer on the ground and they've been exploring the small patch of garden, under a bamboo plant. After they were clearly comfortable with the space I threw in a couple of biscuits of straw, which they took to immediately, scratching at the sides and climbing around on it. 

It will be a while before the small ones get to go on the ground, but they seem to be doing well in the garden wagon, with a mesh screen on top to keep them in and predators out. I cover the thing with floating row cover at night to protect them from any breeze.

Weather forecast is suggesting thunder and lightening for the next two days, with cooler night temps, so I'll have to make sure the small ones stay warm enough.

It is definitely different having all these chickens that can actually see their surroundings quite well. They are fast too, when going after a fly for example.

The Polish chickens we've had for a year have excellent hearing, but not such great sight on account of their puffy feather heads. It will be several weeks before the five can get put in with the Polish, and them more time still for the small ones to be introduced. It will be an adjustment for not only the chickens, but for the humans too. Good thing both chickens and humans are very adaptable creatures.

Chicks

My friend got a call about some chicks a woman was looking to send to a new home. Today they showed up.  There were two boxes of them. One group of eight we figured were about 3 weeks old, and one group of five are about five weeks old.
This photo is of the smaller ones.
They are peeping away outside my office door, as dusk falls in their new yard.

Parentage is Mille Fluer or Cochin, or a mixture of the two.

Propagation success

I pruned my pomegranate during the winter. When I found myself with some long pieces of pruned  material I thought I'd stick a branch into the soil and see if it would take. It looked mostly like a dead stick poking out of the ground most of the summer, and I planted all sorts of other things around it. Squash, tomatoes, beans, and some weeds grew there too. It is in a spot I don't get around to very frequently, and today I noticed, beneath the cover of some squash leaves, the stick had sprouted leaves, about 8" high. This has been a good year for various of my propagation projects. The seedling peaches made good fruit, a fig I've nurtured from a cutting finally took off and is fruiting like mad, and it looks like even one of my olive cuttings might have survived. Seeing the pomegranate leaves today made me very happy.

The plant from which I cloned is about three or four years old and is finally fruiting. I will try propagating more of the plant when I prune again this winter. There is a time vs. money trade-off in the process. I have the time to increase my plants in this manner. If I didn't have the time I'd be spending about $25 each for almost any of those trees. More than those two factors, I like the challenge of propagating trees in this way.

Permaculture Teacher Training

I've just been to a week-long permaculture teacher training and retreat in New Mexico. We were 22 students who have all been through the PDC training. Scott Pittman and Larry Santoyo were our teachers. It was a great and intense experience and it has given me much to think about in regard to the directions I want to go in to explore my place in the permaculture community.

Permaculture and Community

Recently I had the luck of finding out that a friendly couple down the road had an organic garden. I've been walking, cycling, and driving past their house for years and through a series of events and correspondence, found myself invited for a visit to the garden.
Community is important in Permaculture and I've struggled somewhat with that portion of my practice. So it was incredibly wonderful to get to know about the organic garden down the road, and the gardener who tends it. Her garden, like ours, is in gopher infested land. She has several raised beds with hardware cloth under them to keep the gophers from accessing her bounty. Her trellises are sturdy wire (cattle panel) supported by stakes. Her tomatoes were tall and well-supported. She waters with what appears to be a drip system. The set-up produces quite an impressive yield. I came away with my bicycle basked filled with trombetta squash, tomatoes of various sorts, and some Asian cucumbers, all grown on trellises. Sharing from the garden seems to be a fairly common trait among my gardener friends and it was great to bring organically grown vegetables home from her garden.

I brought along a container of winter pie pumpkin seeds for her to try growing next year.

When I return from Permaculture teacher training, I plan to invite her over for a visit to my non-linear permaculture jungle garden. By then the pumpkins and squash will likely have taken over most of the front and back gardens.

Tomatoes, squash, and cucumbers from a garden down the road.

Seedling Peaches

The large peach tree in the back yard has been in decline since before we moved here. I made a few years of mistakes in thinning and pruning the tree, causing it to lose a few limbs in the process. This year I thinned the fruit extensively and was able to get a good crop. We had a late rain in July, it rained all day and night, and the weight of the rain on a couple of branches was too much and there was more breakage. The tree still has several good, strong limbs though.
The peaches are delicious and I want to propagate the tree via grafting and have been growing rootstock for that purpose. I tried some bud grafting early this year. My grafting knife was brand new and extremely sharp. Fiddling with those tiny buds and trying to slice the exact shield shape off the rootstock ended up with me having two bloody thumbs and grafts that didn't take. I've decided to try cleft grafting in the next go 'round.
Meanwhile three of the peach seedling trees put on fruit this year. I've tried the fruit from each of them. One of them is completely sweet. One was a little bitter (I think the fruit might have been slightly under ripe) and one only had three fruits, two of which the birds devoured and the third fruit I picked when it had only just softened, and it was pretty tasty.
From the seedlings I'll have good peaches until I can teach myself to get a successful graft going from the old peach tree onto a seedling tree.

Seedling peach. Sweet fruit.

Chickens and the clover patch

My small back yard lawn/pasture has taken hold. It is a mix of grass and clover, with a few various weeds. It took a while for the clover and the grass to get going and I kept the chickens out of the area until it was well enough established to bounce back from their foraging. The area is a small island of green in a mostly bare spot that used to hold a big pile of dead ivy that I'd pulled from the huge amounts of ivy growing in the back yard. Once the ivy pile was truly dead, I used it as a cover for cardboard and newspaper that I used to cover other areas of ivy. The newspaper and cardboard over ivy approached worked quite well. Cutting, pulling, and digging ivy is quite a chore. And with that area bare I decided a small, green meadow/pasture/lawn type space would be nice. And it is nice.
I moved the chicken fencing to allow them access to a portion of the clover lawn/pasture. They moved in to explore and have been eating the clover and grass. I bring them treats from the garden, fallen peaches, seed spikes from salvias - which they peck and scratch at to get to the black seeds, and sometimes a tomato hornworm or a cricket. Egg production has slowed some with the onset of hotter weather.

Rooster in the clover lawn/pasture

The clover has begun flowering and attracts bees and even hummingbirds. The clover takes well to mowing and grows very quickly after. It is fixing nitrogen in a spot that seemed depleted when we got the place, and it is serving wildlife, livestock, and the humans in this system well.

Foxtail millet

In late May I planted the seeds of German Foxtail Millet I'd ordered from Owen at Annapolis Seeds in Nictaux, NS. He keeps a nice blog about things going on at his farm. I am growing the millet so that I can feed it to the chickens once it matures. I'd previously grown pearl millet, which the chickens seemed to enjoy eating right off the plants. Millet is an easy crop to grow, it does not need as much water as maize, and it requires less processing than maize for it to be fed to chickens. The dent corn I've grown and used for chicken scratch has to be put through the grain mill before the chickens can eat it. 

The plants in the foxtail millet stand in the front yard have just started to send out their foxtails, which will eventually extend out of the tops of the plants and hang like fluffy foxtails.

German Foxtail Millet

The stand of millet grows along with some pole and bush beans, which I harvest for dry beans, a few decorative flowers, some soybean plants, several squash plants (which are finally starting their march across the lawn), basil, thyme, melons, cucumbers, and a young almond tree. They all grow together. The pole beans climb the millet stalks.

Seeds forming in bursting patterns.

Hot weather and chickens

The weather has finally warmed up and it is now officially hot. We've had a few days above 100 F and several in the high 90s (that's approx 36+ Centigrade).  The chickens do not appreciate the heat. They have feather coats on year-round, and since they are Polish chickens, they also wear rather fancy feather headdresses. So I put the mister on in their yard to help lower the air temperature, and I replenish their water dishes frequently. Still, they pant from the heat. When they go into the coop to roost they're still pretty hot, the coop has been around 80 F at around 8 p.m., when they go in.
I'll leave the door open for an hour or so, and close them up when darkness falls, still they are hot.
Since their coop is off the grid, putting a fan in there is not an easy solution. I wonder if the coop temperature would lower enough if I hang a block of ice from the ceiling. I will try it out.

At any rate, here's a super close-up view of chicken #2, with her mouth open in a pant.

Chicken #2

Front yard progression

It started with lawn and some foundation shrubs.

Feb 2007

It got a small strip at the road edge for planting, and a ginkgo, pomegranate.

May 2008

Some circles were dug out of the lawn and planted with sunflowers and maize with beans. The first pineapple guava was planted. Sunflowers an hollyhocks at the road edge.

July 2008

A larger excavation, building a berm and basin designed to catch water running off the road. Planted with herbs, more pineapple guavas, lavender, and more.

November 2008

The shrubs started to fill out the space more, and herbs expanded.

April 2009

A rugosa rose blooms in the berm, and various shrubs expand their reach. Volunteer plants started to grow, a fig tree was one.

April 2010

Lots of herbs, blooming shrubs, the pineapple guavas are laden with blossoms this year, calendula rimmed the edge, bamboo, elderberry, lemon balm, lots of lavender and rosemary. Oregano was transplanted there in the winter and has taken hold. It will make a good, year-round groundcover. Thyme is also spreading.

June 2011

Quite a different view of the front yard from across the road now.

June 2011

June First - downpour

This time of year usually finds us basking in hot, sunny weather. We're usually irrigating the garden by now, and the warm-weather plants are usually on their way. Usually. This year has been an exceptionally wet spring. Good news is that it ended a three-year drought. Our water reservoirs and snow packs are all looking very well stocked. The trouble is many of us like the hot weather for which this area is known. Some things in the garden will be delayed or diminished. My white peach tree could be counted on for ripe fruit by July 4, but this year that timeline will definitely be delayed. On the other hand, some plants in the garden prefer this weather, especially the raspberries, which have produced quite well so far, and look like they will continue. Having a diversity of plants and microclimates in the garden is important when the weather is not "normal."

June 1, 2011 downpour

Today we had a big downpour, hail mixed with rain, thunder, rainbow. Last week we had all that plus a small tornado or two touching down out in the less populated area.
All this rain means water for the garden. This has become my mantra. Still, we are looking to be outside, sitting under our big shade tree, sipping refreshing beverages, and watching the resident hummingbird work the abutilon blossoms, rather than observing from inside.

At least I know my seeds and seedlings are being watered (some of the seedlings were battered by hail but many have survived). It will be an interesting season.

Weather variations

Generally by the middle of May our area has warm and sunny weather settled in. This year we've had a cold-ish early and mid spring. The garden has responded a little slower than in previous years. The strawberries are only just beginning to be sweet off the plant, cherries are slowly turning red, nanking cherry is just starting to ripen the fruit. Trees are leafed out and peaches are fattening on the trees, as are apricots. The grape vines have tiny clusters on them, and flowers are flowering. Gophers are having their way with anything they like, and the trapping has been modest thus far.

We'd had a few days into the 80s F, which were rather pleasant in the shade (and the mosquitoes found it lovely in the evening). Then we got a good wind blowing in from the south west (the direction which brings the rain). We had a little thunder, some lightning and the three waves of hail. Small hail was the first pass, then medium (pea sized), then a bit larger size. All this came along with a big rain event and I checked out my water harvesting areas – downspout to apple tree, road to basin/berm) and found it took a bit longer for the water to soak in than with big-ish rain events.

Hail in May

After the storm passed I noted some damaged leaves on various plants, but most things seemed okay.

Harvest

Aside from rhubarb there hasn't been much new to harvest from the garden. The usual herbs and chard are still around, and the weather has been cool for spring, so the strawberries have taken their time getting sweet. The few red ones were rather tart. Today I went and filled my basket with berries and washed, trimmed, and sliced them. Sprinkled with a little cane sugar they'll make their own light syrup and I'll put them into pint jars and freeze them. The batch of berries contains some sweet and some not so sweet, so by the time they sit in the sugar juice for a while they'll be pleasantly sweet. I did this with several quart jars last year and when I thawed the berries they had good texture, color, and flavor. I ate them just as they were. I also made a strawberry mousse for a dessert (which was much too rich for me to eat, but  my dinner companions enjoyed it).

Strawberries

The big white peach tree got a heavy thinning this past weekend (I still have one section to go) and the crop looks very promising. Another harvest on the horizon is raspberries, which I just ate off the plants last year, this year I think there will be a larger harvest to eat.

First tomato blossom

A friend gave me a few tomato plants, big sturdy things that had been grown in used paper coffee cups. I put them in the garden last weekend and noticed just today a few blossoms on one of the plants.
The plant is growing near an apple tree and its accompanying guild plants — yarrow, comfrey, fava beans, narcissus bulbs, and a few volunteer peach seedlings.

tomato flowers

Chickens - an update

White-crested, black Polish bantams.

The three chickens - two hens and a rooster - have settled into their yard and coop. They have become a family of sorts. Rooster first preferred chicken number one to chicken number two, and has since switched his preference. This seems not to change the peck order of the hens, since chicken number one will still give chicken number two a good peck on the head if needed. It just makes chicken number one a bit more independent, which I can appreciate. Chicken number two is much more compliant.

They are a family, actually. They are all siblings, but that seems to not matter to their sexual behavior. In fact I've read that it is preferable to breed a hen with her own sire. Chickens are inbred, and a little dumb from it, but with T Rex's closest living relative, we do what we can.

The eggs come, two to a day, most days. It is pretty much maintenance level for the two humans in the house. The eggs are very good quality, nice and rich yolks and  strong shells.

Through observation I have decided to alter the fencing of their yard to provide them an amount and variety of space in which they seem to keep entertained.

At one end I've started a compost pile of sorts. I chop down various overgrown things,  former plants the gophers have eaten from the bottom, and figure the chickens will either eat some of it or bugs will come and live in the pile, which the chickens will eat.

I sometimes find myself a little surprised that three chickens live in my back yard, and I even want more. Maybe 3 or four more females. I'd like to share the eggs, also keep the rooster a bit more busy.

I look forward to adding the straw/sawdust/chicken poop mix of the coop bedding to the compost pile. I believe richness of soil life will ensue. The garden will thrive on such a richness.

Still they have no other names than those assigned regarding their gender or peck order. Rooster, Chicken number one, Chicken number two.

I've worked hard to be able to pick up the females any old time I want. They come to me when I go out to their yard. The rooster is less interested, much more macho, so he rarely gets handled, unless he's being too cocky. Then I'll catch him and hold onto him, telling him he's such a nice, soft bird, before returning him to terra firma. He does not care for it, but he's kind of a chauvinist, and I'm kind of not. It could all be for naught, but I do have sympathy for the hens when he gets a little uppity.

He's not a mean rooster though. So... I'm not thinking of learning to harvest anything other than eggs just yet.

I recently read a piece in the LA Times regarding urban chickens and the writer uses the term "owning" chickens. I don't really feel like I own my chickens. I feel like a family of birds, for which I am ultimately responsible, lives in my back yard. Somehow the term ownership doesn't feel right, though I do refer to them as "my chickens."