Friday - Update!

It's been a pretty quiet week. Not a lot happening anywhere really.

This week has been somewhat of a whirlwind type of week. Work has been a little on the crazy side - it's Washington's Spring Break so people (with and without kids) have been off this week. At least I'm consistent this week. In at 8 and leave for the day at 5.

The week has also been a little depressing as far as the weather goes. All I want is some warmth or at least no rain, sprinkles, showers...you know precipitation. For instance today started out very windy...so windy that the parking lot is all  messed up!

What makes this really awesome...the trees are not on Fire District property. These trees are behind the dentist office next door. They should come clean this up!

Anyway...Once upon a time we had a big tree right behind our house -

However now we have a pretty somethin' somethin' to look at - 

April 1, 2017

So, what has been going on around here? Not a lot really. Things slowed down quite a bit this past week. There have been other things going on and the evenings don't always allow enough time to do a decent project. Once the days are longer and the weather improves (i.e. not nearly as cloudy) we'll be out doing more stuff. Stuff like cleaning up the garden boxes and the "free-range" garden as well as the bigger garden space. 

However, I did take another peek at my Flower Sprouts...which I am pretty sure a no longer flower sprouts. They were next to the Purple Broccoli (which is also doing nicely) and I suspect they made friends early on and I've got a Kale-Broccoli-Sprout going on. 

You can see the broccoli part in the center of the sprout itself. I'm not necessarily disappointed by this - everything right now is just an experiment. I did pluck one off and had a taste and boy it had good flavor! Definitely from the Brassicaceae family. I may go ahead and let some of these sprouts go to seed and save them for later this year and see if I can get this to happen again. (Update: Took a look at the plants when I got home and what used to be cute short little sprouts are now long "limbs") 

With all of the stuff I have going on in the hoop house, I needed some more storage in the form of shelves. I had the idea to re-purpose a shelf thing that Tom built when we lived in the last house to place trays on.

Originally this did not have access from the front - it just took a little bit to modify so that we could get the trays in and out.

This helped with making more room, on the bench, but I felt that there could be more shelves. So Tom got some of the shelves that were left over from the Dressing Room project and mounted those over the bench.

During the process of installing the shelves

Two more shelves!

All of the trays have been re-arranged (a couple of times) and my shoe rack is set up again at the far end of the hoop house. So there should be plenty of room for Mary when she comes to play too.

There hasn't been much progress on the Chicken Condo. We did manage to get the sides done and then get the whole thing OFF of the saw-horses. Maybe the roof will happen next we'll see. There won't be much of a hurry though... 

Mostly because we are going to start with chicks! The feed store that I used to visit with my family when we had chickens has a schedule of when they will be getting certain breeds of chicky babies in. We have a couple of weeks before the Mottled Java's and Rhode Island White's are available. So, we have a couple of weeks to get a brooder set up and all that goes with it. 

Mottled Java

Rhode Island White

(both photos  from Google Images)

Originally I was thinking of getting Rhode Island Reds - the better known Rhode Island chicken breed. After a little bit of research on the Livestock Conservancy website the Rhode Island White is not a prevalent as their red feathered counterpart - so I think I might try to breed some of these on our little hobby farm. That would be neat! However, this will not be in the same scope of my mom's chicken "collecting" tendencies.

Both of these breeds are considered Dual Breed. When their egg laying starts to slow down we'll be able to process them and put them on the dinner table! It will be a few years down the road (I think). We'll have plenty of practice when we do the meat chickens, but that's a different post altogether.

I love that we are going to go to the feed store that I remember from way back when! The store itself has changed and they offer more than just farmy types stuff now, but it's still a cool place! Go HERE to check them out.

That's pretty much what is happening around our little hobby farm. 

This dude had his bum tooth checked out - he is experiencing a tooth being reabsorbed into his gums...it's been a rough few weeks, could be a few months. He seems to be holding up okay - with his little bed in front of the heater though. 

He's not spoiled...just well taken care of!

It's the weekend again!!