Saturday, July 14, 2012

Midnight sun kids,chickens, garden.

 On nice nights, such as these, my kids accompany me for our evening chore walk. It includes shooing and herding chickens into their indoor coops and closing them in safe for the night. Our main predators are fox, lynx and ravens. If you've raised poultry in the Interior without bird netting, I'm guessing you've encountered ravens. They can massacre a large amount of small birds in a short amount of time. We've lost full sized male ducks to Ravens! Most chore rounds include my children chasing after and holding chickens. You can imagine how pleased the chickens are with this arrangement.



How does that Strawberry taste Noah? The strawberry patch is in full swing. This is only our second summer with perennial Toklat strawberry plants that we've dug up from friend's gardens and transplanted into our own. Last year, most didn't make it out of the garden. I managed to make one batch of strawberry rhubarb jam. This year is looking more promising. The kids and I are each eating about twenty daily in the garden, and my second bed which is lower down is a couple weeks behind my top bed. So, I'm thinking the strawberries are going to get more plentiful over the next couple weeks, and if we can take a break from snacking for a couple days, we'll be jam making.

                                               Avery, collecting weeds for the Cornish Cross.

This week we started picking shelling peas. Some even made it into the car for snacking on while in town. We also harvested the first broccoli and cauliflower heads. We've been enjoying small zucchini, scallions, radishes, lettuce, spinach and napa cabbage, in addition to herbs. I re-sowed cilantro, chinese cabbage, spinach, lettuce and beets this week. I've stopped planning meals ahead this week. Instead we make sure and take a basket up to the garden and whatever looks good is what we are cooking up. Happy me!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Our strawberries never make it out of the garden and neither do our peas. Greedy little hands..