Chickens, dog pool, and hops

Okay, good news first. We took the dogs to the 'Drool in the Pool', which is when they open the swimming pool up to dogs the day before they drain the pool. Dia actually got in pretty deep! She hates swimming, but we took her thinking Jax may be into it. Well, Jax had a great time but never got wet. Dia was actually coaxed into jumping into the 3 foot end. She can't resist when her mom is in calling her a 'good girl'. She'd run through flames if I was on the other side calling her a 'good girl'.


Yesterday I was woken up by my neighbor calling my phone every 10 minutes. Finally I got up and answered. Turns out, he had a dead chicken in his front yard. There were spots of feathers everywhere, like a path leading from the barn, around the barn, and ending in his front yard. We examined the body. Then we embarked on solving the mystery:

Something had a chicken dinner.



Okay, so the fact that the body was in the front yard makes us wonder if it could have been coyotes. Coyotes do roam our fields, but would they go that close to the road? We're thinking it couldn't have been a raccoon because the head was still attached, and the body was really eaten up. Raccoon's 'signature' is a missing head. The spots of feathers in the yard were about two feet apiece and a few yards apart. Like something caught it, shook it, and it ran a few yards and then caught again. There were no feathers in the barn or in the chicken yard, which means it was caught outside... sometimes (okay, often) the chickens get out of the fenced in area and do whatever they want. After counting them all, we realized we were missing three... the one body, and two others were missing. The rooster, and a fat feather footed chicken.

I took Dia into the field and had her run around in there... she usually finds dead things in the field. She did not find any chicken bodies. This means if the rooster didn't run off, he was carried off. And he's a big rooster.





We're going with 'wild dog'. Although coyote is still possible. Either way, there must have been at least two of them for them to carry off two huge birds.

We've started locking the birds in the barn. They're mighty mad about it, but they'll get over it, and it'll get too cold to free range soon anyway. We're going to install an electric netting fence.

In other news, Roger harvested his hops. They're growing along the trellis in the back yard. He's hoping he got enough to try to make a batch of beer. He's never brewed before, so this will be an experiment.




Also, the dogs love each other. Love. Here's a video of them making out. This never stops.

Mail box accident

At 7:30am Sunday morning someone woke us up knocking incessantly at the door. Over and over. The dogs were going nuts. We go to the door, Rog in boxers and me in red cat pajama bottoms. There were two deputies at our door to tell us that someone had fallen asleep while driving and hit our mailbox. Really hard. The mailbox and the mail were all over the road. The 4x4 post it was on snapped in half. The woman then corrected to the right, directly in a huge bean field. She drove pretty far into the field too. She was kind enough to call the cops instead of just driving off. She has insurance, so we should hopefully get reimbursed for the new mailbox we had to get.







Then Roger left the mailbox inside while I was shopping and Roger was outside. Jax then ate part of the brand new mailbox and the screwdriver.


In farm news, we harvested the black beans. They're just like regular beans, but you leave them in the pod until they dry. They turn black when they dry. Then you split the pods and pick out the beans.


We also got a pumpkin! It's a bit early, but the vine rotted, so I had to pull it. Not sure what to do with a pumpkin. I've tried making pumpkin bread with real pumpkin before, but it was all stringy.

We're back!

We're back from vacation and our garden has exploded! Notice in the pics below that the tomato plant is taller than Roger.








The yellow squash in the picture is actually yellow zucchini. We are drowning in zucchini. The people who watched our chickens while we were gone took five, and we still have lots when we came back. I tried a new recipe for zucchini, that is basically fried zucchini cakes. It was really good. Here's the recipe:

1 large grated zucchini
1 cup bread crumbs
half cup Parmesan cheese
1 egg
chopped garlic
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp pepper
form into patties and fry in olive oil



We had lots of very large turnips. Unfortunately, we didn't know that turnips like cold weather. The turnips are very very bitter. Any advice for super bitter turnips is welcome.

Blue eggs and strawberries

Blue egg! We're getting about 4 eggs a day now. This is our first blue egg! Hopefully more will come quickly!

Our strawberry plants are putting out huge amounts of runners! I dug up a bunch and potted them. I had no idea how wild these would go. The runners are these long tentacles that produce other baby plants. Some of the runners made babies that made runners and other babies. One of the pics below is a double runner... a baby making a baby. The other pic is my giant bowl of runners. We'll try to keep the plants alive until the spring and replant them in another bed.



And lastly, just for fun, a couple of pics of Roger and I at the 'Taste of Bloomington' is which a food festival here in town. All the restaurants in town set up booths and sell $2 dishes. So you can go to like, 5 booths over the course of the evening and taste a bunch of food. We ate a lot.

strawberries

We planted a large strawberry patch early spring and it has begin to give us strawberries! They are so so good. The plants are sending out tons of 'runners', which are thin vines that make new plants. We're going to pot the new baby plants after their roots get established so we can double our patch. If we had thought this through, we would have just started with a much large patch and spaced the plants really far apart. But we didn't, so there's a bit more work involved. Also: greens, spinach, and romaine lettuce.


Foster Dog Dash has gone back to the shelter. He was way too much of a puppy for us. I took him to the dog park every day after work and he ran and swam and tired out every other dog at the park and still managed to come back to the house and go wild. Dia was so fed up. They did manage to cuddle for about two seconds, so I snapped a picture. I hope Dash gets a home with a jogger or something.

Spring has Sprung

We had our first day at the market! We sold luffa sponges, purple jalapeno starts, dried herbs, and chili pepper strings.




Chickens:


We planted two types of peas, spinach, lettuce, greens, and strawberries. We also planted two very small pawpaw trees. For those of you not from the midwest, Pawpaw trees are about 10 feet tall when grown, skinny, and produce fruit that looks like a small mango and tastes like a mango/banana. They are very good. This plant is only a year old, so they're small. It'll be a few years before we get some pawpaws.

A strawberry plant:

Family visits, Dog has allergies

The first Luffa turned brown so we harvested it. To harvest a luffa, you wait until the vegetable is dead and drying. It's pretty light at this point. Then you cut it off the vine, bang it pretty emphatically on the ground to loosen the skin and seeds, and peel off the skin. Then you can shake out the seeds and set it out to dry.


Roger's dad and brother went to the Lotus Festival with us, which is a huge music festival in Bloomington. There are seven stages playing at once. Unfortunately, it was raining pretty hard, and while the stages were either under big tents or in buildings, one had to walk in the rain to get from venue to venue. Here we are at the very beginning of the festival, waiting for the first show to start. At this point, we are only mildly damp.



And here's a pic of the boys:


And we think Dia has seasonal allergies. She's gotten really itchy the last few weeks. According to my dog books / internet (and the internet doesn't lie, right?) Dogs can take Benadryl. So I gave her a couple Benadryls with dinner and she's conked out right now. The internet says it shouldn't making her tired, but it appears the internet may have fudged the truth a bit.

family visits, Dia goes to agility class

Dia has been going to agility class and is doing very well. Roger takes her for an extra practice on Saturday, so I got to go watch some practice.

Also, we're getting close to the end of harvest. We pulled the last of the tomatoes, and the peppers are peaking.


Lastly, Roger's dad and brother are visiting.



And... a picture of the family.

Seed saving

This new world of seed swapping is awesome. So far, I have scored:

Jamaican Hot Pepper
Spinach
Mixed Lettuce
White Pumpkins
Genovese basil

I'm also participating in a seed swap... a bunch of people send any number between 3 and 15 seed packages to one person (and postage) and the person collects them all, puts them in a pool, and then sends you the same number you sent in. I sent in 8 packs.

I'm looking for interesting tomatoes (striped, green, or black) and basil (cinnamon, spicy, purple), but also just collecting things as they come up.

Here's a picture of the seeds as we collect them. We have SO MANY SEEDS. We're going to sell seeds at the winter market this winter. I have at least 150 packs so far.


Also pictures: Dia gets a toy we call 'the worm', and a picture of an Australorp, as requested. The best chickens EVER.




Added: What is the Australorp eating? That would be a bowl of old yogurt that got kind of moldy. Chickens LOVE yogurt. And yes, in light of the moldy corn incident, I scraped off the mold.

We realized recently that the purple jalapeno plant we have is rare. So rare, in fact, that people who swap/collect heirloom and rare seeds often list them on their 'want' list. (We've noticed this as we joined seed swapping online communities to find new and rare strains of vegetables for next year.) So, in addition to them being our most prized bargaining tool on the seed swap forums, we've also put them up on ebay:


here

We've been swapping seeds for about 24 hours now and have already scored a rare spinach and white pumpkin seeds.

What to do with tomatoes

What to do with tomatoes... we had a very cool summer here and all of a sudden we had one really hot week and all the green tomatoes that had just been sitting on the vine refusing to ripen all turned at once. I'm talking a hundred tomatoes. Easily. We chopped and froze several quarts, made a dozen jars of salsa, and made chili sauce. Still deluged with tomatoes. So I give you...

Tomato Pizza.
Instead of sauce, we used thinly sliced tomatoes, some basil, and olive oil. Cover with mozzarella and other stuff from garden. Eat with ranch dressing.


Also... Dia at campfire. She's going real camping with us in October. We're going the weekend before Halloween and everyone decorates their campsite. Really decorates their campsite. I'm talking graveyards and blowup ghosts and sound sensor music... the whole nine yards. I think Dia should go as a Hellhound. No costume needed.

Preserving

Onions in stockings, dried tomatoes, dried herbs, and a Dia guarding the path.