Early Fall Update

As everyone has noticed from our entries, this has been an eventful summer.  We have learned a great deal (and will continue to as fall harvest progresses in to winter).  We've had some ups and downs, challenges and successes.  Both of our making and of the natural kind.  For example, this summer has been quite literally the hottest summer ever recorded in southwest Idaho.  We're in a "severe" drought and have experienced more than twice as many days over 100 degrees this summer as normal.  So we first want to acknowledge a small victory.  All summer we've been rehabilitating our back field, getting ready eventually for new planting and maybe livestock.  It was dry and dead from the heat and had an infestation of the horrid goathead weed (http://www.goatheads.com).  After a great deal of diligence pulling weeds, using spot sprays of herbicide and watering like crazy, our back field is fairly green and healthy.  It might not look like a golf course but it's a positive start, especially considering all the adverse conditions.

For now, it will be a dog play area. 

On the produce front, we are continuing to get okra, grapes and blackberries but at a reduced rate.  Our most exciting development is that we have a very productive watermelon plant that has more than a half-dozen little watermelons in progress.  Much earlier this summer we had planted a lot of watermelon seeds, planting in hills about 6 ft. apart.  None seemed to take, but lo, about 4 weeks ago this weird plant came up. We decided to let it grow to see what it did.  To our great surprise, it was one of our long-lost watermelons.  Not sure exactly what happened, but we are glad it came through.  Now, though, the trick is to get the melons ripened before it gets too cool for them.  It will be a close race, this week we might have lows in the 40s, but hopefully with some help we can get some ripe melons.

It's such a cute little thing. We'll be putting something under it soon.

Even smaller, with lots of buds around.

Finally, our chickens are "bearing fruit".  After about 18 weeks since we got them, we took about half our chickens to a local processor for slaughtering and packaging.  It was an interesting experience, unlike anything we have done before, choosing which bird would live and which would die. Some went in to the "safe" coop, some went in to the "dead" coop. Since chickens fall in to a stupor at dark, which makes them very easy to handle, we loaded up 21 birds and went to the processor early one morning.  Later that day we went back and got our chicken, ready to prepare and eat.  Our largest bird is a bit over 3 lbs.  We have eaten some already, BBQed, and have been happy with everything.  It's a completely healthy meat, organic and free-range, and we have a new appreciation for meat, having had a sort of "relationship" with our chicken before hand. 

Professionally processed and vacuum packed

Our remaining chickens were carefully chosen to maximize egg production.  We kept two compatible roosters for flock sustainability and one small rooster for us to slaughter, in order to have that experience when we see fit. The remaining birds (about 15) are buff, red and white sexlink hens for laying.  And quite perfectly we have gotten our first eggs!  Even though the chickens can be extremely annoying to deal with (they are so stupid), everything has so far worked out exactly as we planned. 

Three smallish brown eggs, probably from the red hens