Gardening 2022

Gardens are fascinating things.  They are so much work and maintenance, but the satisfaction of growing your own food is unbeatable. 

You know you've become a boring adult when you have more photos of your garden than anything else on your phone except kids. 

We expanded the garden this year by about 8 feet to accommodate the bag of potatoes that had some seriously long eyes. I've never tried planting potatoes before.  Unfortunately, many of them got chomped pretty good by deer when they were flowering...so we will see if they produce or not. 

Planting our yearly batch of sunflowers.  About half of them also got chomped. 

We did black plastic this year for the zucchini and squash, cantalope and watermelon, and the cucumbers, basil, thyme, and parsley. 

Beans and Peas.  Obviously, these are old photos. 

There are few things more beautiful than new life springing up. 

Our first potato plant.

Since these photos were taken, I have picked and canned quite a few beans, froze a bunch of peas, and dried lots of basil.  We just started picking cucumbers and we ate two for lunch.  As per our normal summers, we are overrun with zucchini, so we give a bunch away to anyone who will take it at church each week.  haha. 

I love gardening!!!!

Chicks

We've had 15 hens who were laying eggs consistently since 2020.  In the early Spring though, we began getting about 5 eggs each day.  That was also when the stores were experiencing a shortage of eggs, so we had lots of customers stopping at the house for eggs randomly.  We were having to turn them away because we didn't have enough for everyone.  We stopped eating eggs, and I stopped baking anything containing eggs.

One day, I was cleaning and Dan came home with 15 chicks from Tractor Supply.  He told me that he walked in, offered to take 15 of them for $1 each, and the manager agreed!  

There are some barred rocks and some Isa Browns.  

This is only the second flock we've raised out.  The hens we currently have we bought as ready-to-lay pullets.  We decided it was worth it to not have to hassle with chicks and feeding chicks.  

But this time, I'm keeping track, and so far, they've only cost us $40.

They got their cute little feathers.  Unfortunately, the littlest chick just died two days ago.  :(

I started taking them outside to get fresh air in the daytimes.

And this is them now.  We put them in our old, moveable cage which Dan made 5 years ago.  It still works!  Turns out, our hens aren't done for after all!  I started really picking grass to feed them 3 times a day, I feed them any and all weeds from the garden, and also switched their feed to laying mash instead of the crumble or cracked corn.  Now they are giving us about 11 eggs a day.  Two of the hens were very broody, so we shipped them off to the farm.  They lived there for about 3 weeks until they disappeared.  

I don't love chickens...but I love eggs.  So it's worth it to have a couple chickens to get eggs every day and not have to worry about egg shortages and such.  

Hope you all are doing good!