Garden and Chicks and Pickles

Our first batch of pickles. I'm putting up more today so that's why I'm trying to get this post written at 4:30 a.m. I uploaded most of the pictures for the post days ago but have been unable to find time to sit and type.

The garden is coming along. Carrots look great. It is the first year for the garden in this spot so I hope the little guys can find room to grow in between all the dirt clods.




I am trying Romain lettuce this year. I'm not crazy about most leaf lettuce, it's too hard to get the dirt off so I have high hopes for this type. It's a little thicker leafed so hopefully easier to wash.



I have a little cantaloupe started. I hope the bugs don't get it!


I think this is a watermelon. We planted the sugar baby type. I hope I can tell when they are ready.


We have lots of little yellow squash coming. Yummy.

I took this picture more than a couple days ago, I better go and pick it today, it's probably huge now.

Our early sweet corn has tasseled. The garden ended up being larger than we planned so this area in the right of the picture did not get manure spread on it. It's amazing how small some of the corn is compared to the left side, really great proof of the power of poop.

It seems so early for the corn, I can't wait to boil some up for dinner.

See the little ear?

It's been really rainy and grey lately, it was like 60 degrees yesterday (I just heard the weatherman say that on the morning news) and today it's supposed to be warm and sunny so the garden should burst.

Here's the later maturing corn. It's way taller and heaver than the early corn. The wind blew it around a little yesterday. I need to try and hoe around it to help it stay up.

Tomatoes thriving. No bad bugs or worms yet.

We really need to get to tying them up, maybe today. I took the day off to spend some time with the kids. I'm taking the youngest for a horseback riding lesson at one o'clock and I have about 100 other things to get done too. Laundry, pickles, brush dog, if it's ready- freeze borccoli, clean, vacuume, dishes, (Uh oh... I just remembered...I need to hurry and let the young turkeys out of their pen this morning, I'll be right back) and a million other things. I want to work on getting the rest of the cupboards painted this weekend.

I am so looking foward to pickled beets. I need to find a tried and true recipe. Anybody have one?

Onions and garlic.

I wish we had planted more dill. I am going to have to use dried dill today for my pickles.

We had our first broccolli out of the garden. Next year we are going to plant much, much more.

I just love Cleome.

We plan to sell our boat. We were going to fix it up but we hardly ever want to leave the farm. We had someone come and look at it but when we got it out and cleaned it off we realized that we did not want to sell it. Kevin is going to go and get the plates and license and I think we are going boating next weekend. We have a tow behind tube that the kids will love!

We planted these daylilies last year and forgot about them. It was a real treat when they bloomed.

The moon flowers are beautiful but not as beautiful as Puppy!

These two hens fought over a nest box full of eggs and finally got some to hatch. Since they both were squeezing into one box they squished most of the babies but this one lived. I finally moved them to a bigger area. This little chick has two very good moms.

You can't see the chick very well in this picture but it's there.

(When I went out to let out the turkeys one of the hens was out of the pen. The lighter colored hen had gotten out so I had to let the baby and the other mom out in the pen with the big chickens and turkeys. I hope they will be all right and the big turkeys don't hurt the baby.)

UPDATE: I went out and put them back into their pen, was too worried.

This hen hatched out three babies. I moved her to a different spot.

See 'em. How cute

I have this awesome weather thing. It gets readings from a satillite so it's mostly accurate. On this day though there was a problem. The high for the day was supposed to be 80 and the low was supposed to be 60 but the current temp was -100. Whatever.

I took a video when I let the turkeys out. I'll try to upload it. It's taking forever, like over an hour now and I can't post this until it's done. I am trying to upload it to youtube instead. It might be too large or something. Youtube says it will take an hour and a half to upload? We'll see...

UPDATE: It worked through youtube ...sorry about the quality. Should have used my Flip instead of my camera.

Til next time,

Beth