3rd week of May 2009

Scything This week we have some new "toys" to play with around the farm. The scythe is actually an old tool that we found in a shed and sharpened up. It comes in quite handy for some quick (and quiet!) weed eating around the farm and some of the grass piles have been going to feed the goats or to mulch the garden. Our oldest son is the main "scyther" and it's good to see him learn a traditional skill. The other thing we've been having fun with is our new refractometer. This tool measures the sugar content in foods. The Brix level is a quick indicator of general plant health - the higher the sugar content, the healthier the plant. So we've been Brixing everything from the pasture grass and weeds to garden lettuce and cow/goat milk. I'm looking forward to making more comparisons of produce as the season progresses.

In the garden, we had a frost early this week and I'm thankful I didn't plant out more of the peppers and tomatoes. I know of several gardeners who lost tomatoes and zucchinis. We're fortunate to be on the top of a hill which is less likely to freeze. I did cover my early bean planting and some flowers and the rest of the tender crops were protected by water walls or barrels. By the end of the week, we felt safe to put out more summer transplants plus another planting of beans. As it turns out, the frost was not the biggest threat to my garden this week, it was trumped by the damage done by a resident groundhog family. They wiped out a celery bed and proceeded to enjoy a salad bar of lettuce and broccoli (my Umpqua seed crop totally disappeared) as well. We now have traps after them but to be safe I'm replanting the beds near their home with less tasty crops like flowers, tomatoes and peppers. Next year I may need to increase the area that gets surrounded by electric fence because it is quite discouraging to do all that work and have it disappear overnight. Chicks Our first batch of Cornish cross chicks arrived this week and are happily tucked in the chick shed under heat lamps. Here the baby is being introduced to the new flock. We cemented the floor of the shed this spring to avoid last year's problem of a weasel getting in and turning 40 chicks into a midnight snack. In a few weeks the chicks will be ready to go out on pasture in their mobile pen and will be ready as broilers in late July. For our second batch of chicks this summer we are thinking of trying one of the slow growing meat varieties. They are supposed to be better foragers and have better meat flavor but less voluminous breast meat.

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