Coop Swap!!

We've recently swapped coops!  Here is what our old chicken coop looked like, we used five gallon buckets as the laying nests for convenience and ease of cleaning. The chickens seemed to like them too!

You can see the wall on the back of the coop was painted by Martha, trying to use up some old house paints. I think that the chickens enjoyed the murals, maybe we can do it again in the new space this spring!

However, our flock has grown and we are anticipating it continuing to grow during this summer. So, we've re-worked our horse stalls as part of the overall barn remodel to become the new coop for our laying hens, turkeys, and guinea hen. You can see the direct access that the birds have outside through the small doors in the barn wall. We close these up every night to keep them safe from outside predators.

You can see some different nesting boxes on the walls in this picture. We still used the five gallon buckets for other nesting boxes and those are located along the opposite wall to these boxes.

 The new coop is four times the size of the old one which really gives the birds some more room to move around. We tried to make the transition between coops as low stress as possible, but unfortunately right after the initial swap, our egg production dropped down to a mere few eggs a day.  We were worried about this drop and started trying to figure out how to increase the egg production in other ways. Luckily all that the chickens seemed to need was time. After having two or three weeks to become accustomed to the new space, the eggs are booming! We get about two and a half to three dozen fresh eggs a day!

Here are the chickens enjoying their new space!

Get Your Turkey!

        Thanksgiving is on Thursday! If you don't know where your turkey is coming from, we have the solution!

        We still have a limited quantity of birds left that have not been reserved for the big day. All of our birds are heritage breed, grass fed, organic Bourbon, Narragansett, and Palm turkeys. Turkeys were processed on Sunday (11/20) and are sold un-frozen. It's as fresh as they come! 

        $5.50/lb --- weights vary.

    If you're in need of a last minute turkey, e-mail Cair Paravel at

CPARAVEL@GMAIL.COM with "TURKEY" in the subject line.

Remember to buy local and support small businesses this holiday season! 

Chicken Processing

Coming up this Sunday, November 13, 2011 the last 2011 chicken processing (plus a few roosters and some geese. If you want to help/learn come and join us. Set up will start at 9:00 AM.

Tomætoes, Tomátoes

    Martha has picked the last of the tomatoes before the gardens are switched to fall/winter mode. With the nights getting colder, and ultimately the day's temperatures catching up, that means it's time to break out the green house structures for the raised beds and move as much as we can into the affixed greenhouse off of the lower apartment. I've been working on tilling all of this years plants into the soil to decompose and nourish the ground. As a good way to end the time of year that the bulk of our veggie production slows down by sharing some pictures of the different tomato varieties we grew this year.

    Our tomatoes were good to us this year!

Sauerkraut Has Finished!

    Yesterday was an exciting day.  The sauerkraut we had started back in July has finally been jarred, and we were able to taste the incredible-ness that is fresh sauerkraut. 

    Now, to put my amazement into perspective, I thought sauerkraut from a can you buy at the store was incredible.  I would have to refrain from buying it because I'd end up putting it on everything -- i.e. hot dogs, bratwursts, sandwiches, corn flakes, et cetera.  However, now I don't think I'll ever want to buy canned sauerkraut from the store again.  It would only make me cry that it wasn't home-made with every bite.  I can't exactly put my finger on why the fresh kraut is so much better, it just is.

 The canning process.

 Mmmmmmmm...

Martha at work!

    For all you sauerkraut lovers out there, try and make it up for some reubens, or brats, or some corn flakes smothered in kraut with us!

Sauerkraut

We've made our own sauerkraut! Martha seasoned up a huge amount of cabbage with the appropriate ingredients used to make sauerkraut and I got the pleasure of mixing it all together in a large clay pot.







After the cabbage mixture has all been blended together, it goes into the basement to ferment and become incredible! We made this mixture back in July and it has been marinating ever since. We are getting ready to can the kraut very soon! Stay tuned for a post about the finished product!

Millions of Peaches

Well, not quite millions...yet! Our old faithful peach tree in the lower orchard has yielded tons of gorgeous and delicious peaches. Let's hear it for cobbler!

Wonderful Time for Gardening

Summer is a great season for gardening. The plants are well underway, and many of them don't mature or blossom until mid to late summer. Here are some pictures below with descriptions by the garden planner herself, Martha.

This is the second year for the delphiniums.
The blossom spikes have reached at least six feet!

It is amazing how varied the colors and petals are-

Strawberry foxglove made an early show- I let it go to seed so I can
propagate more and fill in the borders of the Cottage Garden.

Many of the hollyhocks planted last year have deep purple- nearly black blossoms,
tho we do have some white and pin. Unfortunately with the wet spring they
have been stricken with hollyhock rust and have been cut back to nubbins. You can
see the rust forming on the leaves to the right. It looks like large scale. Looking in
Wymans I found out that this can be combated with laying down
ground cornmeal prior to emergence- otherwise it is best to destroy the plants.

We got four unique perennial onion sets from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange in
the fall. Unfortunately my labels disappeared during the winter!

The early lettuce has gone to seed. Not the most attractive but
the seed has to come from somewhere.

Hollyhocks prior to the rust explosion-

Bib and redleaf going to seed-

The Cottage Garden was created last spring (2010). The asparagus was
moved from the raised beds it occupied to the inner and outer aspects of
the garden border setting it back a yer. I expect that in the following years it
will be lush. I read in Field and Forest that I can put oyster mushroom
spawn under the asparagus in the straw mulch and plan to
try that next year...or maybe this fall.

This magnificent mass is an Autumn Joy Clematis combined with a Jackmanii.
It has totally covered the birdhouse we constructed during the snows of 2009-2010.
In the hidden garden of the foliage a hummingbird has nested. It is fun to see the
tiny bird zip in and out the huge jungle.

Bronze fennel obscures one of the bird baths in the raised beds
making a protected spot for some of the shy birds.

Red leaf lettuce- yumm salads

Salvia and lavender share the bed with climbing roses. The wet spring was
hard on the roses. Continual dampness allowed black spot to flourish-

We have had a bumper crop of cilantro-

Another view of the bronze fennel with baby's breath in the foreground.

The Seeds are sprouting!

Martha has been hard at work getting her garden started! Every winter starting in February, Martha gets her seeds in order to get a jump start on the season. After all, the plants don't grow themselves! (At least not the plants we want to eat.) Here are some pictures of her first sprouters for 2011!

Berries Galore!

Many years ago, this was the site of the vegetable garden. It made sense for it to be here for Grandpa Cecil and Grandma Jeanne when their house was the only house on the property and just up the hill. Since then the vegetable garden has been relocated closer to the (now) main house and this area had been forgotten and overgrown. I was given the task to use the bush-hog and clean it up again!

Now, I wish I had taken "before" pictures, because then it would be more evident the amount of sheer destruction that was necessary to get this area looking the way it does now. The berry patches to the right were planted before I got here, so the goal was to rescue them and lose all the rest. MAN! Wild blueberry and blackberry bushes had moved in and taken over! Wild berry plants aren't the best because they're incredibly invasive, hard to control, HUGE, have more thorns than just about anything, and yield a tiny amount of fruit given the amount of landscape they take over. The wild plants were choking out the berries we had planted and want to keep. The thick thorny stalks of the wild berry bushes were taller then the tractor! I kept losing my hat and catching my clothes on all the thorns and getting smacked in the face by the branches caught on the tractor...it was a lively experience. I'm glad to report that I've survived the ordeal. Haha! Now the remaining berry plants we wanted to keep have been replanted and are enjoying their un-compromised sunlight!