Dixie Chicks

[vehve]

She must not be that good at escaping... or perhaps it's Stockholm syndrome.

 

[hennible]

 

[Amberjem]

Interesting duck projects... Although I find it confusing that there's also a chicken breed called Ancona.

I've been lazy collecting eggs apparently. We only have the one layer at the moment, and most of the attention is directed towards the chicks at the coop, I did the morning clean up today and found 2 green eggs in the nest where the broodies also keep their chicks. And the eggs looked pretty nasty, all covered in feathers and poop. I need to switch out the straw in there ASAP. I also need to start reminding myself to collect the eggs from there. For some reason, Töyhtis is laying in the evening at the moment, and most of my chicken attention is concentrated in the morning and afternoon.

The chicks are 2½ weeks old now. Until now I haven't seen any change in them since they've hatched, in my opinion they haven't grown at all, but now I'm starting to see winged feathers and they've also gained some size.












The mommies are going through some sort of mini molt. Emma's back has been bald for months due to Eemeli favoring her a bit too much when he was still getting the hang of his romantic advances, but now she's finally starting to put out new feathers. Looks like a porcupine. At the same time, both mommies are dropping feathers like crazy, and the coop looks like a bomb has exploded in there.

All the plants are doing nicely, I can't believe how quickly they turn towards the light when you rotate the pots. We turned all the pots on the windowsill last night, and 3 hours after sunrise this morning they had all turned to face the window again. Most tomatoes are looking good, but the Green Envy seems to be a bit slow. I'm hoping that means it will just become a strong little plant, able to support a lot of berries. I'm still a bit overwhelmed by the fact that we haven't lost a single plant yet, I'm going to have to re-home some tomatoes before they have to be re-potted. Luckily our neighbor is happy to take any plants we offer them.

Hilma is doing well, but she's very hungry. When we got her, the breeder said we should give her half a cup of pellets and a carrot or half an apple, and keep her on a free feed diet of hay. But now that she's got a litter to care for, we've been giving her as much food as she wants. At the moment she's going through about 2½ cups of my own feed formulation per day. This morning I gave her a carrot about ten minutes before I took her some feed, by the time I brought the scoop of feed, she had already finished the carrot. I think she's also started to feed the babies three times per day now, at least she's changed her rhythm a bit. We still haven't seen the baby bunnies though, they should be about a week old now. In a week or two when their eyes have opened she's probably going to start taking them out of the nest a bit.

 

[BriardChickens]

BC, I'm not saying I'd use it on a producing tomato, just thinking if it would boost development during the seedling stage where a 1½L bottle would probably last a week for 8 seedlings.

The idea is that you have a lot of trace minerals in it. I was at first thinking just the carbon dioxide might be beneficial too, but googling revealed it's the salts in it people are after.

Worth a shot, our growing season here is very short. So if I can boost the initial growth of the young plant it would shorten the time until harvest.

We still have ice on the lake, nights still freeze but daytime temperatures go over 12C!

 

[vehve]

We've had -2C nights and daily highs in the 8-10C range. But it's only about a kilometer to the sea, so it evens out the temps quite a lot.

 

[hennible]

Tires guys
Seriously amaizing, I've had sensitive crops service -8 in a tire... Of course anything with thermal mass is great and will extend your season, and there are far more attractive options if tires arnt for you...

 

[vehve]

Like rocks. I really wish the plum tree would start making leaves soon. Although, it probably doesn't like the night frosts we still get. I don't know.

 

[hennible]

Yup
I use rocks too. I assume cement planters would work well, jems raised beds would be great here...

 

[BriardChickens]

We'll be colder and keep the cold breeze until the ice goes off the lake. So about another month...

 

[hennible]

I'm going to risk it and test a few things in my greenhouse. See if the tires I put in the greenhouse make as much difference as I'm hoping. We've got a month or so to the average last frost here too... Ice is just coming of the lakes.