in the garden :: april, may, and june 2023

July 10, 2023 Megan Rodriguez

Wow! It’s been over a year since I posted here! Turns out creating a bunch of draft post ideas doesn’t count as posting. Ha. If you follow me over on Instagram, you may have noticed that we’ve been up to a lot! We had a huge garden last year during our first summer in our new house. It was a dream, but also a lot of work, especially when it came time to preserve, store, and use it all. We also raised a flock of geese, which was incredibly fun and a good learning experience. We butchered most of them in the fall and kept a male and female for breeding. Our female, Emelia, sat on a clutch of eggs this spring, but must not have sat consistently enough because she then abandoned them after about 30 days, which is about how long it takes for goslings to hatch. So, we now have two pet geese for another year and we’re all a little unsure about that. They can be so fun, but also so loud, obnoxious, and rather intimidating for the kids. We’ll see how long they are allowed to be apart of our homestead.

Our biggest news is that we had a baby in April! Ash Adrien was born at home, in the water, surrounded by his daddy and brothers on April 23rd. He’s happy and healthy and just starting to coo and giggle. We’re all enamored. I’m excited to write his birth story here in the coming weeks.

This year’s garden is up and running! It is not an easy feat, though, prepping and planting a garden in the same season as giving birth to a new baby. Dan has been a huge help to me this year, though. We use a broadfork to prep our garden beds and he did all of that work for me so that I could focus on planting. We had a long winter with many inches of snow remaining into the first week or so of April. But a sudden hot streak in the 80’s quickly melted what remained and dried up the ground enough for me to get most of my cool weather seeds into the ground before Ash was born. Cool weather the end of April and beginning of May also bought me time before I needed to start planting the rest, so I was able to enjoy a few weeks of slow postpartum days without feeling too much of the itch to get down to the garden.

As last year was my first year planting here, I worked with whatever soil I had. This meant that my garden actually had about 4 different types of soil in the different sections from sand loam, to forest loam, to forest clay, to thick red clay. I was so happy this spring when I found all of my soil improved and I hadn’t done much to it other than plant in it last year, add leaves and chicken bedding in the fall, and then let our chickens use the space over the winter. This year I rotated my crops a bit to work the soil in different ways and hopefully prevent tomato blight from occurring again. It was pretty bad last year.

The garden is now giving back to us with radishes, peas, green onions, strawberries, and an array of greens coming into the kitchen weekly. It has been very hard to keep up with the weeding and succession planting of radishes, herbs, and greens. Ash has had a few naps in the garden while I’ve worked and I take any little opportunity I get to pull weeds - whether its during a nap, when Dan is home, or when I’m down at the barn feeding chickens and geese. I’m not getting the hours in the garden that I love and it’s not the prettiest place right now (as my pictures humbly show), but we are growing food and working the soil and that’s what matters most.

country living chickens

February 25, 2022 Megan Rodriguez

Chickens! It’s been so long since I’ve written about them here or on Instagram, but we managed to keep our flock even though our crazy move and they are now happily settled into their country estate! When we sold our house last June, in 2021, our wonderful buyers agreed to foster our chickens for a few months as we floated around until we found a house to buy. They were extremely gracious with us as we didn’t end up closing on our house until the end of October! The seller of our new home was also wonderfully gracious and he allowed Dan access to the property before we closed so that he could fix up the old goat barn and turn it into a chicken coop. He and my brother Jake tore off the rotting old roof and replaced it with tin. Then Dan built a coop inside the barn on one side and then the other side will be used as a garden shed and a chick brooder. I love the doors he found at a selvage store in Minneapolis! It’s going to look so fun once we put finishing touches on it this summer. The coop also has an automatic door for the chickens that opens and closes on a timer and lets them out into their fenced yard each day. It is awesome. The barn is quite a ways from the house, so the automatic door frees us up to just check on them once a day, instead of twice a day. It will also make it much easier to leave them for a few days.

We moved our seven hens up from the city about a week after we moved ourselves into the house. They were surprisingly easy to move and settled in really well! My brother Tanner gave us a rooster to add to the flock about a month after that. Since the barn is far from the house, we wanted to get a rooster as soon as possible in order to offer our hens a bit more protection from predators. Our ratio of hens to rooster is still a bit low (roosters do better with a larger harem….), but the protection was worth it until we have more hens to integrate into the flock.

Which brings us to chicks! With so much more space for chickens, we knew we wanted to add quite a few to our flock this year. After doing a bit of research on raising chicks in the winter, we decided to order day-old chicks from a hatchery at the top of February. They came by USPS and arrived at our local post office for pick up early one morning. We ordered from Hoover’s Hatchery in Iowa and were very pleased with the selection, availability, and health of the chicks. We got 15 female chicks of assorted breeds. Five of which lay colored eggs and the other 10 lay brown eggs. Since we got them in the winter, they should start laying eggs by the end of June, which will be fantastic! We have them in our mudroom right now and will likely move them into the garage in the next week or two and then down to the barn after that. We’ve had colder than usual overnight temps, reaching down into the negatives most nights still, so we are having to keep them in the mudroom a week or two longer than we’d hoped. Once they reach 6 weeks, though, they will be fully feathered and will be able to withstand temps down into the 30’s. We will then move down to the barn, where we’ll keep on the garden shed side so they can get used to the rest of the flock and the flock can get used to them. Integrating chicks to an established flock can be very challenging, but I’m hopeful that having more space for them all will make integrating easier than it’s been for us in the past.

Oak has been taking charge with the chicks’ care and has been doing such a good job! He feeds them once or twice each day and he’s so sweet with them. It’s been fun to watch him grow in responsibility by caring for them.

We are so excited that we will soon have enough chickens to actually provide enough eggs for our family! We’ll likely cull most of our older hens this fall, which will leave us with 15 or so chickens going into the winter. I’m planning to preserve some of the summer bounty in order to extend our eggs more into the winter (more on preservation later!). My hope over the next year or two is to completely supply our eggs needs for the whole year. We are also hoping to raise a batch of meat birds this summer and also add a few geese to the homestead for meat and eggs! After so many years of making the most of our little city lot, it is incredibly fun to now have land on which we can truly homestead!

happenings 'round the homestead

October 13, 2017 Megan Rodriguez

Fall is here and it is lovely! Our days have been full of great things, both in and outside, both with friends and family, and a good balance of play and work. We've really been enjoying this fall so far!

Things around our little urban homestead are going well too, for the most part. We are down to 8 chickens, from 11 earlier this year. We lost 2 of our pullets this summer - one to sickness, one to a hawk, and one of our older hens to sickness or egg-binding, as well. And while all of that is not great, we are happy that the 3 remaining pullets are starting to lay and our egg production is slowly increasing - just in time to drop off for winter! Ha! Out of the breeds we got this spring, I'm loving our Golden Sexlink! She is an egg-laying machine! She's been laying for several weeks now and I don't think she's missed a single day. We will definitely be adding more sexlinks to the flock next spring. As for Oak, that boy loves his chickens. Yesterday he played outside for about an hour and a good portion of that he spent sitting on a stump by the chicken coop, just talking to his chickens. They have good talks, he and his ladies.

The garden is slowing down, just as it should be at this time of year. We had our first frost this week, but my sheltered garden seems to have been spared. I think I'll pull the tomatoes and peppers this weekend, though, and try to get a cover crop to sprout before the hard freeze happens. The temps are cool enough now that the remaining green tomatoes are unlikely to ripen. All that will remain, then, will be the green beans, a few carrots, and the cover crops I planted in early September. Not bad, for the middle of October!

We added a few new structures to our little backyard this summer and we've so been enjoying them! Dan built us a shed, a firewood rack, and a fantastic sandbox for Oak! The benches of the sandbox fold in as a lid, in order to keep all of the neighborhood kitties out - as well as any free-ranging chickens. It's so fun to see the backyard become more and more of what we need/want for this season of life. Our backyard may be small, but we're making the most of the space and I love it.

our new brood

April 14, 2017 Megan Rodriguez

Chicks! We have new chicks! And let me tell you, watching chicks grow through the eyes of a 13 month-old is absolutely wonderful. He LOVES his chicks! He walks his little push cart past them and stops to say hi and check on them periodically throughout each day. He talks to them and says good morning and goodnight. He feeds them spinach and gives them kisses. He knows to be gentle with them and does a pretty good job carrying that out. And he is very diligent in telling us that the heat lamp is hot. Our experience with our first batch of chicks 4 years ago was so much fun, but this is an entirely different kind of fun and I'm loving it.

We got 5 chicks this time around. One Rhode Island Red, named Rosie the Red. One Golden Sexlink, named Marilyn (Monroe...of course). One Barred Rock, named Fingers II...we lost Fingers I to a raccoon last fall and while they are different breeds, Dan wanted another Fingers. And lastly, two Black Australorps named Dumpling and Noodle Soup. That gives us a total of 11 birds, but we are planning to cull 3 of our older hens by the end of the summer in order to make room for the youngins and hopefully revitalize our egg supply for next year. Our egg supply is up, but definitely not where it was before when our birds were younger. It will be sad to say goodbye to our older hens, our first ladies. I'm not ready yet...but I know it's what is best for us and so I'll be ready when the time comes.

But for now...CHICKS!!!!!! Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate and happy spring to all!

earning their keep

February 20, 2017 Megan Rodriguez

We FINALLY have eggs again after at least a 2.5 month break! I haven't posted about our chickens in quite awhile, but they are still here, healthy, and slowly getting back into earning their keep around this place. 2016 was a rough year for us in the chicken department. We lost Chicken, the chicken to the cold in the winter. We lost Trudy in the summer after we found her egg-bound and decided to cull her as she wasn't likely to make it through the night. And we lost one of our two pullets, Fingers, to a raccoon in the early fall. So, we now have 6 chickens, 3 of which are 3 years old and not very productive any more. March will bring some new chicks into our home, which will be fun for us all and will be very helpful for our egg supply. I'm looking into a few new breeds and am excited to add a few more heavy producers and bit more variety to our flock! Raising organic back yard chickens in the city is not very economical, but the eggs are so delicious and watching our baby boy get excited to see and touch the chickens makes it all worth it!

happenings 'round the homestead

May 11, 2016 Megan Rodriguez

It's been a full few weeks around this little homestead of ours! With all things baby, a trip out to Michigan to visit family, and spring springing around each corner. Flowers are blooming, perennials are up and filling out, the garden is waiting for seeds and seedlings, and the chickens are enjoying the longer days, the rain, and the sun! I love the softness of the spring blooms--lavenders, whites, and light pinks. The flowers tend to be small and delicate, just like spring.

The busyness over the past few weeks has made it a bit difficult to get the garden up and running as I'd hoped. The soil needs to be worked and there are peas and raddishes to get in the ground. However, it will all get done eventually, it always does! I did get my pots planted on the deck with lettuce, swiss chard, and arugala. The garlic, rhubarb, and herbs in the garden are also doing well! The rain we've had over the past few days has made things really start to take off! We'll have garlic scapes in no time!

We got two new chicks a few weeks back and they are about ready to join the older ladies in the coop. They been spending their days in the yard and nights under a light in the garage, but they are very curious about the older hens and can often be found looking at them through the fence. These two little ones bring us to a total of eight chickens. The time has come for us to begin to stagger our flock and keep it young and productive. We have decided to cull two of our hens this summer/fall for meat. More on that later...but for now, aren't our new little chicks cute?? Their names are Violet (the brown Ameraucana) and Fingers (as in Chicken Fingers...yes...). Fingers is a Maran and she will lay chocolate brown eggs! I'm so very excited!

Next week will hopefully bring lots of sunshine and time in the garden! How about you? What's happening around your homestead?

when keeping chickens doesn't go as planned

February 19, 2016 Megan Rodriguez

When we first got our chickens almost two years ago, we told ourselves that they were not pets, even though we were decided to name them. We planned to raise them for eggs, and eventually meat. While some backyard chicken keepers let their chickens live, retire, and die of old age, we decided from the beginning that wasn't the road we were going to take. We wanted to raise chickens for food and in order to do that, we decided that at some point we would cull (a nicer word for butcher) a few of them in order to keep our flock young and productive.

Well...what I hadn't expected was that the first chicken to die on our watch would not be by our own hands, or by a predator, but instead would be because of the cold. Two weeks ago, we lost our first chicken...Chicken the chicken, one of our two Plymouth Rocks, started molting at the end of January and within a few days she had lost a lot of her feathers. The week that she died was a tough one for us. We were both rather busy, I was coming down with a nasty cold, and the short, cold days left us with little time to really check on how our hens were doing. The morning of the day she passed, we both saw that she had dropped a lot of feathers and we told each other as we left for the day that we needed to check on her later that day and make sure she was staying warm enough. However, by that night she was gone. She had lost many more feathers while we were gone that day and her little body was unable to withstand the cold. Dan found her when he closed them up for the night and we were both so sad to know how she had died and that had we been home that day we probably could have saved her.

It was in that moment, though, where we cried together as we mourned the loss of our first hen, that we also knew that we needed to honor her by trying to save as much meat from her body as we could. Some may view this a morbid or inhumane, but coming from a family of hunters and meat-eaters, we've both learned that if you take an animal's life (or it dies on your watch), then the best way to honor its life is to not let its death be in vain. So, Dan did his best to keep what he could of her body in order to further nourish our family.

Chicken is the one in the front of the picture above and on the right in the picture below.

Since she died we've had a renewed sense of responsibility and stewardship for our little flock. They seem so self-sufficient at times, but we've been reminded by Chicken's death as well as two close calls with a possum and a raccoon that their lives are actually pretty fragile and its our job to ensure their safety and health. Our other girls have all faired the cold very well and their egg production has started increasing again with these longer, sunnier days. With our first hen gone, we've also started thinking about what lies next for our little flock. It might be time to cull a couple and add another round of chicks. We shall see as the next two months unfold. What we do know, however, is that we enjoy raising backyard hens and despite the challenges and expenses, we are excited to keep moving forward and to simply learn from the past. We miss Chicken, the chicken, but we are thankful for the eggs she provided, the meat in our freezer, and the joy she brought to our backyard. Rest in peace, pretty bird. May your life and death teach us how to be the best chicken keepers we can be.

winterizing the ladies

November 20, 2015 Megan Rodriguez

Wow! What a crazy couple of weeks it has been! With mid-semester grading, baby preparations, winter preparations, choir rehearsals and concerts, and my best friend visiting, I feel as though I've been running non-stop! Thankfully, though, we've had a enough time to get a few of the winterizing tasks checked off the to-do list, and just in time as the cold weather arrived yesterday and seems to be here to stay!

One of those tasks has been to get the girls ready for the long winter months ahead. They were in need of a good coop cleaning, but they've also been in need of a bit more space. When we got our two new chicks in the spring, we knew that we'd eventually need to figure out a solution for the limited run space that we have for our ladies. For the summer, we made a makeshift fence that connected to the run and allowed them a bit more space in which to roam, dig, dust bathe, and do their chicken things. This worked great for the summer when we were home so much during the day, but it was not a great solution for the fall, winter, and spring since the ladies had their ways of escaping their confinement. So, a couple weeks ago, Dan made the fence around their chicken yard, as I like to call it, a bit more permanent! He also expanded it to include the space behind the coop next to the covered wood pile. The ladies love it! They have more places to explore, hang out, and escape from any possible predators. It's a perfect solution to our crowded run! Hooray! Over the next few weeks, the opening from the run to the chicken yard will also become a closing door of sorts with a latch to help protect our ladies from possible nighttime predators.

The ladies' water heater has also been returned to them, along with their run light which extends their daylight hours a bit. Once the snow starts blowing, they'll also get a layer of plastic wrapped around the lower half of their run to protect them from the elements a bit more. They seem pleased with all these changes, both in scenery and weather. However, at least four of our five older chickens are in the middle of their fall molt right now and so this sudden cold front may have caught their naked little bodies by surprise. Naked chickens...really, you'd think they'd have more decency!

Alas, it feels so very good to have the ladies ready for the long winter ahead. I know I'm ready for the shorter days and the cold quiet evenings. I hope they are too.

the chicken and the egg

August 5, 2015 Megan Rodriguez

Until I had chickens I really had no idea how valuable those eggs at the grocery store really are. It seems so simple, right?? You have a few chickens, they lay eggs, easy! Yeah....it's not quite so simple. Chickens raised in a natural living environment (i.e. little or no artificial light, no temperature control, bread to reproduce, rather than just produce eggs, etc.) go through many different phases throughout the year that all effect their egg laying in different ways.

As I mentioned in the winter, 3 out of the 5 molted (meaning they shed their feathers and grew new ones), which meant they stopped laying for over 6 weeks as their bodies focused on growing feathers. One of our 5 chickens (the Ameracauna) decided that she just really didn't like winter and so she stopped laying, probably to focus her energy on just staying warm. Then this spring our Buff Orpington, Henrietta, became a broody mother hen, who sat in the nesting box for weeks on end trying to hatch eggs that would never hatch and being crabby towards everything and everyone who came near her. After her broodiness began calming down, she starting molting, which meant she didn't lay any eggs for about 3 months. We now think we've had two other chickens (our two Barred Rocks) who have been a bit broody over the past few weeks and seem to be taking an egg laying break as well.

So over the past couple weeks we've been averaging about 2 eggs per day--from 5 chickens! Today, though, we got three brown eggs, which tells me that someone is back in the swing of things and we should start averaging 3-4 per day now! Hooray!!

And then there are the two little ones, who are getting closer to laying, but are still not earning their keep around here. Soon, though! Bernadette (the yellow one) is starting to have a warm, red comb, which is a sign that she's getting closer to laying her first egg! Maybe in a few weeks!

And so, if you buy eggs from a local farmer who gives his/her chickens a pretty natural lifestyle, don't be surprised when the eggs are not cheap like the big styrofoam cartons in the store. Raising heritage breeds in good conditions can be tough and unpredictable, but the eggs you get are completely worth it.

free-range...for a few minutes

June 19, 2015 Megan Rodriguez

As I've mentioned before, this summer we are doing things a bit differently with the chickens when it comes to their time free-ranging in the yard. In a perfect urban homesteading world, our chickens could freely wander around our yard and gardens at their leisure, enjoying grass, bugs, sunshine, and shade whenever their little hearts so desired. However, we do not live in a perfect urban homesteading world. Rather, at our urban homestead, the chickens eat my carrot tops, trample and scratch up the rhubarb and hostas, kick mulch everywhere, poop on our deck, pathway, yard, pretty much everywhere, and eat my kale. No, it is definitely not a perfect world over here. So, this year, we're doing things differently and it means a lot less grass-time for these ladies of ours. I read a book on my long Texas road trip a few weeks back called Free-Range Chicken Gardens and it gave me a lot more confidence in our decision to give the ladies a more controlled environment. The reason for this is that in order to have a successful free-range chicken garden, your yard and gardens need to be ready to house chickens! The plants need to be chicken resistant and the plants need to be arranged in a way that allows the hardier plants to protect and shelter the more vulnerable ones. There are also times when it's necessary to protect tender seedlings or ripening fruits and veggies from curious chickens. All of these things confirmed our decision to keep our chickens out of the yard and gardens for a bit. With our landscaping only being a few years old, a lot of our perennials are young and in need of protecting until their roots grow deep and their stems and branches strong. And with our relatively short vegetable garden season, it's important to keep the ladies out of there during pivotal points of the season, such as when tender seedlings are sprouting or when tomatoes are ripening. So, for this year, our chickens are getting to free-range for a just a few minutes at a time, and under very supervised conditions. So far, it seems to be working well and everyone seems to be happy! (The cat has also been enjoying his free-range moments!)

My hope is that in the years to come, free-range time will become easier and easier, especially in the middle of the summer when the plants are thriving and strong. Until then, our limited "free-ranging" is working just fine.