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!