Gardens are Put to Bed

Last week I put my gardens to bed. It's always kind of sad to do this, after I've spent hours and hours out there tilling, planting, weeding, watching things grow, harvesting ect. Now I've picked everything and plowed it under. It looks bleak, one of my good friends calls fall "the season of death".

However, there is one last hoorah of sorts in the end of the growing season; the cover crop. A cover crop is grown for it's fertilizing properties, it's also known as green manure. Green manure is not to be confused with it's cousin, regular manure, which is of course animal poop. Not that there's anything wrong with regular manure it's just stinkier though some folks would argue it's a good stink.

This year I've planted winter wheat as my cover crop. So now I get to watch it sprout and turn green as the leaves and snow fly. Then next spring I'll till it under and thus revitalize the soil, and then it all begins again.

I plant approximatly 40 different varieties of vegetables plus some flowers, herbs and a few berries. Growing a big variety helps protect me from total crop failure. After all, every year is a good year for growing some things and every year is a terrible year for growing other things.

The only downfall of planting a whole lotta different veggies is picking them all out, it's gets a little daunting. But it's a good daunting. Let the seed catalog season begin!

Chickens!

We raise chickens for eggs, meat and entertainment. Chickens are hilarious animals! It's really a lot of fun to watch them peck, scratch, coo, cackel, crow, roll in the dirt and get into spats with each other.

Our chicken eggs are really delicious. They have a very dark orange yolk which is due to them being mostly free range. I've observed that chickens that are left to their own devices spend a large part of their day wondering around finding things to eat like bugs or different kinds of grass and weeds. I think their eggs taste better when they are allowed to be free range. The only times our chickens are not free range is when there's something extra-yummy for them to eat in the garden, like cherry tomatoes or kohlrabi then they have to live in their yard. When they are living in their yard and eating feed, their egg yolks get lighter in color and the eggs taste more like store-bought eggs. Well, not quite that bad, I think store-bought eggs have very little flavor, have unaturally white shells and disturbinbly yellow yolks.

Chickens are very social and like to hang out with each other. If one finds a treat, like a virgin vine of ripe cherry tomatoes, he or she will alert other chickens near by, then they all desend on the plant and happily eat every single red fruit. They also have little spats and disputes and sometimes cluck menacingly at each other. At one time we had nine roosters who constantly had arguments and occasional all-out brawls. That didn't last too long though as they were nearly butchering weight.

We generally eat all roosters once they get to butchering weight, which takes them about a year around here. We do like to keep one rooster on hand though since it's nice to hear them crow. Right now our token rooster is a very pretty, somewhat petite, really colorful fellow that I named Pioneer. I got Pioneer at last year's Pioneer Day which is a winter-time town festival held in Ridgeland, WI. At noon the good people of Ridgeland toss chickens off the roof of their post office and if you catch one, you get to keep it. It's really a lot of fun and Pioneer is a great rooster.

The only problem with raising chickens is that everything likes to eat chicken. This includes (but is not limited to); racoons, skunks, dogs, coyotes, owls, weasels, chicken hawks, eagles, geese, pigs and of course humans.

The night before butchering day, which is generally in the fall or spring, we put all the chickens that we plan to eat in one of those big plastic dog kennels. We do this at night because chickens sleep really hard and thus are very easy to catch when they are roosting. Then in the morning we chop their heads off one by one and hang them by their feet from our clothes line. After that we dunk them in hot water, pull out all their feathers, chop off their feet, wrap them in freezer paper and toss them in the freezer. Delish!