Where have I been??

Right now since I'm feeling sick I figured I'd take advantage of my down time to post an update. I've been busy working on paintings for a show I have coming up and that has consumed most of my awake time and will continue to do so for the next couple weeks so posts may be sporadic for a little while longer. Hopefully you're all so busy planting that you don't even notice. :)

The duck eggs are still in the incubator, but this past week we had a serious temperature spike in the incubator that I am pretty sure killed all of the developing ducklings. I'm pretty upset about it, and I'm going to go ahead an leave them in there until their scheduled hatch date (Wednesday the 25th) but I haven't seen any movement in the eggs in several days and they don't appear to be developing. I can't really figure out what would have caused that to happen, but I'm going to be making some adjustments and doing some tests before I put the quail eggs in there next weekend.

Speaking of temperature spikes... the weather has been hovering around 90 for the past few days causing the remaining lettuces and herbs to bolt. I'm not really ready for warm weather yet, luckily it's supposed to dip back into the low 80's next week.

Out of the 50 or so tomatoes I planted, about half of them are doing well. About 5 have already been pulled, and several others seem to just be stunted after I transplanted them, but I'm giving them time to catch up. This is what I expected to happen which was why I planted so many in the first place. We have a few tiny green tomatoes developing, I'm hoping to get my first ripe one before May.

We also have some good news on the duck front, one of our muscovy ducks started laying this week! Not only that, they've begun eating flies. We were starting to think that the whole muscovy fly-eating thing was a trick to sell ducks, but now I've witnessed it several times and it's great entertainment. The ducks run around with their necks fully extended and their heads almost touching the ground snapping their bills like mad. Like chickens, the ducks seem to become more friendly once they begin laying. Now the one that's laying lets me pet her every once in awhile.

I'm off to rest!

Around the tiny farm: The animal pen

Here are just a few photos illustrating what's going on this time of year in the animal pen.

Delilah taking a bath. That water was clean not too long before I took the picture. Ducks have a way of getting water very dirty quickly. This shot is in between splashing like mad, they get everything within a several foot radius very wet, which is why I thought it would be smart to plant the sugar cane on the other side of the fence there. After the ducks take a bath, they hop out and run around the pen full speed with their wings flapping, it's hilarious to me, but I think the chickens would prefer to not have giant ducks zooming at them.


All of the older birds are now laying, the last one to start was Cosmo, the white-crested blue polish last week (at around 24 weeks). We're averaging 6-7 eggs a day between 9 birds that are currently laying. It's gotten noticeably louder, mostly with the "Get out, I want to be in that nestbox" noise, which is not my favorite thing to hear. Here's Pizazz (named after the Gem and the Holograms character), our australorp in one of the boxes. I leave the plastic 'training eggs' in the boxes in the nests even after the chickens begin laying just for fun, also, it can't hurt to remind the chickens...


The compost was in bad need of turning, and I was feeling lazy about doing it, so I opened the little gate to the compost bin and for the past few days the chickens have been doing the work for me. They love it and do a far superior job. Now I'll sift the finished compost into a separate container and shovel the rest back into the bin.


Finally, I decided to build a potato bed in the chicken pen. There isn't any grass in there, so I don't have to worry about sprouts of bermuda popping through the potato patch. The chicken wire has so far kept the chickens away from the sprouting potatoes and the newspaper lining has done a good job of keeping the soil in. For seed potatoes, I just went to the farmers market and got some organic red potatoes, yukon golds and fingerlings. This also gives me a good place to dump dirty water when I'm cleaning the waterers instead of having to haul it around the yard or wasting it.

New hen!

Rachel's tiny farm got a new hen! Well, in a round-about way I got an old hen back. Remember when the hatchery accidentally shipped my order to me again two weeks after I got the first 26 chicks? Well I was visiting the urban farm the other day, where 10 of those chicks ended up and I commented on how beautiful one of his hens was, and it turns out it was one of the ones he got from me and he gave her to me. I offered to trade him my noisy hen, and what a surprise, he turned her down. For now she's in a pen inside the chicken yard to get accustomed to her new home. She should begin laying any day.

Here is Miss Moneypenny, the new Easter Egger.


I am pleased to get another easter egger, I love those green eggs. I had planned on having three of them originally but you may recall, Dazzler, turned out to be a rooster and got a new home.

I'm trying to get some foliage up around the chicken pen to act as a little bit of a sound buffer, and also to obscure any view of my chickens from the street. So I was pretty excited when tonight a neighbor gave me a stalk of her sugar cane. I cut it into a few pieces and buried it sideways along the chicken fence. It's right next to where the ducks take baths and splash water all over the place. I'm hoping that nitrogen-rich duck water will really boost the sugar cane. I'll let you know how it goes.

Candling the Muscovy eggs

Well, we are now on day 14 of 35 with the Muscovy eggs. After candling them, I determined that 2 of the original 15 were infertile and 2 had died early on, so now we're down to 11. Tonight I candled one and could see a little embryo moving around, but unfortunately could not get a picture to turn out. Maybe next time I candle I'll test out the video function on my camera. I did get a picture on day 10 of a viable egg, this vaguely shows the spiderweb of blood vessels that form early on in development (The faint red lines near the top of the egg).

Day 10

It's interesting that different poultry take different amounts of time to hatch. You would think that ducks are ducks and it would all be the same, but all other ducks only take 28 days to hatch and Muscovy ducks take 25% longer at 35 days. Compared with a quail's 16 days, that's an eternity (also seems like eternity for those of us that watch the incubators.)

Warm days ahead

This happens to be my 100th post, I wish it would have coincided with something earth-shattering, like me inventing some easy and safe way to rid your yard of bermuda grass forever... oh well. Our weather has been unseasonably warm and next week we're looking at a couple of days where the temps will be approaching 90. Luckily, I've gotten everything in the ground already with the exception of a couple of tomato plants and one butternut squash. When all is said and done, I will have planted 50 tomato/tomatillo plants! For most people that would mean 500-2500 pounds of tomatoes, I'm shooting for 100 pounds, 250 would be fantastic. Many of these are planted in pots, some are more cool weather varieties and there's several other reasons why I'm fully expecting some casualties early on. There are somewhere around 25 varieties mostly heirlooms, and this was the real reason there are so many. I just couldn't say no to the seed catalog. Thankfully the tiny farm is paying for itself through selling eggs, seedlings, sometimes baby poultry and teaching classes. It's somewhere between a hobby and a job, but since it has it's own bank account (by bank account I mean small envelope with about $30 in it at any given time) no one bothers me about going overboard with seed buying.

Our mild winter means the eggplants and peppers from last season are still doing just fine, they're starting to put on new growth and are just starting to flower.
An eggplant flowering... in February
These should hold me over until my new varieties of pepper and eggplants begin fruiting. I can't wait!

Ollas and the neighborhood community

I tried candling the duck eggs last night and they're still just a little early along for me to see anything definite. I'll give it another go this weekend, and show you pictures.
So what else have I been doing? Well, this morning I had my very first root canal. I was sick with terror about it. My doctor prescribed me some sort of anti anxiety pill to take before I went in, that helped a little, then the happy gas came,which helped more and after the shots it was really nothing at all. I couldn't believe it, after all this talk about root canals. It really didn't even hurt. YAY! So Since I was so good, I decided to get myself a special prize. I was still loopy from all the drugs, but I had my neighbor drive me over to Southwest Gardener and I picked up these babies!

My new Ollas

Southwest gardener has a 25% off coupon if you get their mailers, after the discount these four set me back $73.10 total. I had received two as a thank you gift for chick-sitting awhile back and I have loved them and am so happy to be getting more. They will go in my front yard native bed which has no drip system. A way better reward than a trip to the pizza place.

On a somewhat unrelated topic, I feel so grateful to live in the neighborhood I do. Today I came home from the dentist to a hand-written note from a guy down the street, that I had only met once in passing, wanting to learn about chickens. Still loopy from the drugs, I ran (crookedly) to his house and we talked about chickens, I told him I would help him get set-up for them and gave him some squash seeds and a tomato plant for his garden. He is a bike mechanic and volunteered to fix up an old bike we got at a garage sale to return the favor. Awesome. Over the past few weeks there's been a lot of bartering/sharing talk in the neighborhood. I'm sure some of it's because of the economy, but some of it is just people wanting to deal with individuals and business on a smaller and friendlier scale. Off the top of my head I can think of some trading around that's been going on here: food for seedlings, seeds for seeds, tool sharing for fixing tools, fixing things for seeds. This isn't officially bartered, it's more like I fixed a neighbor's sewing machine and a giant bag of oranges magically appeared at our house. It's just a bunch of folks helping out some other folks.

It's a little funny in a central phoenix neighborhood to have 5 people with chickens all on the same street and at least that many with some sort of garden plan and a bunch of us are also experimenting with home-made solar and in all other regards, we couldn't be more different. It's encouraging.

Home-made olive taste test

For those of you that have been reading the blog for awhile, you may remember that I decided to brine my own olives. I picked olives from a neighbor's tree and followed directions I found on the internet. Here's the original post if you care to read it, the olive part along with a promising photo are near the middle/bottom.

How did it go??



Terrible. Yuck. Awful.

I ended up making 5 jars total. 3 of the 5 had mold on the tops, so they were out straight away. I tried one from one of the non-moldy jars and it tasted like salty poison. Poison-y taste aside (perhaps they needed more curing) the salt is so overwhelming that you can't even begin to taste anything remotely olive-like. I think I'm going to find some local folks who have had success making olives before and find out what went wrong. As a side note, my neighbor that tried this experiment at the same time had similar results.

It's disappointing, but at least I didn't NEED these olives. It's always best to practice when you can afford to fail.

Today is day 8 on the Muscovy eggs in the incubator. Tonight I will be candling them to check for fertility. I will do my best to get pictures of anything I see and post them soon.