Category: Homesteading
Phlox
We have wild phlox that is purple and we have wild phlox that is white. But every now and again we get one that is white with purple stripes, and I love those. Anya dug this one up from the field and planted it in my bee garden last year, and it is huge this year. And still has the striped flowers that I love!
Nesting Instinct — Duck Edition
One of our Pekin ducks has gone broody — but people have managed to sufficiently breed out brooding instinct to what I call “short attention span nesting”. She absolutely needs to sit on a nest. For about 20 minutes, then she’s ready for a swim in the pond or some chow. Which means we wouldn’t trust them to hatch eggs — we’ve got incubators for that. She has, however, figured out a reasonable solution: pinecones. No one takes them from her .She can even leave them out in the yard overnight and the marauding racoon will leave it alone. She built a very convincing nest in our pine trees (and was frantically trying to escape the fence to go sit on the nest) … so Anya relocated it into the duck yard and got the duck over to it. Now she’s got a nest inside the fence to sit on for half an hour and doesn’t seem so compelled to escape.
Hazelnut Progress
Hazelnut Progress
Black Walnut Seedlings
A neighbor gifted us black walnut seedlings he dug up from his yard — we planted them along the East side of the end of the farm path. Another twenty years, and we’ll have some more big walnuts lining the path!
Hazelnut Progress
Progress picture of the hazelnut cluster we’re watching
2024 Hatch — Chickens
Our first birds are hatching — we’ve got ten Bresse chickens (and I learned that there’s both a dominant white gene and a recessive white gene. French flocks go for the recessive white because you’ll always get white birds. American Bresse have dominant white … which means you get a colored bird!)
Hazelnuts – 2024
The hazelnuts are just starting to form — it looks like we’ve got nuts developing on the newer plants on the north side too. As far as propagating plants, I’ve pretty well established that dropping a woody cutting in willow water doesn’t work. Dropping a green cutting in water doesn’t work. Next, I’m going to try a green cutting in soil and air layering. I’ve found a few places online that say air layering worked … even if it looks a little odd having bundles of soil wrapped around the branches of your shrubbery.
2024 Garden – North Side
We got most of the north side of the garden planted — watermelon and tomatoes are still in the greenhouse (sprouting)
