{"id":1869,"date":"2011-04-30T14:39:37","date_gmt":"2011-04-30T19:39:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/?p=1869"},"modified":"2011-04-30T14:39:37","modified_gmt":"2011-04-30T19:39:37","slug":"big-rocks-toddler-chicks-update-from-green-island-farm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/2011\/04\/big-rocks-toddler-chicks-update-from-green-island-farm\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Rocks & Toddler Chicks: Update from Green Island Farm"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>We have a jumper. We haven\u2019t called 911 yet, but when we found Martha (one of the big gold Buff Orpingtons) on top of the water jar in the brooding box, we knew the chicks<\/a> were getting frisky. It\u2019s amazing how fast they\u2019re getting their feathers and learning to stretch their wings. They can all fly\/hop\/jump from one end of the box to the other if startled, though fortunately they don\u2019t all jump at once. It\u2019s tempting to build a bigger box, but they\u2019ll be ready to go outside in a few weeks. Meanwhile, I do my best to keep the box and their water and food dishes clean. They sure can trash a place\u2014worse than teenagers.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>The girls all have names now, thanks to Libby and our friends Eliza Peter <\/a>and her son James who came to visit weekend before last. Eliza and James brought along the family dog, a golden-colored Labradoodle named Opti, and Libby decided one of the Buff Orpingtons should be named for Opti (far left). The littlest and prettiest bird (and also the friendliest\u2014she loves to sit in Roy\u2019s hand–see top photo) is named Perky, for my mom. Yes, it\u2019s sort of an odd Mother\u2019s Day present, but I thought she\u2019d get a kick out of it as she likes animals. My Mom\u2019s real name is Pauletta, but friends have called her Perky for years. (She is<\/em> perky\u2014and pretty, too, so it\u2019s only fitting that our beautiful little Sicilian Buttercup be named for her.) Oreo (above right), one of the Barred Rocks, definitely gets our vote for Miss Personality. Every time I try to take a picture inside the box (difficult), she comes right up to the camera. Also, along with Martha and Opti, she heads for high ground whenever possible; these three generally hog the little roost Roy built for the box. The other gals\u2014Jelly Bean, Little Squawker, Sugar (Eliza\u2019s pick, short for Cinnamon Sugar), and Chippy (looks like our resident chipmunk), are camera shy and less adventuresome.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>Keeping up with the toddler chicks has been easy compared to the garden work over the past few weeks. We\u2019re still prepping beds, as our soil is full of rocks. If you want to see a humorous illustration of Mars vs. Venus, you can watch Roy and me in the garden using two very different methods to get rocks out of the soil. I basically kneel or bend over and hand-pick them out after turning a patch of soil over with a fork. Roy has built a portable screen that looks sort of like a soccer or hockey goal that he can shovel dirt through and watch the biggest rocks roll away. His method is (somewhat) quicker, but I think mine is more efficient!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>One thing I\u2019m crazy about, though, is the simple little screen (far left) Roy made me from hardware cloth and a few boards. I use this to cull out twigs and stones from soil to make a fine mixture to sprinkle over tiny seeds after planting, instead of spending money on a soilless mix. Actually, I\u2019m always excited when I hear the table saw screeching or the compressor hissing in the shop\u2014I never know what Roy is going to come out with, like this recent appearance (at right)\u2014a new gate for the chicken pen.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>We also spent the better part of an evening splayed out on the newspaper-covered mudroom floor transplanting all the tomato and basil seedlings out of six-packs and into 4-inch pots. The numbers are not as crazy as last year, but we still have 200 seedlings, all of which need light. So Roy had to reconfigure the seedling shelves (which he built last year with the idea that they’d be easy to break down and reassemble) to accommodate more lights and taller plants. (The extra lights came from Roy’s shop–now he has to do without until Memorial Day!)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>The really great news is that everything I planted outside a few weeks ago is coming up. The pea vines are a couple inches high. That\u2019s my crazy teepee trellis at (near)right. I don\u2019t plan to sell peas this year\u2014I just wanted some for us\u2014so I grabbed a corner for them and made this contraption out of our bamboo stock (also saved from last year) and string to keep the birds out and to provide support. My first batch of arugula and radishes are thriving, so I went ahead and popped the PVC pipes in the ground and draped the Remay over them for early flea-beetle protection (photo, far right). My baby bok choy and about 12 different kinds of lettuces have germinated, and we got the onions, the leeks, and the first batch of potatoes planted. I\u2019ve also been working on an area outside the garden where perennial herbs will go.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all very satisfying, and every morning I wake up excitedly, head out to feed Cocoa the bunny, and to check out the garden, too. I especially love a foggy morning like this past Friday. Something terribly romantic about the mist and the green colors fading to grey. (Romance was on my mind, I admit, as I was watching the royal wedding. No, I am not related to Kate Middleton, unfortunately!) I snapped a few pix of the garden and then trotted over to the north side of the property\u2014an area called The Grove which had fish ponds in it years ago and now has hundreds of daffodils waning and lilies of the valley coming on under the maples.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>The fish ponds were the purview of Farmer Greene, who built this place. And since we love all things green, we\u2019ve started calling our little operation Green Island Farm. Might be more accurate to call our version a mini-farm at this point, but it\u2019s wonderful to imagine all the different iterations this place has taken over the years\u2014the food that\u2019s been raised and grown and gathered on this piece of land over the last few hundred years, probably beginning with the Wampanoag Indians. We\u2019re still hoping all this digging is going to turn up an arrowhead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We have a jumper. We haven\u2019t called 911 yet, but when we found Martha (one of the big gold Buff Orpingtons) on top of the water jar in the brooding box, we knew the chicks were getting frisky. It\u2019s amazing how fast they\u2019re getting their feathers and learning to stretch their wings. They can all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[45,1],"tags":[46],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1869"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1869"}],"version-history":[{"count":44,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1933,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1869\/revisions\/1933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}