Ups and downs

First the good news! We’ve been getting back in to the swing of things gradually (or abruptly in some cases — when the baby chicks show up at the post office, you’d better be ready!). We’ve gotten rehabituated to the morning routine of opening the greenhouse, watering seedlings, and gathering eggs, and I’m doing better this year about staying on top of upgrading seedlings to larger pots or planting them out. The tomatoes we started from seed in March are planted out under plastic and are starting to flower already. The squash plants are still in pots, but are huge and the pattypans are already forming tiny tiny little fruits, so little that they are still fuzzy — I’ll transplant them this weekend and try to avoid damaging the teensy squashes.

This year we cleaned out the greenhouse, which is 10×20′, and moved all the seedstarting tables to one side in order to build a raised bed in the other half. So we now have a 4×20′ bed across the whole length of the south side of the greenhouse. For the summer, it is holding eggplant, hot peppers, cucumbers, a French melon, my Moon & Stars watermelon, and two luffa (loofah) plants that I am not sure will thrive, but I’m going to try. If they fruit, I’ll try eating them once maybe but mostly I want scrubbers. In the fall we’ll turn the bed over to winter leeks, lettuce, radishes, etc.

The disappointing news! Although we didn’t anticipate the demand for meat chickens from our usual hatchery — we left it too late and weren’t able to get our preferred chickens for the dates we wanted — we were able to place an order for some slow-growing red broilers from a different hatchery, with which we’ve had good luck for laying hens and turkeys. I was really excited to let everyone know about this first batch of chickens, which arrived about a month ago. It quickly became apparent, though, that the hatchery had sent us not the slow-growing red broilers we ordered, but some white chickens … after several phone calls, we established that there was apparently no way for them to say with confidence whether they were their slow-growing white broiler, or their fast-grower — which is literally (truly literally) the same type chicken you get at the grocery store, and the type we emphatically do not want to raise. So we sold them to Pheasant Fields Farm for the cost of feed, got credit from the hatchery, and sighed and wrote off Batch 1. So there’ll be no chickens in mid-June, as we’d planned.

Back to the good news section! Batch 2 of chicks has arrived and are about a week and a half old, and ~60 of them are scheduled to be ready for sale in early July. Batch 3 (fifty chicks, probably taking reservations for 35-40) will be here in a couple of weeks, and the turkeys are coming soon too!

The chicks are JM Hatchery’s Freedom Rangers — the same chicks as last year, although they used to be called Colored Range Chicks. The turkeys will be 10 Broad-breasted Bronzes and 40 Narraganssetts. Turkeys are more fragile than chickens, especially as babies, so we’ll take orders for 30 turkeys and keep a waiting list for the rest. We may also have a wide range of weights, so we’ll try to fairly allocate big turkeys to people with big Thanksgiving dinners, and smaller turkeys to those with smaller parties.

Overall, in addition to the turkeys, we hope to have four batches of 50-75 chickens at a time, ready in July, August, September, and October. If we time it well, we might have a fifth batch in late October.

You can sign up to be on our notification list for poultry news — that’s how we’ll get in touch when we are taking orders for both chickens and turkeys. Everything will be first-come, first-served.

More news soon, as I add “write blog posts” to my list of regular and semi-regular farm chores …