Dropstone Farms

My camera is obviously not intended as a video camera, so the video quality is not great — at times the chickens appear to be made of lasers, zooming around very quickly — but the sound is pretty much exactly what we live with, all the time.

(For treats they are getting kale stems, parsnip tops and peelings, and some stale corn chips from last week’s tortilla soup.)

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1. Can we dry overripe shelling peas, which are too starchy to eat fresh, and use them like split peas?
2. Is there any use for the fibrous but still fresh and juicy shells of the peas that did not get overripe? Make stock maybe?
3. If one boy duck is picking on the other boy duck, pulling his feathers out and whatnot, and we want to get rid of one and keep the other to breed, do we keep the aggressive one (to breed strong babies) or the passive one (to breed docile babies)?
4. Where in the world am I supposed to find time to post more often?

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It was 70° here on Saturday, which is approximately late June weather, rarely in mid-April. It was also the first day of the Bainbridge Island Farmers’ Market, so we rode our bikes into town in the morning and did some shopping. I had my bike all tricked out with my removable wicker basket on the front, and my new REI-dividend-purchased pannier on the back. We strolled around for an hour or so, had lunch at the pub, and returned home with my front basket full of seedlings, pannier full of groceries from the regular store, and Garth’s messenger bag and front basket full of veggies and eggs from the farmers.

When we got home, we immediately took advantage of the heat — seriously, it was actually hot — to bring all manner of poultry outside. Chickens were in the electric fence, until we discovered they could get through the holes of the fence regardless of zapping, so we moved them to a smaller, but still large, area with a smaller-holed. It was pointless, really, as they huddled together in one section for an hour or two, although it was definitely above 70° at that point.

Our charming young next-door neighbor Calvin, who is almost four, inquired with volume and frequency as to the location of the very cute ducklings. So we brought them out to enjoy the sun too, though Calvin was napping by the time we wrangled them outside. Turns out ducklings like a dog-dish full of water and bits of weeds and grass nearly as much as a four-year-old likes ducklings.

The chickens spent their first night in the coop on Saturday, but we didn’t get much else done. Saturday was poultry day, I guess.

And Sunday was planting day. We had bought broccoli, chard, and onion seedlings at the market, and we picked out three kale seedlings from our seed tray. Chard (multicolored) and kale (1 Winterbor and 2 Nero di Toscani, I think) went in between the two rows of peas (Oregon Trail and some Sugar Snap, both of which have germinated almost 100%, which is awesome). The greens should keep sort of shady there, and not bolt too quickly, I think.

Broccoli went sort of alongside the rosemary bush, which we had to trim to get the deer fence in place. I don’t remember which variety it is — the broccoli, that is — but I remember it was from Persephone Farms, so I’ll ask them when we go again this weekend.

The onions are Egyptian walking onions, which are funny looking and awesome. Instead of making a bulb underground and a flower on top, they make a group of small bulblets on top. If you don’t harvest them, the weight gets too much and the stalk bends down to the ground, where the bulblets plant themselves and grow. Hence, walking. The 4-H kid we got them from at the market said they make good scallions, too.

Earlier this week, Garth planted potatoes, too. Rather than marking them with the little flags, he drew a map in his notebook. He says it’s “four plants of everything, and six of All Blues.” I don’t know what “everything” means, but I’ll find out eventually, I’m sure.

As always, pictures are up at Flickr: Chickens; Ducks; Little farm (not very up-to-date).

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Just yesterday, we were telling Garth’s mom what a relief it was that the chickens are old enough to require less work now. We have elevated their foods and waters off the ground a bit, so they don’t scratch so much pine shavings into them. We have given them a bit of dowel to perch on, and we upgraded them from the bottom half of a dog crate, to the two halves of a dog crate zip-tied together.

So it was sort of ironic (Garth says: “less ironic than a pain in the ass”) that he called me frantically from the feed store late this afternoon to tell me that they had four Khaki Campbell ducklings, exactly the breed we have been looking for. They were two females and two males. We wanted three or four females for eggs, and would take a male just to hang out (and breed, maybe, given the hard time we had finding these ducklings). Two males and two females is way different from the

ratio we had hoped for, but the prospect of leaving one poor little boy duckling behind in the duckling bucket, all alone, was just not even an option. So Garth brought home four little ducklings, two boys and two girls.

For now they are in the chicks’ old galvanized tub, washed out (thanks Garth!) with vinegar. They are already displaying very different behavior from the chicks; they run and splash in the water, going in circles with one foot in the waterer.

So at this point we are looking at a future average of:
6 chickens = ~28 eggs/week
2 lady ducks = ~10-12 eggs/week

Yay!

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