Tuesday, April 22, 2008

So Busy

It is Holy Week for us Eastern Orthodox Christians and so therefore besides the every day farm duties of busy spring, we are busy with Church. This is why I will not be around much this week except to maybe update egg count, which certainly is awesome as of late.

We begin the Feast of Feasts Sunday, and in honor of this St. Brigid Farm will be butchering the roosters and setting them in the crockpot for a good 10-12 hours. This will make for amazingly juicy and tender meat that is making my mouth water just writing about it. Butchering day is tomorrow (we'll have pictures later) and I hope I can catch that cotton-pickin' rooster!

My tomato plants are huge...maybe a foot tall. I'm worried though as some of them are yellowing and the tallest of them seem to look weepy, like wilting. But they have plenty of water and and I have "fed" them fish emulsion from time to time. The only thing I can think of is that they have outgrown their pots again. If so I'll need to get them out side in big buckets. My dad suggested making a tent for them, another on the list of 100 things to do NOW. But I really want LOTS of tomatoes this year so I better do all I can do for them. Do you have any suggestions?

I'm getting ready to move chickens around. I will start butchering soon and thought I'd put the small, older flock into the smaller coop until they are all gone. So we are moving fence and clearing out coops and disinfecting them. I hope to accomplish this today and tomorrow.

Firefly has only a little over 2 weeks to go until kidding and they say to be ready a week ahead. As big as she is I really think it would be fun if she had triplets. And I wouldn't be surprised if she is a bit early.

We'll update as time allows!!

Have a great week.

5 comments:

Mimi said...

A blessed Holy Week to you and yours!

Matt said...

It sounds like your coops are stationary. That makes me wonder how you clean them out. Wow do you clean them out?

Have a fabulous Holy Week!

Susan Sophia said...

I open the door and start shoveling.

Yesterday I had my 8 year old and my 5 year old helping me. We had the bigger coop completely empty very quickly. They pushed the litter to the door and I shoveled it into the compost.

I have been doing the deep litter method but am finding that in the Pacific Northwest this is probably not the best method. Mites love it.
So I think I am going to switch to a "once a week clean out" and see if that doesn't work better for us.

Anonymous said...

HI,
I am an Orthodox Christian too. I live in Walla Walla, and we too are homesteading. We have three acres, 33 chickens, 8 goats, and last but not least 4 kids. We go to visit St. John's in Goldendale too. Small world I guess. Great Blog!
Theodora

Charlotte Custom Closets said...

Lovely blog you have hhere