This spring has been very wet and warm, and the plants have taken notice. As I was walking through the home vegetable garden on March 31st I was pleasantly surprised at what I found. I went back inside to get the camera, because being from Minnesota you aren’t supposed to have fresh veggies in March. The following is a sample of what I found:

First up: Peppers!

Gypsy Peppers

Golden Treasure Pepper

Golden Marconi Pepper

Next comes the tomatoes:

Lots of tomatoes!

Early Girl (maybe?)

Lots of cherry type tomatoes

Our basil is doing awesome. We plucked some and made bruschetta for dinner last night.

Sweet Basil

A couple 65 gallon pots full of potatoes…

Potatoes

And of course no post would be complete without a picture of a chicken, who desperately wants to get into the garden and eat everything green.

Mandy, the destroyer of vegetables

I knew we were all going to be tired when this weekend was over… that realization hit me as I was walking around the hardware store at 7:30 Saturday morning carrying a 10 lb. sledgehammer. And I was right. Those posts that we laid out last weekend weren’t going to pound themselves into the ground. I tried using the front end loader on the Kubota to push them into the ground, but the Kubota is just a tad too light, so instead of pushing down the posts I just lifted the front of the tractor off the ground. Luckily we’ve had a bit of rain this spring, so the ground has softened up making it at least possible to pound the posts into the clay soil. After swinging the sledgehammer like a lumberjack all morning I was happy to be done with the fence posts.

Next up, Farm Boy Sid helped me drive nails in the posts to lock them in place. Once the posts were all up (and mostly vertical) we put in corner braces… more posts to pound into the ground. Finally finished with the posts we could start hanging the fencing. The fencing we used was 7-1/2′ tall plastic fencing that is designed to keep out deer of the gardens.

The fence is secured to the posts by zip ties. Lots of zip ties. 500 zip ties. Farm Boy Spencer got in on the action, and was the zip tie dispenser.

More fencing…

And more zip ties…

Wash, repeat.

Fence is done! Wrong. Once the deer fencing was up we moved onto the rabbit fencing, which is 2′ high plastic coated chicken wire. This is to keep the rabbits from chewing through the deer fencing. Guess what? MORE ZIP-TIES!

Time for a break…

Breaks done. Next up, tension cable and Gripples! Forgot to take pictures of the gripples, but they are a neat little trinket that is used to pull wire through and the wire can’t slide back out of it. Hard to explain, but it allows you to tension wire easily. We ran cable around the top of the entire fence, and then a second run of cable 3′ off the ground. How do you attach the fence to the cable? ZIP TIES!

NOW the fence is done. Wait, forgot about the ground stakes… drive a 8″ long aluminum ground stake every 5′ to hold the fencing to the ground so small animals cant get in to the gardens under the fence.

I think the fence is done… well, except for the gate, but the fence manufacturer forgot to send us some of the gate pieces, so at least we are done with the fence for the time being.

Once the fence was done we went to Bob’s Taco Station in Rosenberg, TX. Good tacos, but if you are doing farm work I recommend getting twice the number that you would expect to eat, because they are on the small side.

Lunch break is over. A quick stop at the hardware store to pick up more irrigation supplies and back to the farm. Luckily we are now adept at running irrigation, so this was a quick project.

One project that wasn’t quick was one that took Farm Boy Sid the vast majority of the weekend… remember the rains that I mentioned that allowed us to drive the posts into the clay? Well, those same rains pooled in areas between the raised beds. Sid dug and trenched all weekend. He did an amazing job of getting the water out of the gardens, so the ground will now have a chance to dry up.

Tired and dirty, we went home. It was another beautiful weekend at Three Sisters Farm.

Where to start? Lets start with the morning ritual… letting the chickens out of the chicken tractor. I really need to take a video of this, because it is a fun experience. The chickens see you coming (it is difficult to sneak up on 75 hyper sensitive birds) and queue up at the door…

And as soon as the door is dropped they fly out en masse…

And after 30 seconds all birds are out waiting around for treats!

What are treats for chickens? Black sunflower seeds.

OM NOM NOM!

That takes care of that.

So, now that we are in planting season we need to put up the deer/rabbit fencing to keep our veggies safe and sound. We are currently in the middle of putting up the 200 feet of 7 1/2 foot tall fencing. We estimated corners, measured middle posts, lined up the posts by sight, and started pounding them in. Once we got the posts 1/2 way in we measured the perimeter to make sure our 200′ of fencing would work… our perimeter ended up measuring to 199 feet. Good enough for me.

This coming weekend I need to finish pounding in the 18 posts, brace the corners, and hang the fencing. As you can also see our tomatoes are in the ground! So, if you are thinking of planting tomatoes this spring you should get them in the ground sooner rather than later, because we have spotted a few tomato flowers already! This might mean we’ll have fresh farm tomatoes by mid-April.

If all goes well, and we finish the fencing this weekend we will be planting peppers next week. Keep your fingers crossed.

A week ago we moved 77 chickens from the house to the farm. Today we ordered 45 baby chicks to raise at the house.

Another full weekend at the farm. We started bright and early Saturday morning… well, Friday night, and worked right up until dark-thirty Sunday. We couldn’t have asked for better weather; it was absolutely perfect out.

Last week our roosters found their voices, which meant emergency relocation. On Tuesday our first batch of 15 chickens moved to the farm, and 3 roosters were brought to the local feed store to find new homes. Another batch of 15 hens were moved on Thursday, another 15 on Friday, 20 were moved on Saturday, and the final 12 moved out Sunday morning giving us a total of 77 chickens living at the farm (74 hens and 3 roosters). They are happy, happy chickens, and we are happy that we raised them, and got them out of the yard with out getting in trouble with the HOA.

The big task for the weekend was moving and filling our raised beds. Friday we collected enough cardboard to cover the bottom of the beds to use as a weed block. Saturday was the day I had been fearing for months: 24 yards of garden soil was delivered in 2 large dump trucks. Last year we got 2 yards of soil for our home beds, and that was tiring work, so getting 12x that amount had me frightened. Luckily we had the trusty little Kubota to help us move the soil… 1/5 yard at a time.

Saturday we were able to get one and a half beds filled. Each bed took 10 scoops of soil, and a LOT of raking and smoothing.

Farmer Jen working the soil in the beds

So after relocating chickens, moving and leveling the beds, and starting to fill the beds, we were exhausted and ready for a camp out! We set up the tent, started a campfire, and the boys cooked hot dogs and made s’mores.

Farmer Jen and Farm Boy Sid spent the night in the tent while Farmer Mike and Farm Boy Spencer headed home to tend to our chickens, cats, and fish at home. We were all asleep by 8pm.

Sunday morning came too early. Farm Boy Spencer and Farmer Mike loaded up the remaining chickens into the Jeep, and were back at the farm just after sunrise. We knew we had a full day of dirt work in front of us, so we all pitched in to build the farm.

After 100+ trips on the tractor, and many blisters from raking, the beds were full. Filling the beds was actually penciled in to take a full two weekends, but we knocked it out in one. We are tired, we are sore, but we are one happy family.

Remember the old cotton trailer we bought a few weeks ago? Well, we have now finished converting it into our chicken tractor. It took a full two weekends, but we are very happy with the end results.

Step one was to put on a roof. Sounds easy enough until I realized that meant drilling sixteen 1/2″ holes through 1/8″ steel. But twenty 2x4s, four 2x6s, six sheets of plywood, a box of screws, and many drill bits later we finished.

As you can see we also cut out a panel and installed a chain link fence door/ramp for the chickens to walk up, and so we can close them up to secure them at night.

Did I mention that the burn ban was lifted for Fort Bend County? We hadn’t been able to burn for almost a year, so we had some large brush piles. We tossed a match to our two piles, and they went up fast! Within 30 minutes the piles disappeared. I’ve never seen anything burn so fast.

End of weekend number one.

Weekend two started slow and drizzly. Went to Lowe’s and bought more wood… it seems like we are always buying wood at Lowe’s. Anyway, we got back and put up 6 roosting poles and built 12 nesting boxes.

The chicken tractor is done! Well, mostly. I still want to reinforce the door (it was bent from us walking up/down it all weekend). I also want to put shingles or corrugated panels on the roof, because I have a feeling that plywood isn’t going to handle the Houston weather very well. We also might wrap the entire thing with contractor plastic to keep the weather out if it gets cold and rainy again before winter ends.

Only one problem… we built everything backwards. The roof pitched the wrong way, and the door opened on the wrong side. So I hooked it back up to the Jeep and took it for a drive to turn it around. I was nervous how the roof would handle driving on our uneven ground. I was fearing that it would rip apart from the trailer flexing. But it held together perfectly, and we got it positioned exactly where we wanted it to be.

The last thing we needed to do to get ready for the chickens was install 350′ of chicken fencing, wire up the energizer, pound in a 6′ grounding rod, and plug it in. 8000 volts of electrified goodness sprang to life.

The chickens should be very happy at their new home in the country…

It is a very busy time of the year for the new farm.  Our 90 baby chicks are almost old enough to be moved to the farm, the vegetable seedlings needed to be moved from the garage to the greenhouse, we inherited a shed from some friends that needed to be moved, the grass and weeds were finally tall enough to need mowing, and the county burn ban has been lifted so we can get rid of the big brush piles that have accumulated over the last year.  With all of that on our plates I decided to take a weeks vacation from my city job to get a bunch of these tasks knocked out.

First up was evicting the youngest chicks out of the greenhouse, and combine them with the older girls living in the temporary coop.  This needed to happen so we could get the vegetable seedlings out of the dark garage and moved into the greenhouse.  It actually went really smoothly until mice invaded the greenhouse and ate two flats of tomato seedlings.  150 tomato plants gone in a night.  We put out traps and caught 6 mice.  The rest of the seedlings are now safe.

On to getting the farm ready for the chickens… Last week Farmer Jen drove all around Needville and Fairchild looking for an old cotton trailer that we could turn into a mobile chicken coop (chicken tractor). She got a call a few days later, and the next day we drove the jeep into Pleak, TX, hooked up the cotton trailer, and drove the 15 miles back to the farm very slowly. Luckily we didn’t have a tire blow out, and we made it safe and sound to the farm.

Another fun adventure was loading 25 – 2″x10″x16′ boards for the raised beds onto our 11′ long trailer, and towing those 15+ miles to the farm. But, amazingly, we made that trip without incident as well. Once we got the lumber to the farm we spent a day building 10 raised beds.

Up next? Moving our new shed. It took everything the little Kubota could give (and then some) to move the shed into its new location and get it leveled on cinder blocks. The tractor’s front end loader popped off one time, we snapped one hook that we were using to pull the shed, and pulled the other hook out of the 4×4 it was screwed in to. We ended up pulling the shed with the jeep. In the end no one got hurt, and we got the storage shed into position. This is going to be VERY useful to have at the farm.

In between all of these jobs I actually had some time to get the whole farm mowed. Due to last years drought I hadn’t mowed in 9 months! It took about 4 hours total, but the grass and weeds are now all a respectable height. We just need to get the chickens moved out there, and I’ll never have to mow again.

Speaking of the chickens and rain… Lola was not amused at all of the rain we got earlier this week.

So what’s left? This weekend we are going to burn the brush piles, put a roof on the cotton trailer to make it safe for the chickens, and put up the electric chicken fencing (UPS says it’ll arrive on Friday). If we can get all of that done this weekend we’ll be fully ready to move the chickens to the farm at the first sound of a rooster crowing… hopefully that won’t happen for another 2-3 weeks. Next week we’ll need to have 20 yards of garden soil delivered, and then fill the raised beds. After the beds are full of soil we’ll install deer fencing around them, and run drip irrigation lines through them. We will then be ready for planting the week of February 15th.

Even though we’ve only purchased hens the sexing process isn’t 100% accurate. Most hatcheries guarantee a 90% accuracy rate, so out of our 95 hens we could expect 9 roosters. We did a bit better than that, and instead of 9 roosters we have 6… or had 6.

Over the last 6 months we have been building a relationship with Fort Bend Feed in Rosenberg, TX. We have bought many baby chicks, supplies, veggie seeds, and thousands of pounds of chick feed. So, when we discovered that we had more roosters than what we needed we asked them what we should do with the extra birds. They agreed to sell them for us on consignment. All we really want is for the roos to find a good home. So, today we brought them a Plymouth Barred Rock rooster and a Leghorn rooster. We still have a Red Laced Blue Wyandotte, Silver Laced Wyandotte, and 2 Light Brahma roosters. We’ll eventually have to bring 2 more roosters to find new homes, and keep 2 for our own flock.

Take care Foghorn Leghorn!

Every year we take time over the Christmas holiday to start seeds for the spring garden. This year is no exception. Due to the baby chicks living in the greenhouse we have had to temporarily move the seed starting part of the farm into the garage, and get the seeds germinated using heat mats and grow lights. Hopefully the baby chicks will be old enough to vacate the greenhouse before too long, so we can once again use it for its intended purpose. Yesterday we spent time in the garage building an additional potting table, and planting pepper and tomato seeds.

First was to build another potting table. I looked around to see how much it was to just purchase another table, but did not like the $100+ price tag, so I went to the lumber store and spent $12 for supplies, and after an hour had this:

We then worked on filling trays and planting the pepper and tomato starts. In all we planted around 300 seeds. We’ll be getting more starter trays this week, and will hopefully start another round of seeds next weekend.

Right now we are just trying to get the seeds to germinate, so growing in the garage should be fine. By the time the seeds trays have all sprouted we’ll be able to move them into the greenhouse.

A chickens feathers are important.  Why?  First of all, they are beautiful- so many variations in color, shape, and size.  They are a valuable aid in identifying the different breeds of chickens. Feathers also help the chicken to regulate their temperature.

Feathers may even have a role in future technology.  Feathers left as waste in chicken production are being used in interesting ways.  Scientists in Nevada have created a new and environmentally friendly process for developing bio-diesel from ‘chicken feather meal’.  Chicken feathers are also being used in the production of a new type of plastic called thermoplastic.  The feather-based plastic could be used for all kinds of products, from plastic cups and plates to furniture.

Here at Three Sisters Farm, we’ve been thinking about feathers.  We have a Silver Laced Wyandotte chick who is lacking feathers.  Poor Gertrude.

Why isn’t Gertrude growing her feathers?  Research tells us that it could  be a genetic defect or a lack of protein.  We know it’s not a nutrition issue, since she is being fed the appropriate chick feed required for growing chicks.  That leaves the genetic component.  Maybe she is just a “slow to grow feathers” type of gal.  Time will only tell.

Another feather issue- molting!  This is a first for us, here at the farm.  Farmer  Mike and Farmer Jen noticed that our beloved Molly hasn’t been laying her beautiful blue eggs.  After ruling out her being “egg bound”, we decided that she must be molting.

A few days later, it was very apparent that this was the case.

Molly’s feathers are all over the yard.  They just drop as she walks.  When she shakes, a  bunch fly out. Yesterday was a windy day- which helped her lose more feathers.

The molting process has just begun for Molly.  Chickens will first molt at about 18 months.  Molting may take 2 to 4 months. Laying will resume when molt is over, but may not be as good as before molt process.

Farm Boy Spencer is going on “scrambled egg strike”, as he prefers Molly’s blue eggs to the brown eggs laid by Lola and Charlotte.  Maybe I’ll have him start collecting her feathers instead.  Who knows, maybe when this process is complete we’ll add Bio-diesel to the list of our farm products.