The first egg of the season arrived this weekend! Surely Spring can’t be far behind. I assume the little green egg was from Hazel, since she is the most consistent layer of all the girls. Pearl and Winnie gave up their egg-laying duties around Labor Day, but Hazel kept up through about mid-October. It kills me to buy commercial eggs from the store when I think of all the delicious eggs we had overflowing last summer from our urban chickens.
My nephew and I spent our sunny Saturday planting one of the four garden beds. We put in three tidy rows of lettuce, one variety per row. Collards, arugula (rocket), and spinach finished out the vegetable bed. I also went around the yard poking in about 15 fava bean seeds. I have never grown fava beans before, but they sound fairly straight-forward. I believe they are a nitrogen fixer so I planted several near my fruit trees hoping they will benefit from being close to one another.
I have been trying to figure out new uses for all the chicken-manure filled straw I clean out of the coop once a week. The yard looks nice with a clean layer of wood chips everywhere, so I am not eager to start dumping straw in random places again. The compost bin has been getting fairly full as well over the past year. I decided to try something new.
I dug out one of the vegetable beds about halfway and loosening the soil at the bottom. I dumped an even layer of straw from the chicken coop over the bed along with some mostly-broken-down-compost from our bin, then raked the soil back over the top of the bed. It’s sort of like a sandwich: the dirt is the bread and the straw/compost is the filling. I am really, really, really hoping I don’t have straw sprouting in my vegetable bed… But if all goes well, I was thinking the bed gets a hefty dose of nutrients from the compost and chicken manure, with some mulch material to boot.
To measure the success of this little experiment, I will grow half of one vegetable crop in the prepared bed and the other half in a bed I haven’t prepared this way. We can compare the results come summertime harvest. I just need to decide now which vegetable from my long list this season would benefit the most from nutrient-rich soil…
This year we started using a deep mulch of wood/bark chips in our chicken coop/greenhouse. Last year we needed to clean it out about once a week through the winter when we had straw in it because the smell wou build up. This year we haven’t had to change it out as the carbon – nitrogen ratio is about right for good nutrient breakdown without the smell. We will probably have to compost the wood chips in our compost through the summer before its ready to be put on beds though. We did like having all of the straw to mulch with last year, but not having to clean out the coop every week this winter has really helped to…
Damn, I miss that action. Down here in Mexico, pretty much everything I do these days is done in pots and planters.
My wife, Adriana, bought me eleven roses while I was up north, and we got them planted this week. We bought some really nice mesetas (clay pots) in Comonfort, and we hope to have some sweet smelling rose aroma up on the terrace. I still need to get a tomato and zuchhini plant started.
Looking good girl. Keep it up. And keep that little nephew involved. These are lessons he’ll take with him for life. I know I did.