Last Easter Egg Hunting Party With the Cousins

 We had our last Easter party with my brother's family.  They are moving to Florida in a couple of weeks. 

We let the youngest four kids have the first three minutes to hunt before we released the older kids. It's a little more fair that way. 

Traditional Goomie style ham dinner afterwards:

Farm Fresh: Hatching Silver Appleyard Ducklings and Garden Progress

 Twenty of the twenty two duck eggs that we put in the incubator hatched this week!  I tried a different approach with them.  Normally, I feel pretty locked in to the 24 hour window with hatching.  That is to say, after 24 hours in the incubator chicks/ducklings need to come out so that they can get a drink of water etc.   Germs and bacteria build up quickly once they start to hatch and poop outside of the eggs. And if you open the incubator to take some out then usually the humidity drops and the egg sac stiffens so that any who haven't hatched yet have very little chance of breaking out. 

Normally, we lock down the incubator 3 days before hatch day. This group started hatching very early though! There were still 4 days left on the incubator timer when the first duckling pipped. I had to quickly stop the automatic turner and remove the tray.  (In hindsight, I wish that I would have left the tray in place. The first duckling to pip got too cold or too dried out from opening the incubator all the way to shift the tray out). 

The hatching was spread out over almost 3 days. After the first 24 hours there were about 12 ducklings ready to go into the brooder.  I just opened the incubator a crack and carefully pulled out each duckling pausing to make sure that the heat and humidity levels were not changing much.  That allowed the other 8 slower eggs time to hatch.  The incubator was very stinky after 3 days of hatching, but ducklings are very sturdy compared to chicks and turkeys. None of them seem to have gotten sick. 

Nineteen are Silver Appleyard and one muscovy snuck an egg in there. 

I started advertising them for sale two days after they were born and in less than a week all are sold and there's a waiting list for the next batch! I sold them for 10$ each. 

My little garden buddy entertaining himself.  He does not like to keep his hat on, but the tight cinched toggle helps it stay. 

The garden is loving the rainy weather we had this week. 

The first strawberry blossoms are open!

The new way of deep mulching the strawberries worked pretty well.  I wish that the plants had come up more thickly.  Maybe they will over the course of the season.  It did a good job smothering the weeds so far though. 

Our little pea seedlings are coming up strong. A little more reaching and they'll be climbing their trellis. 

My Red Lake currant bush is coming in as are the cuttings that I propagated from it. 

My little espaliered apple tree might fruit this year!  Probably not since it might need a closer buddy for pollination... working on that.  It's not as pretty as the ones we saw in Villandry, but I am pretty proud of how well it is going since I was just guessing on how to train it. 

                                                               

Farm Fresh: March - Hardening off plants, weeding, planting, and incubating

Lots of gardening happening around here.  I made a new rule that everyone has to do one garden chore each day in addition to all their other chores. The kids have been good with it and have been working hard right along with me. 

Lots of my seedlings have moved out from under the grow lights and are hardening off outside on the front stoop.

I cover them during the afternoons and gradually expose them to a few more hours of direct sun each day. 

Cured my early round of seed potatoes for a week and planted them out in the garden. 

Rhubarb pops up so fast! 

We seeded the first rows of lettuces, carrots, and onions 

We have some duck eggs in the incubator.  They'll be hatching in about 4 days!

I harvested one of my "failsafe" crops -- Jerusalem Artichokes -- 17 pounds from a small patch. They are so easy to grow, nutritious, and prolific. I'm going to try to move my patch to a different spot for their "forever" home now that I know how tall (8 ft!) they get. 

Stored them in bin in moist soil in the root cellar.  They usually don't store well and are supposed to be eaten gradually over the winter, but we'll see how they do. 

My happy farm kids -- playing in the dirt while I planted about 40 new raspberry canes. 

Our ducks cannot resist all the worms that come up when I pull back the mulch and turn over the soil.

First row of potatoes.

We had two nights of 27F this week.  I had to bring in about 36 trays of plants from off the porch.  Hopefully, we're done with frosts now. 

The young women at church had a photography contest with different categories. This is the one big sister A submitted and won first place with:

We also had a sad burial for a couple of her baby polish bunnies that died. The breeder said that they are hard. I think they are too inbred and had some genetic issues. Either way, it was pretty heart breaking. 

Happy Easter 2021

The kids did some Easter art projects this week. (Baby A was very annoyed that I was helping the big kids instead of holding him). 

Progress on the flooring project is slow. I have had to order several extra boxes of tiles for the hearth area. There is a lot of variation in the natural stone (slate) and I want to pick out the best ones.  

Baby A is cruising around getting into everything. He is in the pull-things-out-of-drawers phase. 

First time falling asleep in his chair:

 Smokey kitty really likes him for some reason.  She has done this on multiple occasions when he's sitting outside.