We've enjoyed the delights of paw paw season with around 40 fruits from our 5 year old trees. That's about double last year's harvest!
Many of them were eaten fresh with a spoon. The rest were frozen for creamy sorbet or put into morning smoothies.
Unfortunately, no one told me that cooking them, and especially dehydrating them, will give most people upset tummies. I learned the hard way.
Baby A says that he wants to be "nice and warm" now that we are experiencing cool fall nights.
Our dear Natalie hatched another 8 ducklings on her own initiative. She has been taking wonderful care of them without any work or intervention on my part.
Not to be outdone -- two more hens decided to go broody. We will see how they do with hatching. I have been carefully monitoring their egg piles to make sure that they do not end up setting on more than they can handle.
I marked all 13 of Broody #1's eggs with a china marker so that I can take out (see lower right) the new eggs that her friends try to add to her pile.
Rhubarb is amazing. After getting beaten up by the Japanese beetles, it has come back vigorously. I harvested a big armload to make a gallon of rhubarb juice and used the pulp for fruit leather.
Baby A is still obsessed with tractors. This is his favorite shirt. He loved watching the construction site across the street and wants to watch a "tractor show" with daddy every night after work.
I was trying to observe how well the summer chicks liked the mangel beets we grew and they thought I might have more food stashed away some where. We call these chicks the "piranhas". They are the offspring of the best foragers, which we selected from the hundred we raised last winter. They were all naturally brooded and then raised from day 2 of their lives out on pasture. They are lightning fast bug catchers and gobble up almost anything that I put in front of them. We will keep the 5 hens and butcher the 8 roosters later this fall.
We try to take special care of the swallowtail caterpillars in our garden. I let them eat my leftover fennel and extra dill, but I get annoyed when the second wave goes after my carrots. We harvested those carrots and moved the caterpillars to other locations.
We found more kits from our free range Silver rabbits. They are darling. Unfortunately, their moms do not seem to be able to keep them safe as well as the hens and ducks do. Our cat Tiger killed one so fast that we couldn't stop him. The kids always went to capture and cage them, but they are too young to leave their wild mamas.
The raspberries have been absolute feast. As with the rhubarb, the summer ones were decimated by the Japanese beetles, but these fall varieties just keep producing. We have at least 12 gallons in the freezer and have been eating our fill every single day.
We have had some sick livestock lately. This duckling seemed like it had something stuck in his throat. We used VetRx directly on his beak and throat and he was better the next day.
Our 6 turkey poults on the other hand had a cough and sneezing illness. I tried garlic in their water, thyme infusions, and the VetRx again and nothing helped. Five poults died. Only the runtiest one, a female, is left. She still has a little cough, but she is growing and I am hopeful that she will survive.
We grew about 300 lbs of mangel beets. They are a winter livestock feed. We shared some with our neighbors' goats and sheep. The rabbits did not want them while it was hot outside, but now that temperatures have dropped into the upper 40s at night, they are loving them.
