spring round-up

I've been reading garden reports. Ours is pretty sad. It's been so rainy and muddy that we got it in late and some things didn't transplant well and some got overgrown with weeds and we just don't have as much planted as we'd planned...so I'll skip that for now and come back to it when things are looking brighter.

Juneberries aka serviceberries are almost cleaned off the tree. We had a plentiful and delicious crop this year! Mulberries are also huge and sweet and abundant. My husband wants to collect 25lbs to make wine. That's a LOT of mulberry. Our yellow raspberries are producing a lot, as well. I need to get some red and black raspberries planted! We have had a TON of rain to make them this way, but they're difficult to harvest because they are in areas that the mosquitoes like to hang out. They're bad this year and there are a lot more Tiger Mosquito, Aedes albopictus, than last year. This thing is like a "mosquito on steroids", as our friend, Jeremy, put it. I smacked this one after it had bitten my arm. A mosquito on steroids, indeed.

We butchered the 275- chickens June 12th. Well, technically "we" didn't. I was on the couch with the flu. I took a couple Ibuprofen and came out to bag and weigh and sell them towards the end, though. I was miserable - so were 3 of my 5 kids PLUS the baby was cutting her first tooth! Anyway, this was the set up:

Pallets everywhere to keep us out of the mud. Killing cones on the far right; moving to the left there is a homemade scalder (electric hot water heater tank) for three at a time; Featherman plucker; homemade tables with stainless steel tops set up in the shade; down at the end you can't see the old deep freezer or stock tank we filled with cold water and ice to cool them. There are 36 x 6-lb dressed broilers in our freezer and we sold the rest for just enough to pay for the chicks, feed and supplies, which makes our chickens "free" (we really can't call them free because we have our equipment costs to consider and all the work that went into getting them into the freezer but you know what I mean).

Despite double and triple checking the coop and yard, we had a Survivor. She is happily free-ranging all over the property, now, but goes back to her coop at night. She's on the smaller side but we're still surprised at how active she is for an 8-week old Cornish Cross. We had our share of chickens that would only stand up to eat and drink, but there were a lot more that willingly came out of the coop and foraged in the grass and weeds than last year. We were thinking of growing her out to 12 weeks, maybe longer. We're trying to find a little more info on how long they CAN live. Anyone? Anyone?