Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Wild Chicken Chase!

Our biggest news of the day: we got some chickens!  Today we welcomed 35 egg-laying hens to the farm.  We herded the majority into their newly built coop, but unfortunately ended up chasing 6 escaped chickens for about 2 hours.  So far it seems as though the chickens are settling in and making themselves at home.  We look forward to providing farm fresh eggs to our communal and CSA members this summer!


Chickens in their new home


Today we also spent some time investigating the pests that are quite fond of our cucumber, squash, melon, and potato plants.  We have researched a variety of "solutions" to combat these pests, so now our next task is to experiment.  Rae, a very knowledgeable and helpful farmer from L&R Poultry, suggested using a kaolin clay spray on and around the plant to ward off pests.  The spray creates a film on the plant which repels the pest trying to chow down.  An example of one of our nasty pests is the potato beetle.
Colorado Potato Beetle (yuck!)
The potato beetle larvae feeding on potato plant leaves (double yuck!)


 For the remainder of the week we are focusing on tackling the ever-growing weeds, packaging our season's first CSA box, planting successions, and moving in the pigs!  More updates will be coming soon! 



3 comments:

  1. I was visiting the farm today to see the new animals, and was disturbed to see that nearly all of the chickens are debeaked. Are you planning to move away from supporting chicken suppliers that engage in this practice?

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  2. While we're not psyched to have our chickens debeaked, we had few options for hens that were already laying eggs this late in the season. In the future we hope to be able to plan a bit more ahead and support farms that do not debeak their chickens.

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  3. That is really encouraging. Thank you!

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