It's a Girl! And a boy! (Many of each!)

Our chicks have arrived in wonderful shape from McMurray Hatchery.  Firstly, mad props to McMurray for doing an awesome job with shipping baby chicks.  Because of our work hours and hours of the small-town post office we have, our chicks ended up being at the post office overnight and until lunch time the next day.  They called me to say they were there, but I didn’t get the message until after the post office was closed already.  In the message, they said if no one came to get them, they would be shipped to a different post office.   

I drove over there and left a note on every door to the place (three) and hoped for the best.  The next morning, I called them to see if they got the notes.  "Yes", they said (not without a tinge of annoyance), we got the note(s).  "They’re here.  The sooner you come and get them, the better."

This particular post office has interesting hours.  They open pretty early at 8:00 AM, but then they take lunch from 1:00 PM to 2:30!  Wish my lunch was that long.  Our lunch is only an hour, starting at 1.  Elizabeth started her lunch a few minutes early and went to get them before the post master went on lunch. 

 Success!  She drove down the driveway with a huge smile on her face.  Not one chick had died!We set up their home and cut open their shipping box.  28 little chicks in a little box doesn’t give them much space to move or stretch.  The second they hit the woodchips in their tub, they started to stretch their wings and legs and run around.  

One had a pecked head and kept falling over backwards, but has since made a recovery.  Today there is one who doesn’t look very well (it’s having trouble standing up), and one runt that didn’t make it.  I’m still very impressed with the survival rate of being shipped halfway across the country and spending a full two days in a little box.

McMurray also sends a mystery chick with every order.  Ours is adorable, but we can’t even begin to guess what it’s going to turn into.  Ten thousand life points to anyone who can figure it out.  I’m hoping it’s a penguin of some sort, but no one else seems to think it is. 

What am I??? 

Rainy Day(s)

It’s raining again.

It rained yesterday too.  And also the day before.  Sunday it was merely dreary, but the week before was Hurricane Irene week, which meant we deserved what little sun we got last week.  This rainy weather is certainly not good for morale.  Putting on wet rain gear day after day is in no way a refreshing way to start the morning.  We plant in the rain, weed in the rain, harvest in the rain and spend a good portion of each morning meeting discussing the question, “is there anything we can do inside today?”  You see, all this rain isn’t good for the farm either.

The soil is completely saturated, meaning that it simply cannot hold any more water.  That’s how you end up with fields with puddles in them.  Our one field of black dirt (field 03), was under a couple feet water for four days after Irene and is back to having a couple inches of rain sitting on top of our kohlrabi and some of the celeriac.  If we did walk in that field, our shoes would compact the dirt, making it so when the field dried, there would be less water and air space for the plants’ roots.  Bringing a tractor into a wet field is pretty much out of the question.

This much moisture is not the greatest for plants either.  Ideally, in a season, you would only get enough rain to keep your well with enough water in it to keep irrigation going.  Turns out that tomatoes, summer and winter squashes, lettuces, greens, root vegetables and pretty much everything else we grow here don’t like having unpredictable humungous amounts of water either.  A little bit of water will force the plants to grow their roots deeper, helping the plant get nutrients that are deep in the soil, not to mention holding it up when it’s windy.  With so much available water on the surface, our produce lacks some toughness.  Things are water saturated and therefore flimsy, not to mention diluted and therefore not quite as tasty as they could be.  If that wasn’t bad enough, many plant diseases thrive in moist weather.  Especially moist, warm weather.  (Like this entire summer, basically.)  Our tomatoes are dead.  There are spots on the parsley.  The celeriac has a leaf disease.  The dandelion has a leaf disease. 

We were watching the Weather Channel at the pizza place during lunch yesterday and most of what they were talking about were the wildfires in Texas and the drought that contributed to the fires’ existence.  Trust me, if I could any of this rain we’ve been getting to the farmers in Texas, (or the homeowners whose homes are threatened by the fires), I would.  It’s just one of those things, unfortunately.