Share 10 - week of July 29th
In the share this week:
1.5 lbs mixed slicer tomatoes
1 Pint cherry tomatoes
1 lb green beans
1 lb sweet onions
1 bunch carrots
1 medium head garlic
1 bunch sweet basil
Thoughts from Farmer Anna:
As promised, I'm going to spend a bit of the newsletter this week giving a full chicken update! Our icelandic chicks are now about 11 weeks old. Here is a group of them in their enclosure and with their mobile coop:
They have grown and changed so much and have some beautiful diversity. They are really fun to watch and it's been great to throw them veggie scraps and watch them eat them up! The little roosters are crowing and starting to terrorize the hens a bit. so we are thinking about needing to separate them out. We are planning to keep two of the roosters for breeding purposes next year. These little hens haven't quite started to lay yet - that should happen in the next couple of months. We only have 11 hens, so it won't be so many eggs, but we are hoping to breed them next year and eventually get to a little bigger flock - maybe a total of 50-60 max. The mobile coop we are using can move around along with the electric net fence so we can have them scratch around (and fertilize!) different areas of the farm. Right now they have been hanging out in a nice area outside of our growing beds that has the shade of a couple of walnut trees. Once the weather turns a little cooler and we start to turn over beds in the fall, they'll be moving out to the garden to help us turn in crop residues and fertilize our beds in place.
Alrighty, now to the concept of chicken math. It has been said that once you get chickens, you'll quickly want to add more chickens. While I'm not sure if I wanted to take on extra chickens at the moment, one of my egg producers had decided to downsize his flock and offered us some of his 1.5 year old hens. After thinking it through, I realized it wouldn't take much more work to keep another 24 hens. Well, there was some initial work of building another coop and setting up another electric enclosure, but we got it done in a couple of weeks and are now the proud owners of some actively laying hens. We have them penned in the asparagus patch, doing some nice fertilizing for next year's crop.
It's not a huge daily time commitment and the kids have been excited to go and collect eggs. It's been really hot this week and I've learned from my other egg producer that chickens don't lay as well in the heat. Despite that, we've gotten an average of 14 eggs per day from these ladies. They should continue to produce decently well for another year or so. We won't be breeding these hens, so hopefully we'll have a next generation of Icelandic hens coming along next summer to replace them.
So that's the chicken update for now! I'll keep you posted when our Icelandic hens start laying. We are still going to be pretty limited in egg production since one of my producers is getting out of it and the other is limited right now. There is a good chance we won't have enough to fill our egg shares and may need to end that early and refund the shares folks haven't received. If that is the case, I should still be able to put up some extra eggs we have on the Farmigo store, I just won't have as many as we had planned at the beginning of the season.
As for veggies this week - you have an awesome share with lots of favorites! I don't think you'll need much help or inspiration in using these up! I'm really happy with how beautiful our new planting of sweet basil is looking this week. Maybe make a caprese salad with your tomatoes and basil?
Hope you all have a nice week!