What could be better than watching chickens in the garden?

So it feels like summer is half over already and the weather is just getting nice.  The garden is blooming and fruiting and doing what gardens do and now that we hired a guy, the grass is even being mowed every week.  Since I went back to work I found it increasingly hard to do all of the yard work, garden work and look after the animals.

A couple of weeks ago we got a little addition to our family, just a few short days after our youngest cat got hit by a car and died, we got two little ducks. Born June 24th.  I call them Donald and Daisy of course.

Here is a photo journal of what is going on at the Windmill Motel this summer.

New Addition

Donald and Daisy!

We used the bottom of their old cage to make a pool for them, the orange thing on the right.

Garden

Here I am growing oriental greens (with a little diatomaceous earth (DE) on top as something was nibbling on them), mesclun mix, radishes, beets, lots of onions and a stray eggplant left over from last year.  I will have to move that one as it doesn’t have a lot of room.

I didn’t intend to have so many tomato plants this year but since my first seeding didn’t go so well I had to reseed and then I bought plants anyway and the seeds came up and low and behold I think I have 20 tomato plants all over my garden.  Here I have 6 tomato plants and in the back is some corn that is sprouting and I think I have 2 potato plants in there.

These are my mystery squash plants.  Could be pumpkins, hubert squash, summer squash, butternut squash or zucchini.  I grew all of them last year in this patch and the one beside them.  When they first started coming up I went on a hunt for squash bugs and there they were fornicating all over my leaves.  I physically massacred some of them, I sprinkled DE on them 3 times now and I removed eggs that I saw under the leaves.  I don’t see them crawling over the plants so I think I have them in check but I have seen some decimated leaves underneath so I know they are still there, somewhere.

Strawberry patch 1, I did nip off all of the flowers originally but these are ever bearing and they have spread far enough for my liking so I am going after the berries now.

Strawberry patch 2, I didn’t plan on putting these in the planter boxes but when they arrived in the mail I had to plant them right away and I had no other place to put them, so here they are.

Yellow beans and peas, I have already had a small harvest of beans and lots of peas, enough for my husband and me.  Three of my pea plants are dying mysteriously, not sure if it is cat related or something else.  I have learned so much about bugs out here and there is always more to learn.

I have some brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli in this patch and the next one, not sure which are which from the pictures but I have an insect problem with them regardless.  I need more DE or something else to combat them.  I have a row of potatoes down the middle and 4 tomato plants.

Potatoes, cabbage, cauliflower or broccoli, and red lettuce

Decorative gourds and two types of tomato plants (and grass)

Tomatoes I started from seed and dill in the far left upper corner. I sprinkled marigolds in there too.

Garlic, leek, onions, celery and one stray tomato plant I caught growing in the old patch

Cucumbers, tomatoes and sweet potatoes.  I just planted these this week from little cups I had planted from seed (except the sweet potatoes).  So they are late to start but I am still eating pickles from last year.

Our orchard of fruit trees, we planted them last year.

The one on the lower right is growing very tall.  There is a small one in the upper right that I thought had died.  There was one little green shoot coming out the side of the stem, under the white protective plastic, that I thought was a weed but it is the tree.

My husband had painted our old pool house yellow, and it is now the chicken coop.  There are a few chickens along the fence.  We’ll be moving the fence when we make a motel laundry room with access in the back.

This is our abandoned pool, it is a frog sanctuary and the site of our new green house we’ll be putting up.

Animals

Big bullfrog!!

The ladies!

Major and Moulty

Gouldie and Sneak

Two of the babies, either Kelly or Khloe and either Bella, Bonnie or Bailey.

The ducks are being harassed by the chickens in the coop since we put them in there last night.  So last night and tonight I put their cage back over them to protect them from the chickens until they get use to each other.

The coop is wired, so I have a fan in there to keep the air circulating.  The feeder and water for the big birds are hung, the little food is the pullet grower but they all eat it.  I have some galvanized buckets in there to keep the food in. The garbage can lid over the feeder was necessary when it was outside to keep the rain out of it but it also works to keep chicken poop out of the food.

We still have got to move out the old dog kennel out of the coop and move the bunnies to the coop too.

My gorgeous rooster, Fog Horn.

He is very protective of his females.  At night he perches with one of them and puts his wing over her.

Penny or Phoebe and Kelly or Khloe

We used two tarps on the floor to make clean up easy. We wanted cushion floor but it was too expensive for the coop.  I’ll keep looking for some used piece though but it is 10′ x 12′ so it is hard to get a big enough scrap of it.  GJ painted it yellow with a spray painter and now he just needs to do along the bottom, after the weeds are pulled out. That window is open and we don’t have the wire mesh over it yet so we put the old temporary coop in front of it.

Molly or Maize relaxing.