Poultry Plans

       I've gotten hours of enjoyment from researching poultry and picking out which breeds I'll keep of each species. For chickens I've set my heart on Lavender Orpingtons.

    They're a dual purpose breed (means you can raise for both meat or eggs) and they are said to be very friendly. There's also an interesting problem with the lavender gene linking to a tail dwarfing gene. It'll be a project to build a gene pool with normal sized tails. I've read that many people breed their flock to a Black Orpington every few generations to counteract this. Once the tail dwarfing gene has been flushed out, perhaps they can be recognized as a proper breed and be given a standard to compete against in shows. For now, they're just very pretty, large, dual-purpose birds that demand high prices in my local area.
     

       Ducks were the last species investigated, and I wasn't really pumped about the idea of them until I found a breed I liked. Meet the Cayuga Duck!

     These guys are listed as threatened by The Livestock Conservancy. they're a medium class dual-purpose duck (again good for meat and eggs) and they look jet black with the mallard green sheen covering their heads. Some specimens have the green running down their body The eggs that are laid in the spring can be a dusty black, and become lighter as the season wears on. Again, these would be a great genetics project to work on, besides offering meat and eggs. There seem to be a few breeders in the area, so I may be able to bring in new genetics every few years without relying on mass shipments from hatcheries.

       Selecting which variety of goose I wanted was more difficult than I thought it would be. I quickly narrowed it down to the African Goose or the Chinese Goose. Both are descendants from the wild Swan Goose.

The African Goose

The Chinese Goose

Their common ancestor, the Swan Goose

        Honestly, I love the look of them. And they look fairly similar, especially if you only get the production lines of African (they don't have that dewlap on the chin). What the pictures don't show is that the African is twice the size of the Chinese, yet the Chinese can lay over 3 times as many eggs. They're both noisy and protective of their nests. I want them for meat mostly, so I was wondering if the Chinese would even be worth the trouble per bird. They only weigh 10 lbs each (2 lbs more than the chickens I plan to have) so I don't expect a lot of meat per bird. The Africans are larger, but that's a larger bird that can be very territorial, and one that lays less eggs, so less offspring. I'm still pretty torn on the goose breed. There's a farm around here that has both and it very open with information and farm tours. I'm hoping that once I see them and talk to them, I'll know if it's worth it to process a 10 pound goose, and if I can physically handle a 20 pound one.

        So those are the selected poultry breeds right now. Anyone have any of these birds and have words of wisdom or words of caution?

       8 days after planting! The Baby Pak Choy have grown 3 inches tall and the peppers have started sprouting. I have 30 tray plugs seeded with Cayenne Peppers, 15 plugs seeded with Midnight Dream Black Bell Peppers, and 12 seeded with Albino Bullnose Bell Peppers. The Cayenne and Black Bell seeds are from last year, and I never believed that seeds vitality could diminish over just a year. The Albinos are all sprouting much faster than the other peppers. The Albinos are doing so well I may just have to trim back the weakest of each plug. Or the Albinos might secretly be great seeds. I'm not practiced enough to know for sure one way or the other. I do know that seeing that first pepper sprout shed it's seed cover is incredibly rewarding!

        But back to the Baby Pak Choy. I don't know if I'm growing them properly. The catalog said to harvest when they're 2 inches tall, and the picture shows tiny adorable bulby plants. Well they're 3 inches tall and stringy and falling over. I read online that seedlings need cool light, so the seed tray is set up under 4 cool florescent shop lights. I'm starting to doubt that strategy now. Perhaps I should swap out half the bulbs with warm lights? Or maybe it was just a bad idea to grow something so fast growing with slow growing peppers. The Baby Pak Choy may just end up as sprouts in my salad!

        About 6 days ago, I planted half a milk carton (one long side was cut off and the carton was laid on its side) with onion seeds. I watered the seeds, then wrapped up the homemade planter in saran wrap. It wasn't until today that I saw tiny white roots sprout from the seeds and dig into the earth. This is the first time I'm growing onions, so I'm excited and nervous. We use a lot of onions, and I'd love to run out to the garden for green onions to add to my "poor man's scampi" that I make. The onions should've been planted back in January, so I'm glad they finally got started.

        My family and roommate are already sick of me shrieking with each new seedling development. I'm half tempted to pull a Chicken Little on them and deny them fresh veggies. :)

2015 Gardening Results

      I made this blog so I'd have an audience for my ramblings about rare seeds, farming plans and poultry ideas. I'm currently living in the suburbs and spend a good portion of my free time researching and planning for a small farm I want in the future. My husband and I have agreed to work to have our tiny farm by the time I turn 40, so that gives us a little under 9 and a half years.
     Before I get to try my hand at the tiny farm, I want to learn and perfect as much as possible. I can't keep chickens or any other poultry on our little half acre of suburbia (strict zoning laws), so I will work on my green thumb for now!

    I live in Richmond, Virginia, Zone 7, and I will have to get creative to fit as many edible plants into our yard as I plan to grow. I want a lot of plants, but I want to keep the neighbors happy.

       Last year, was a great starter year. I grew the following:

       I managed to grow a few impressive zucchini bushes until the powdery mildew took them. I hear that you have to be careful not to plant more than 1 or 2 plants per family. Well those people must not have a good zucchini bread recipe because we ran out of frozen pulp for breads before Christmas! This year I've picked a different variety of Zucchini, and I plan to line the driveway with the plants, and replace them when the Powdery Mildew strikes.

       I planted a bunch of Bush Green Beans. I don't know what happened to all of my plants, whether I planted them too closely, or if a storm hit them too hard, too early, but they all fell over and grew on the ground. We had to lift the plants off the ground to harvest any beans, and I was terrible about picking them early enough. So now I have bags of very woody green beans in my freezer.

      I had some leftover tomato seeds and I got exactly ONE great tomato from them. I didn't water them evenly enough so they all developed blossom end rot. There were also some squirrel planted cherry tomato plants in my yard, unfortunately they must've gotten the wrong genes from their hybrid parents in my neighbor's yard. They all tasted terrible :)

     MARIGOLDS! My Marigolds grew 3 feet tall! They looks fantastic when they finally decided to bloom, and they bloomed through several frosts. I've gathered a few hundred seeds from them and will ship those to my buddies who asked for them.

   I read online somewhere you could plant garlic in early spring and harvest them late summer. I got my garden going around early May. So of course I planted garlic cloves! Those poor cloves didn't have time to split, so I'm looking forward to harvesting them this summer.

   I had precisely 1 pepper plant survive long enough to be transplanted. It started producing flowers a week before the frost, and I had yet to see if my Midnight Dreams Peppers really are purple black. (I'll get another chance this year)

   I also had some luck with direct seeding some Giant Italian Parsley. I loved walking out to the front yard to cut some leaves for my poor-man's-scampi.

And that's everything I tried to grow last year!

Any other brown thumbs out there have harvests from last year worth bragging about?

First Sprouts!

There it is! The first sprout of 2016! I planted 60  plugs of a 72 plug seed starting tray with peppers, and filled in the last 12 plugs with the Extra Dwarf Pak Choy seeds I had. I've never grown anything like that plant, so I was shocked to see seedlings less than 36 hours later!