It's been a busy week with new chicks to take care of. They are such cute little balls of fluff and after a week already have feathers coming in. We still cannot tell which ones are boys and girls, but sometimes that is the fun of hatching eggs. I think it also makes it harder when we did different breeds. For instance, we did 2 Golden-laced Wyandotte eggs that were fertilized by our Ameraucana rooster, 1 of the chicks has dark legs and the other has light colored legs, other than that they are quite similar. Personally I think we have 3 girls and 5 boys or vice versa.
We even started another clutch of eggs to hatch. These little ones will be Rhode Island Reds and Black Sexlinks.We were only able to put 15 in this time as 1 we found was cracked. We also moved the incubator into a different room since we had problems the last hatch with humidity. This room does not get much foot traffic and is on the opposite side of the house, so the room temperature is much different. The 18th day, which is the day we stop turning the eggs, is June 1st.
I also was able to take some pictures of some of the fruit trees and plants we are growing. We have many more plants and trees out there, but these were the ones I had taken recently. Already having fungus issues with our nectarine tree. We have never sprayed our trees until now. Hoping this fixes the problem and we do not have any issues with the other trees we have. I cannot believe out of all the kiwi starts we have at least 1 potential female plant that is rooting and possible 2 males, which are actually self-fertile plants but can be used in place of male kiwi plants to pollinate female kiwi plants. Our blueberries are doing wonderful! It's nice to see so many berries out there. This is our first year doing raspberry plants. We purchased the from a lady off of Craigslist and they will bear fruit this year, making it even more worth it! My new variety of strawberry plants have had flowers on them since April, but have finally fallen off and berries are starting to form on them. We have lots of plums in the making. However, the wild elderberry I tried to transplant did not make it. I should have left it until after it was done berrying and then transplanted it, but I was too inpatient. Hopefully it may come back next year, but if not there is still another one that I did not dig up that I might try moving making it easier accessible. Our pomegranates are still very tiny trees. We also have lots of jerusalem artichokes. I had thought I pulled all the rhizomes out and separated them evenly throughout all the buckets, but I found extras growing plus a few in the blueberry plants. We had decided not to do a garden this year with all the projects going on in the yard, however we ended up with some rogue potato plants coming up that we must have missed last fall and I will be doing some October beans. After our vacation this summer I may plant a few things that can tolerate the cold, but time will tell if that happens.
I tried to do some weeding in the strawberry patch but haven't really had time, but I best get on it as I have 40 yards of mulch coming to help keep the weeds at bay. I wanted to weed as much as I could to make it easier to lay newspaper down before we lay the mulch over it. Yeah, I probably should have done this months ago.
Eventually we will be cleaning up the area that will be our garden, laying cardboard down, compost, fertilizer, and mulch. Granted I won't need it all over the garden but plan to do the whole thing like that just to keep the weeds down so I can put in raised beds, trellises, and an area for plants that will get direct seeding. I still have yet to fence it off, but now that the brush is finally burned that will be happening soon I hope. As you can see the blackberry bushes are starting to grow back, plus I have some wild foxglove that I also need to move.
I think that is all for now. After all the burning yesterday I am still exhausted. As always, will keep you posted with chick updates, incubating updates, and of course our yard updates. Feel free to subscribe and/or comment. Have a wonderful day!
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