August has arrived now, the hottest month of the year for us. The actual temperature may only be 98, but we received a few inches of rainfall in the last week and the heat index has made it feel about 115! It is hard for me to work outside when it is that hot, but I must.
The heat is slowing my garden way down, I have lost some green bean plants and my corn plants crispified...is that even a word? I pulled them all out yesterday, I just have a couple of piles of dead plants. My plan is to clean out more of the composted manure from my big chicken coop and run and till it into the soil before it rains again. I had added it to half of my garden, now it is time for the other half. I should have done it all at once...but, I wanted to get my garden planted and I just had a window of opportunity in the Spring and hoped for the best. Most of the time Winter and Spring are very wet months...and since I moved my garden, and had to erect a fence that rabbits could not breach, it took me awhile, it had to be dry to till and I am not fond of working in the rain. I only have a small hand tiller, no tractor so I have to walk behind it and it takes me awhile to break up the grassy weeds. We have a lot of crab grass and grass called Bahia, it has very large roots and sends out shoots so I get really large clumps caught up in the blades of the tiller. I have to stop and unwind them or cut them off the blades fairly frequently.
Everyone who stops by and looks at my garden is amazed at the size of my plants, and asks how I grew them so large...all I can tell them really is that I used composted chicken manure. I have a lot of chickens, therefore I have an unlimited supply! I will have to find the right balance though, otherwise I will have to put more space between the rows when I plant next time. I want to expand my garden too. I still have much to learn about farming, because if I am ever going to make any money off of it, I must do it at the right time of the year...when I can sell things at the farmers market. One of my egg customers has been stopping by and buying some of my tomatoes and peppers to sell. I have a good amount canned so I have been selling them pretty cheap, he picks them himself and it keeps them from going bad while I am busy doing other things.
I need to clean out my largest chicken coop and run to get the manure for my garden, I will probably do that today. I may just pile it up by the garden until I am ready to till it into the garden...I need to start some seeds too so they can be transplanted into the garden for a Fall harvest. We usually don't have our first freeze in Texas until Thanksgiving, if not later...it may get really cool prior to that, but I should be able to get another crop this year. I also got something called a plot spike, it is winter crops like peas and radishes or something for my poultry to munch on. I just have to plant it and some perineal rye grass seed. Hopefully we will get some more rain after I plant it so I don't have to water it every day.
I still have broody hens and a broody goose, they drive me crazy! Lol, I let them sit on eggs, but so far...only a few of the hens had babies hatch. I have to get to them pretty quickly or other hens kill them, I have taken away chicks and eggs in those cases...so I still have chicks in the house! I hatched longer than planned and was hoping to get finished up before my garden had crops I needed to pick, that did not happen. I have one last (I hope) batch of chicks in the house, I am going to give them another week in the house, then move them to the porch brooder. They have to be able to stand the nighttime temperatures and the last one hatched is not yet two weeks old. So, once they can handle down to 80, I think they should be fine. I had a few chicks get Coccidiosis on the porch too, two died but I got Corid in the waterers and I think the rest of them will be fine. I was canning and not paying as much attention to them as usual, I missed the symptoms. It has been so hot anyway, I am not sure I would have been able to tell until I saw blood in their poop. I have fans running 24/7 out there, but it is still very hot.
I moved my batch of Heritage Rhode Island Reds out to the coops yesterday and my last batch of baby turkeys to the grow out brooder they were in, so they are now separated from the chickens still on the porch. I need to finish my set of four breeding pens run area and build more roosts for the big coop too. I am selling some of my older mixed breed roosters today, so hopefully it won't be too long until the wire pens we call the big top will be practically empty. I really need to revamp them too and move them to an area that doesn't have runoff running through the middle of it. The tarps don't seem to last very long on anything out here, so I need to think about replacing them with something different on the four cattle panel coops I built.
Time is flying by...it is hard to believe it has already been three years since I first started my chicken adventure, and three years this month since my husband opened his computer repair shop. We signed the papers on this house in January of 2013, we still have a lot work to do on it...but we have come a long way on whipping this place into shape.
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