Unfortunately, the problems in the garden persist.
I found a bunch more tomatoes half eaten, presumably by rats. I have yet to get a single strawberry even though I definitely have strawberry plants that should be making strawberries right now. The weeds are completely out of control. My brother-in-law borrowed my lawnmower so they can’t even get cut at the moment, which is fine, but it does add to the general feeling that everything outside has gotten away from me a little bit.
And then there are the chickens.
It turns out some of them took it upon themselves to roost in the forest overnight and we lost three of them, including my single remaining Buff Orpington. That one really upset me.
I specifically wanted Buff Orpingtons when I ordered chicks this spring. I ordered six of them and, after the horrific chick experience I had in the spring, I had managed to keep exactly one. Of course, that was one of the chickens that got eaten. So now I’m down to just one remaining chicken from the entire chick order I got in May.
Three of my Jersey Giant chicks from Tractor Supply also managed to get themselves killed.
As of right now, we aren’t getting any eggs either. The younger chickens are still too young and honestly I don’t expect any eggs from them this year. Of the three adult ducks I have left, one is a boy and the girls are molting, so no duck eggs either. Which is fine. I had actually gotten to the point where I was giving most of the duck eggs away because I couldn’t keep up with them.
But it just feels like setback after setback.
The zucchini and summer squash have been completely decimated by squash vine borers. We went to four different plant stores trying to find some zucchini or summer squash starts because I still have roughly three more months in which I can grow things, but everybody has already thrown out their summer vegetable starts.
Which sucks.
My wife also needs a blueberry bush for a work event next week, so now I’m going to have to troll around trying to find one of those too because apparently nobody has blueberry bushes anymore either.
You know what we do have plenty of?
Mosquitoes.
It’s been an incredibly wet year, so we have lots and lots of mosquitoes and almost no fruit.
It is still a little early, though. I haven’t completely given up. The Concord grapes still look okay and my single watermelon is hanging in there. I’m waiting for the vine to start drying up because I feel like that will be the indicator that the watermelon is ripe, but I need to do some more research before I pick it. I really don’t want to wreck it because, at the moment, this is my one watermelon and therefore my entire watermelon harvest is riding on this. I keep having nightmares about picking it too soon.
I’m still really upset about the chickens, especially the Buff Orpington.
My wife has a contact at a nearby farm that sells adult hens, but I have a feeling the price is going to be too dire for me. I may just have to wait until next spring and do another chick order.
Meanwhile, the oriental bittersweet bramble continues to vex me.
The ducks are nowhere near as good at eating it as the meat chickens were last year. I think if I can get an electrician to come out and install the correct outlet for our electric chicken plucker, I’m going to do meat chickens again next year almost specifically to eat down the oriental bittersweet.
Honestly, it feels more efficient to me to have chickens slowly work their way through it over the course of the summer and then get meat out of the arrangement than for me to spend hours doing the backbreaking work of digging these enormous vines out by hand.
I have tried cutting it down. It comes back.
I tried finding someone who would bring goats out to eat it. I couldn’t find anyone interested.
So far, the most successful thing I’ve tried has been meat chickens.
The problem is the plucker.
The outlet we need is a super hardcore one and electrical work in a 250-year-old house is always an adventure. Our basement is basically made out of rocks, so getting electrical from the box in the basement through the foundation and outside is not exactly straightforward. We’ll see if it’s even possible.
Processing chickens without one takes hours. It probably takes four times as long and it is absolutely horrible on your back. I’m just not up for doing that again.
If we can get the outlet installed, I think meat chickens are probably my best strategy for the bittersweet. I’ll have to actually order them next time, though. Tractor Supply usually only has Cornish Cross and I don’t think those are going to forage well enough for what I want them to do. I’ll probably special order Freedom Rangers or something similar that is actually willing to wander around and eat plants instead of spending its entire life sitting next to the feeder.
Edit (a week later)
Then this weekend became an absolute flurry of activity.
I genuinely don’t think I sat down for more than an hour either day. I am very tired.
WOM ordered us a new chicken enclosure and spent basically the entire weekend building it, which was incredibly helpful and I’m very grateful because we were down to just three adult chickens.
Three!
We started with fifteen.
The new enclosure has a roof, which should protect them from hawks. We’re still putting them inside the actual coop at night because I trust the coop more than the enclosure when it comes to bigger predators like bobcats, but at least now they have a much safer place to spend the day.
I think eventually we’ll probably get a second one of these enclosures and connect them in a corner shape so they have more space. For now, though, this will do. They’re kind of expensive and they’re a lot of work to build, so one thing at a time.
And then, because apparently my response to losing chickens is to immediately acquire a frankly unreasonable number of new chickens, I went to Tractor Supply.
They had straight-run Plymouth Barred Rock chicks on sale because they were already about a week old. They were $2 each.
So I bought all of them.
I think there were seventeen. (I also snuck in a couple Buff Orpingtons at full price – I couldn’t resist AND a variety called Coco Espresso that lays extremely dark brown eggs)
Since they’re straight run, statistically at least half of them are probably going to be roosters, so we won’t end up keeping all seventeen. Still, I went from being devastated about my rapidly dwindling flock to having seventeen tiny chickens on my porch remarkably quickly.
I also drove out to a farm about an hour away and picked up some Easter Egger pullets. They’re about six weeks old and still a little too small to deal with our adult chickens bullying them, so right now they’re living in the shed with the bunnies.
I’m going to give them probably two weeks to get a little bigger before I introduce them to the adults. I want them to be big enough to defend themselves in the pecking order because the last thing I need after this year is chickens getting trampled to death.
They were also very expensive.
The tiny Barred Rock chicks are currently living on the porch with a heat lamp and heat plate, but they can only stay there for about two weeks because we’re starting construction on the house after Labor Day.
After that I’ll move them outside into the old quail coop with the heat plate. I probably won’t mix them in with the adults until they’re around eight weeks old and big enough to hold their own.
So that’s where we are.
I feel like I have had spectacularly bad luck with both animals and plants this year. Every time I think something is finally going well, something eats it, dies, gets eaten, gets infested, rots, disappears or otherwise finds a creative new way to become a problem.
But all I can really do is keep trying.
And there is one saving grace.
It has been an absolutely fantastic year for mushrooms.
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