Chickens love the snow (man)!

What a funny moment today, watching our hens trying to eat the carrot nose off the mini snowman Maya built.  I think we might build a few more bird-friendly snow creatures around our yard, with sunflower seed eyes, carrot noses, berry mouths...

The amazing bees!

I've been watching bees the past weeks, fascinated, captivated, astounded - by their diligent work, their beauty, their diversity.  My almost-6 year old and I spend hours in the garden honing our patience and observation skills, sitting quietly amongst the oregano patch, or the squash plants, waiting for the bees to come.  Mid day to late afternoon, when the sun is warmest, we find them to be the busiest in our garden.  We've seen squash bees, mason bees, carpenter bees, honeybees, bumble bees, sweat bees, and others I'm still not sure of.  Here are some photos, which are now also turned into photo cards that can be found here!  Remember to allow flowering plants, berries, trees and veggies (and wild plants such as goldenrod) a place in your yard to provide forage for the pollinators!   Then take some time to pause and observe...what is pollinating in your yard?

For my upcoming birthday I've asked my partner for a "date" building a top bar hive together, so we can embark on our own beekeeping/bee sanctuary project here.  Here is another site that has great info on natural beekeeping methods.

Pumpkin harvest!

One of this weekend's projects around here was starting to clean up the garden.  This included the last potato harvest, storage potatoes and fingerling potatoes!  Cleaning up finished zucchini and squash vines, picking the last basil and tomatoes, and harvesting our pumpkins.  The pumpkin project was our daughter's this year.  At the top of her garden list back in January was to grow pumpkins, even if it meant losing space to other things.  She has been waiting patiently all season, watering them, watching them ripen, checking each day in the past few weeks to see if they are ready yet.  She had a nice harvest of 9 pumpkins and felt quite pleased with it!  She had wanted to try "milk feeding" them just like in the book Farmer Boy (Little House on the Prairie series), but that would really only be economical if we had an abundance of milk, which we do not. 

Harvest foods

Now that our Symposium is over and the calendar page has turned to September, it's time to work on finishing our garden harvest, canning & preserving, drying, fermenting & pickling for the winter months.  The greenhouse shelves are stacked with drying racks layered with herbs; our kitchen counters are lined with jars of beans and cucumbers that are being lacto-fermented; our counters are covered in bowls and containers brimming with tomatoes, basil, eggplant and beans to be preserved into sauce, pesto and ratatouille.

And our meals these days are simple, but fresh and glorious with the abundant garden harvest - kale, chard, beans, various pestos, tomatoes tomatoes tomatoes every day!  Using these veggies on different kinds of pizzas has been a fun way to experiment lately.  We were recently at a wedding in Muskoka where pizza was served by All Fired Up, a portable wood-fired pizza catering business.  We loved their pear-pesto-arugula-goat cheese pizza, and made our own version of it last night using all these ingredients sourced from our yard (we even have our own pears this year!).  Yumm!

Fresh Pear-Pesto-Arugula Goat Cheese Pizza
Ingredients:

Fresh pears, 2 sliced thinly
Freshly made Pesto (our version uses fresh basil, sunflower seeds, olive oil, garlic, nutritional yeast, lemon juice, sea salt)
Fresh arugula, about 20 leaves (we used Surrey Greens, a spicy arugula-type leafy green)
Fresh soft goat cheese

Roll out thin whole-grain pizza dough.  Let rest 15 minutes on your pizza pan, pizza stone, or peel.  Spread with thin layer of pesto to cover whole dough.   Cover in concentric circles with sliced pears.  Sprinkle with arugula leaves, and dot with clumps of fresh soft goat cheese.  Bake at 500F for about 6 minutes!  Serve hot with fresh arugula leaves tossed on top.

This Moment

{A special moment from the week to remember, savour and enjoy!}

A Chicken Celebration

Today, it was decided, was a day that our hens needed a celebration.  More importantly, they needed a cake!  A very special cake.  It's been cold and grey the past few days and today was not exception.  So, our daughter thought the hens needed some cheering up.  Why not call it their birthday - all of them at once?  She decided to create a cake that included all our hens most favourite treats - delicious layers of leftover brown rice, chopped up kale, comfrey & dandelion greens, crushed eggshells, mashed over-ripe pears, sunflower seeds, and shredded carrots, blended together with yogurt, and garnished with raisins, buckwheat, strawberry tops, and a garden slug or two.  Mmmmm.  Our hens were delighted with this treat, served up to them in a fancy old cake pan that they scraped clean by the end of the day.

We were rewarded with fresh eggs to warm our hands on.  Thank you, lovely hens!

If you ever decide to make your own cake for hens, please avoid: avocado (pits can leach toxins into the flesh making hens sick); apple cores (seeds contain cyanide, enough to harm a hen); fruit pits and seeds of other sorts; long grasses (these can case problems in the hen's crop); meat, citrus and onion (all not agreeable to hens).

In our garden right now...

Happy chickens

Happy chickens getting lots of attention around here.  A few simple (and cheap) healthy hen diet additions we've made this year: we've planted a huge comfrey patch around the sides of their coop so they can munch these nutritious greens all day as they like; and we bake our all our used eggshells to dry them out, then crush them and add to the hen feed so they get extra calcium in their diet. 

On the cusp

I look around the property here and see that we are on the cusp...this beautiful time of year when the yard is vibrating with new life everywhere.  All the fruit trees and berry bushes are in full bloom and are just moments from fruiting.  The grapes, cherry, apple and pear trees, the gooseberries, currants, and even our little fig tree are bursting with hopeful blossoms - and for us too, this is such a hopeful time of anticipation for the new growing season, and a time of making lists of new projects and plans for the summer.