Garden Update July/August

This was a few weeks ago when we treated our garden to a top dressing of compost.

Hi all! The weather here has been awesome the past week and we are just loving it. With summer beginning to wane, I figured I'd better do an update on the garden. The garden has come along very nicely, especially considering last summer our gardens were patches of lawn. I'm just going to share some pictures with a few notes on what you're looking at.

Thanks for reading!

This is our first muskmelon. We planted 3 varieties.

Our popcorn is beginning to get tassels (flowering part of corn stalk), so we'll be getting popcorn soon!

A nice slicing cucumber is growing. We haven't had much luck with our cukes this year.

We Have A Broody Hen!

Hi all! In one of my previous posts I discussed Nesting Etiquette and I briefly mentioned a broody hen. Today I want to elaborate on that a bit.

What is a broody hen? A broody hen is a hen that sets her own eggs and hatches them and even rears them without the help of humans, heat lamps, incubators, brooders, etc. It is a hen's natural desire and urge to become a mama. Nowadays, broody hens aren't always so commonplace. This is due to hatcheries breeding this desire out of their flocks. In a commercial hatchery, hens hatching out their own young is cost prohibitive. A hen can hatch 12-18 eggs, but must sit on them for 21 days and then will raise them for 4+ weeks. The big problem for a hatchery here? During all that time of waiting and rearing, the hen doesn't usually lay a single egg.

Why have a broody hen? Broodies hatch and raise their babies the natural way. It's something to behold to see nature at work. While there are plenty of merits in hatching chicks in an incubator, I'm told everyone should try to hatch with a broody at least once. No stressing about incubator troubles, no worrying about power outages, no major concern about the welfare of the chicks.

Currently, our hen is on day 10 of sitting on her eggs. She is halfway through the 21 day incubation period! We are really excited about our first time hatching eggs here on the farm, especially with a broody hen! I actually chose a couple of my breeds because of the tendency to go broody. For our first time we are just using eggs that have been fertilized by our mix of hens and roosters. Next time I will buy special eggs since I now know she has (so far) had the tenacity to stick it out. So, who knows what kind of funny hybrids we will end up with!

I hope to get a few more posts up about our broody hen before she hatches so,  wish us luck! Thanks for reading!