The last couple weeks have been busy! One of the beautiful things about where we live, is that we get a lot of visits from family and friends who still live up north. We have been blessed to receive not one, but two visits over the last two weeks! Our days have been filled with time at the beach, campfires, games, movies, stories, and lots of fun. It was absolutely amazing getting to spend some quality time with my Aunt and Uncle who I don’t get to see often. They got to meet my youngest child for the first time and she absolutely adored them as I knew she would. After that my mom came into town to spend some quality time with the grand kids. It’s always lots of fun when she visits! We have been doing the bare minimum work on the homestead so that we could enjoy every minute possible with my family. This means, there’s a lot for us to catch up on. The garden hasn’t stopped growing, and the pests haven’t relinquished their stronghold just yet. On top of that, one of our chickens has decided to present us with our first bumblefoot experience. Now that our visitors have gone home, it’s time for us to refocus and get things back in order.
Glorious Rain!
After over a month of drought, it finally rained! Needless to say, I was over the moon excited when it rained for an entire day. Since then, its rained almost every night but still been beautiful and sunny during the day, that is up until the last couple days that have been mostly on and off rain all day. This combination of rain and sun has made the garden (and our yard) go nuts. The plants desperately needed a good thorough watering, the kind that only a whole day of rain can provide. I thought my sweet potatoes were almost ready to harvest since the vines were beginning to turn yellow. It turns out they were just really thirsty and since the rain the vines have easily tripled in size! The watermelon vines have escaped the confines of their garden bed, reaching their tendrils every direction in a five-foot radius of the bed and trying to overtake the other garden beds. There are so many female flowers on the ends of the vines that I’m kind of okay with letting them roam wherever they want to be in hopes of more watermelons. Right now, we have one watermelon really close to being ready to harvest, and we have a few smaller ones on the way. When I was out in the garden this morning I watched as several bumblebees made their way from flower to flower, eating nectar and pollinating my watermelon flowers. I took a minute to just be present and take in the serenity and beauty of that moment. Homesteading has helped me find joy in the small things, as nearly every time I’m out in the garden I’m visited by one creature or another. Recently I’ve been enjoying the bumblebees and the baby lizards, relishing in the fact that these creatures have found a place right here in my garden. It’s almost like our own little ecosystem beginning to take form.
On one of the days in between family visits, I cleared out the green bean bed. Once it was cleared, I decided to plant a few more zucchini and summer squash plants. I got them in right before the rain and they sprouted in only three days! I’m hopeful that I will get an abundant zucchini and summer squash harvest in the second half of the summer. Some of my existing squash plants seem to have overcome the vine borers, fuzzy mold, and pickleworms and are now beginning to once again produce fruit, thanks to the rainfall. I’m going to give these plants another week or two before clearing the out to make room for new plants.
Unfortunately, the pickleworms have found themselves a better habitat in my cucumber bed. They are destroying every cucumber before it even has a chance to grow, and even destroying the vine. Every night I go out with a flashlight and hunt down at least five of them. It sounds silly, but these little guys are most active at night so it’s the easiest to catch them when its dark out. I’m hoping that nightly checks as well as some diatomaceous earth will keep them from completely destroying my cucumbers. I’m also taking a very pro-active approach by putting a mesh bag over the cucumbers as soon as they are pollinated. I did a test run on one cucumber to see how this would work and was able to harvest it this morning! This year has been a really tough year for pests, and it’s forcing me to be more creative in my solutions to crop preservation.
Playing Vet
A couple days ago I was out tending to the chickens when I noticed one of my hen’s feet looked strange. Naturally, the one whose foot needed to be checked was the one who is the fastest, and hates being picked up. Since my son is a much better chicken wrangler than I am, I enlisted his help to catch the injured bird so I could examine her. The webbing between her toes was swollen and squishy to the touch, but she had quite a bit of mud caked on the bottom of her foot, making it difficult to see what was causing it. We decided to soak her foot in Epsom salts and clean up the foot as best we could in order to get a better look at what was going on. After cleaning, we realized it is most likely bumblefoot. Bumblefoot happens when a chicken gets a small cut on their foot and then the cut gets infected. I’ve heard it’s a pretty common ailment, but we haven’t dealt with it up until now. It seemed that this called for consulting the experts on a chicken group on Facebook. After gaining much useful information, we headed to the store to buy the necessary supplies. Right now, we are taking a course of action that involves using PRID, a drawing salve that is supposed to pull out the infection. We soaked her foot again for as long as she would tolerate, slathered on the drawing salve and then wrapped it up in vet tape. Tomorrow we will remove the bandage, soak again, reapply and rewrap her foot. Supposedly, this treatment will clear up her foot in about a week or so. If this doesn’t work, we will have to perform a minor surgery on her to extract the infection. Let’s just say I’m REALLLY hoping the current treatment works! My son thoroughly enjoys helping us with any treatments for the chickens. It’s an amazing opportunity for him to get some exposure to real life anatomy lessons and have hands on experience providing minor veterinary care.
Catching Up
We have a couple of weeks before we have more visitors. In the meantime, we are continuing with our homeschool days and catching up on our homesteading. It’s also time for me to get my plan together for our fall garden. Having everything planned and ready to go will make it easier for me to get the garden planted in between visits in August. My preparations actually begin this week with buying my potatoes to get them chitting in time for planting. My big garden project this week is to clean out the tomato bed. I also need to take some time to clean up the cucumber bed, removing any vines that were taken out by the pickle worms and tying up the remaining vines onto the trellis. The last couple of days have been rainy which has made it impossible for me to sneak in these tasks. Keep an eye out next week for a post about a fun homeschool project as well as something else we’ve been working on for a while. I can’t wait to share more with you guys!