We do have a few things growing in the greenhouse, albeit slowly. I just need days to be a little longer days full of sunshine and of course warmer temps would be lovely. I'm hoping that by mid-February we will be eating salad greens, kale, spinach, arugula and hopefully radishes from the greenhouse. It'll be a little longer wait for beets and ages still for leeks and broccoli.
And of course I'm planning for the spring! Last year by April I had tomatoes, green beans, and and a whole bunch of other stuff growing in the old greenhouse. I may have started things a little early this year, but I've already started peppers and eggplants. It has taken almost a month for them to even to sprout, but now almost too many of them have! I'm hoping to have them planted in containers by April (depending on weather of course!) in our little greenhouse and maybe by August we'll have an insane amount of 4-6 different kinds of peppers and eggplants.
A year ago we did not have chickens and I barely remember life without them! We are getting 6-7 eggs a day. We keep waiting for the day that it's going to be too cold and they are going to go on strike and in preparation we have been keeping a back stock of eggs. Our inventory keeps getting bigger (right now we're at 6 1/2 dozen!) and the hens just keep laying! Maybe it's because they're happy that they have a rooster again!
As I may have mentioned out old, huge rooster started attacking people, so he had to go, if ya know what I mean. A friend brought a baby chick over that she was pretty sure was a rooster. I named him Gandalf the Grey in hopes that he would grow into the name. Then a few things happened that confused us. We got a few eggs that looked like the kind of eggs a hen lays when she is first starting out, then we got an incredibility small egg. It was that super small egg that convinced us that our rooster must actually be a hen....damn! We wanted a rooster to start incubating and raising chicks in the spring-where are we going to get a new rooster in the middle of winter!
Well, we were wrong. Our rooster we thought was a hen is a rooster. How to we know this? Even though he is still smaller then all of our hens, he's started doing things that only a rooster would do. No, he's not crowing yet, but lets say that I don't think we need to worry about having fertilized eggs to incubate this spring!
And then there's Fang II. He is ever present, constantly following me around while I'm outside and doing his best to slip inside. He's really good at getting inside and his Christmas present was a day and night napping in the house. Now he thinks that where's he's supposed to be and the constant scratching on the door is getting pretty annoying!
Inside we have a little arboretum going on! This was a great Christmas for trees! I got both a dwarf fig tree and a meyer lemon tree. They both look kind of sad right now, but I will nurse them to be amazing trees (I hope!)
I'm so glad Keith puts up with all of this! I can't wait for this spring and summer when we have veggies growing all over the place, not just little baby sprouts!
