I've been busy researching, figuring, re-figuring, and getting all the orders ready for the upcoming growing season for both the garden and the chickens. I admit, it has been pretty enjoyable for me. I've always been one to enjoy the planning process, making different scenarios to compare ideas and options. I find it rewarding, it probably seems borderline obsessive to most people just HOW much thought I put into these decisions, but that is ok. I hope that the extra planning time will help us make less mistakes, I always figure the more thoroughly I can plan something out and figure for mishaps or hopefully avoid some then we will be that much better off.:) Then maybe I will be able to share some of that with others as well. It is a special time of year when I can spend time browsing through all the garden catalogs. There is quite a pile of them!
While I do all the planning for the season the boys are enjoying more free time than they normally have available and they've kept themselves busy with various projects.
Gopher hunting. A lesson in patience and optimism. HaHa
Here they are working on a tree fort.
It is really coming along and taking shape. They are building it themselves and paying for all the materials as well. I can't wait to show you the latest progress from today on the tree fort, but it is dark right now so you will have to wait until at least tomorrow to see them!
Anyway, back to the planning process. Some of the things I considered where the batch sizes for the meat chickens to raise and whether or not to go with all cockerels for the broilers or straight run. The cockerels (males) gain faster and we'd be able to shorten our production time frame by 2 to 3 weeks for the season and possibly save a little $ on feed because if they gain faster we'd be able to butcher a week earlier. In the end we decided to go with straight run (equal male and female birds) it seems simpler to stick with what we know worked well last year at this point. I might want to test it out next year but we figured we might as well gain some more accurate data this year doing it the way we did last year and then we will have more stats to compare it to if we change something in the future.
We also plan to order laying hens for this spring as well. We will order some for ourselves as well as some for other locals who would like to add to the order. We plan to order 6 white leghorns, 6 Ameraucanas, and 13 Golden Sex Link (or Golden Comets) for our own flock. We really enjoy the Golden Comet hens, they are medium sized so they eat efficiently and lay extremely well. The leghorns are egg laying machines but less enjoyable and more flighty but since they lay so well and eat so little they are a nice addition to the flock. We added the Ameracaunas for some color to the egg carton, but if they end up being less prolific layers than we'd like we will sell them because we do try to keep the feed conversion to egg laying rates as economical as possible just to try to be good stewards of our resources.
We like to keep a flock of about 9-12 hens but we plan to expand just a little to offer eggs to our neighbors that have asked if we have eggs available. At this time we decided to not have a delivery route or expand beyond just supplying close neighbors with eggs. Our goal is usually to sell just enough to help pay for feed costs. It will be fun to have some little layer chicks in the coop again, we don't have any layers right now as they were getting too old to lay efficiently over winter so we simplified the chores some, but I seriously regret that decision right now. I forgot what store bought eggs were like and I miss the homegrown beauties. I will be placing the chick orders in the next week or so for a mid March arrival.
We got the seed orders figured out and ended up ordering from 3 places and I have a list of items to purchase locally once the seeds go on a 50% discount as well.
I plan to plant about a dozen varieties of tomatoes and five varieties of peppers from seed this year. I am going to be offering some of the extras for sale the same as last year. It really helps to sell a few extra plants to reduce the costs of the seeds to get the garden started. I am pretty excited about all the things we will be growing!
We also threw in a few types of flower seeds for some garden beauty and a splash of color. I like to edge the different blocks of the garden areas with flowers to help define the main pathways and give us some fresh cut flowers all summer long. We selected zinnias, marigolds, straw flowers, snapdragons, sunflowers, and cosmos.
We also have a fall decoration garden planned. This is Sunshine's project, she likes to grow gourds to sell for decor in the fall. It was a big hit last year! So this year she has colorful Indian corn planned, as well as some fun gourds and we will also grow a large patch of pumpkins. We can sell both the dried Indian corn as well as bundles of corn stalks for decor. It will be a fun way to end the garden season and it will be nice to have a nice collection of fall items to decorate with here too.
That is about all for now. Things are really coming along well and I feel really positive about the coming production season. I hope you have some fun spring projects planned that you are excited about too!
