How Does the Garden Grow?

It's finally warming up a bit. That means the vegetable garden is starting to grow. Cabbage, chard, turnips, and peas and lots of other stuff seen here. And there's more out of picture further to the left. The turnips in particular are heavenly - so sweet.

Overview of Grafting Tools

Here are the tools Nick and I used to graft this year. From left to right is an Omega grafting tool (blue handle), a Bench grafting tool (orange handle), and a grafting knife. The main one used is the one I've got my hand on. The reason it is superior: it's much faster to use than a knife and the blade design is more useful than the Omega grafting tool. Simply put the Bench grafter has a triangle shaped blade as compared to the Omega grafter which has a blade shape like the Greek letter omega (which kind of looks like a horseshoe). A triangle blade is better because a much wider size-range of scion wood can be used. Anything from 1/8 inch up to an inch. The Omega blade is limited to something in the range of a pencil. Also note that a grafting knife is different than your average pocket knife. The blade is beveled on one side only. Even with a grafting tool it is still handy to have the knife as occasionally an imperfect tool cut needs a bit of detail trim work. And not pictured well is the second blade on the grafting knife. A sharpened bump on the back of the blade is used for summer bud grafting. Oh, and I forgot to mention the best grafting tool of all: a good teacher. Many thanks to Nick for his time and patience showing me the tricks of the trade. In all we made somewhere around 1400 grafted trees - maybe more. And most of them seem to be taking well.

What A Week

Started out the week bottling the remainder of last year's wine. And finished out the week doing plumbing work. In between it was: planting tomatoes, summer squash, cucumbers, peppers, and grafted trees, digging blackberries, mowing, helping repair the tracker, helping catch sheep for the shearer, and visiting the sea lion caves over in Florence, Oregon (which is pictured and which is supposedly the largest sea cave in the world.) What a week.

Chicken Run

Here is a better pic of the chicks. They are inside one the welded wire vegetable cages. They have plenty of room to run, which is hilarious to watch. Were one goes, they all go. Also, you can also see their waterer and feed. They eat a lot, which makes sense since everyday they seem to get bigger. And they nibble the grass as well. It's amazing to see how fast they go from fuzz ball to adult. I think their feet have grown the most. At night, because it has been in the thirties, they are rounded up and put inside. A light bulb keeps them warm. And on a somewhat related note, a bald eagle visited at breakfast and ate one of the ducks. We saw the whole thing from the house. Sobering thought. It has me re-evaluating just how 'free range' I'll let the chicks be.

Chickens!!!!!!!!!!

Look what I got. Chickens. 5 barred rock and 5 rhode island red. How cool? Got em today at a feed store in Eugene. Everybody is asleep right now after a stressful ride in the truck back to Yoncalla. I'm so lucky to have Carla here at the farm to teach me how raise them.