Kiss me I'm Polish

So my garden has been taken over by a giant gourd, I want to see what's going to happen, so everything is on hold! I did manage to plant one patch of radishes, lettuce, and broccoli.

kick ass batch of finished compost ready for the new bed.

New bed of radishes, lettuce, broccoli, and kick ass compost.

Found this mantis the other day AWESOME!!

The cover crop is coming in.

cover crop close up, can you name all plants? 

Finally, I went to the feed store the other day and found this lady. I had to buy her, coolest lookin chicken ever. She's a blue polish, and is pretty tough for being half blind. The head feathers make it hard for her to see. No I don't have a chicken problem, I only have 7chickens and can quit anytime I want to. Anyways, I don't know what to name her, so I'm up for suggestions???

BOOYAH Q-Tip head lookin chicken

Cover Cropping The Backyard

I planted another cover crop in my backyard this year. Last year I planted a cover crop of oats, wheat, barley, and rye(pasture mix). This year I planted a green manure mix of common vetch, lentils, soybeans (non GMO), arrowleaf clover, crimson clover, sorghum sudan, pearl millet, sudan grass, oats, Nitro oilseed radish, dwarf essex rapeseed, purple top turnips, Ethiopian cabbage, flax, buckwheat, sunflowers, and phacelia from http://www.greencoverseed.com/. Most of the mix are nitrogen fixers but some are soil busters and extra biomass, check out all the cover crop info here. I also mixed in herbs such as dill, oregano, cilantro, and sage so the regular ole bermuda yard should be pretty interesting this year. Cover crops are pretty easy to install I scalp the yard, throw down the seed, rake it into the thatch, and water for 10 minutes everyday for a week. After that the cover crop grows on it's own.

 My dog hangin out in last years cover crop.

 The chicks foraging through last years cover crop.

The chicks doin some more foraging.  The pasture mix will eventually produce seeds that the chicks love to eat. This year I focused more on a soil building mix so the chicks might miss out, but my backyard orchard will really appreciate it, and the chicks never miss out. If your thinking of planting a garden, orchard, or grass yard in the future, cover crop it now to build soil for the future. If you have an existing plot that you want to re-invigorate without using chemicals or working to hard cover crop it. Even big time monoculture overall wearing farmers use cover crops. 

BOOYAH Dave Brandt

Forward Operating Base Munatee

Our new flock is doing well, so well they have out grown their space on our kitchen table. The best scenario would be to put them in the coop in the backyard but my 2 older hens just want to beat the crap out of the new girls. On top of that there's a neighborhood cat that could make quick work of the new chicks. So I need to get them outside but they need to be protected. Building a new full size coop is wastefull (space and material) plus they will all integrate together as soon as every body is the same size. I need a beach head so I built Forward Operating Base Munatee (FOB Munatee) named after the greatest chicken to ever walk the backyard. The coop is modular, built out of 4 panels and held together by 4 screws. FOB Munatee is tough and provides enough room for our new girls and introduces them to their new world. When the girls are done in the new coop I'll take the 4 screws holding it together out and put the panels behind the shed.

FOB Munatee includes shading, duck bathing, a roosting pole, and fresh piece of yard everyday. The coop is light enough to move around to different parts of the yard everyday.

We still bring them in every night but sun up to sun down they're living in the yard (the house smells much better). On a really funny note, once I put the chicks up, the ducks walk across the yard and come inside the house on there own looking for their buds, and one of the chicks thinks it's a duck, she still hasn't figured out how to swim, but keeps on trying. Keep trying Baby Red. 

Booyah!!

Summer update

It's been awhile since I've posted so here's a quick run down of how summer went.

These guys destroyed my tomatillo plants. Three striped potato beetles.

3 striped potato beetle larvae. By the time I figured out how to kill them they had eaten all my tomatillos. An application of bt will kill the larvae.

I'm starting to harvest my black eyed pea crop.

Glass gem corn I'm harvesting.

Raising our new girls has become a full time job and ducks are stinky.

Finally check out my new pile of mulch I scored it from some landscaper friends of mine it's 4 cubic yards of shredded mesquite. This will be the winter of mulch.

Finally Finally the monsoon ended on 9/30/13 and we ended up with just over 3 inches of rain for the season not bad for livin in a desert. 

BOOYAH!!!

My New Flock

What's this bucket doing with a heat lamp above it sitting on our kitchen table for?

It's new additions to our flock! We've got 2 white muscovey ducks (V & G), an Americauna (Georgette), a Rhode Island Red (TBD), a Black Maran (Chicky Ray), and a White Leghorn (TBD)

BOOYAH!! 

R.I.P. Munatee

Tragedy struck 2 days ago when I found my favorite chicken Munatee dead. The heat of the summer was just to much for her. Munatee was brought into my flock by my brother Jacob, he wanted chickens but couldn't keep them at his place. So when I bought my chicks I told him he could by his own chicken and keep it at my house. He soon showed up with an Americauna chick and named it Muntee. As Munatee got older and turned into a hen she developed a real funny character. This was strange to me because I've always thought chickens were pretty much just dumb ole chickens. Muntee's name was soon changed to Munatee because of her huge appetite, she reminded me of the giant sea cows called Manatees. Munatee never missed a meal and was always the first one to the diner plate and last one to leave. Whenever the chicken feeder was empty she would run around the yard squawking as loud as she could until the feeder was filled back up. At a family bbq she snuck up on my sister, ambushed her and took a cheese quesadilla out of hands. All I heard was my sis screaming and then I saw Munatee running through the crowd of people with the quesadilla in her beak. She stole a pulled pork sandwich from my mom at another family bbq. I know these stories sound like some rogue chicken running amok stealing peoples food, and they are, but Munatee has been a part of some of the funniest backyard moments around here and she will be greatly missed. I don't know if you can tell from the writing above but at one point Munatee became mine and she soon became my favorite pet. Munatee was my best laying hen even at almost 4 years old she still would lay one green egg a day. I buried her in the yard with rest of deceased pets.

Aaron and Munatee avatar.

Rise of the striped cucumber beetle

Every year a new pest invades my garden, I thought by now I'd seen them all.

I was wrong, see these cute little guys fornicating away in my pumpkin patch. Harmless right? Wrong. These striped cucumber beetles showed up over night and by the time I figured out what was going on, they had a solid foothold in the garden. The adults feed on the foliage of cucurbits (squash, pumpkin, cucumber, gourd, watermelon, and cantaloupe). The larvae feed on the roots of cucurbits, and they are known spreaders of bacterial wilt. All around nasties, I've been handpicking and vacuuming them off the plants and I think I'm getting the upper hand, but the damage has been done. Sometimes I wish I hag a big ole barrel of DDT.

Beetle damage to armenian cucumber.

One of the reasons I don't use pesticides, that's an assassin bug eating a striped cucumber beetle. The beetles do have some natural predators. The main problem is for every assassin bug there's a 100 beetles. That's how the pest survive, sheer numbers. It's an easy way to tell between beneficial insects and pests. If you don't know if a bug is good for your garden or bad just take a head count, if there's a bunch of them they're probably bad if there are only a few they're probably beneficial.

Now some good news, it's the beginning of August and I'm still harvesting tomatoes. There not huge, but I'm still getting fresh tomatoes in the middle of summer.

That's the tomatillo, black eyed pea, and tepary bean patch bustin out

black eyed pea

Pumpkin patch with volunteer tomatillos and bisbee red black eyed peas.

Monsoon garden planted with corn, sunflowers, beans(climbing and bush), and squash. The 4 sisters, the corn and sunflowers will grow tall to shade the garden. The climbing beans will use the corn and sunflowers as a trellis. The squash and bush beans will crawl along the ground cooling the earth and naturally mulching the soil. All the seeds I planted are native to the southwest and can tolerate the high heat and dry conditions. I bought them at native seed search they sell seeds native to the southwest. Very cool, all their seeds have performed excellent and I'm giving them a shout out. 

BOOYAH NATIVE SEED SEARCH!!!