July is plowing right along. We've had a pretty good mix of sun and rain and most things are growing like crazy. We ought to be picking cukes, zukes and green beans every day, but three times a week is about all we can manage. We haven't had enough sunny, dry days to get ahead of the weeds, and they've been growing just as fast as everything else, so every sunny, dry day is spent weeding. Harvest and wash for CSA and market takes most of the day on Friday now. This week we added potatoes to the mix.

New potatoes are one of the reasons I love farming. They were really a revelation for me. I think that everyone knows - at least theoretically - that a fresh, sun-warmed, garden tomato is fundamentally different from the tomatoes you get at the grocery store. What most people don't know - what I didn't know until only a few years ago - is that a fresh, just-dug baby potato is a fundamentally different vegetable than the big old russets (or even the pretty-good red-skinned ones) you get at the store. They're so creamy and soft and tender and full of good flavor. Potatoes are one of my favorite things to eat and one of my favorite things to grow. They don't take much care, just basic weeding and a hilling once or twice, and they grow all big and bushy, then you dig them up and surprise! There's potatoes in there! It's like magic every time.

Besides, potatoes, what else is new? The younger chickens have just started laying, so we get a little blue pullet egg every other day or so (a pullet is a young hen). When chickens first start laying, it takes them a few tries to get it right, so the first eggs tend to be a bit funny - often they're very small, grape-sized or even smaller, sometimes without yolks. Sometimes they don't get their hard shell on and are just enclosed in the inner membrane. Sometimes they have two yolks, or only yolk and no white. They're an adventure. After another few weeks the pullets should have it all worked out and we ought to be getting four or five good blue eggs in addition to the 8-10 that the other fourteen hens lay each day. Which will be good, because our household eats 6-8 eggs a day, and we haven't had as many to sell as we'd like.

The new chickens also seem to have integrated into the flock better now that they're full-sized and laying. They mostly roost all together now, although one still insists on roosting on the coop's hipboard rather than on the roost. I suspect that when winter comes she'll join the flock.

Also, the cherry tomato plants in the greenhouse have reached the top of their trellis (which is about 7 feet high), and Jeremy has doubled them over and trained them back down, and they have now reached my waist on their way down to the ground.

Several items of interest this week:
1. New chickens! We got five new pullets to add to our laying flock. They're Ameracaunas, which are blue-egg birds. Gabe at Four Family Farm raised them until now, about ten weeks old, and we picked them up on Thursday. We fenced off a corner of the coop for them, and this morning I opened a little pop-hole in it that they can get in and out of but the big hens can't fit through. That way they have a safe place to go if the hens pick on them, and that's where their food is and roosts that are lower down. I raised up the hens' food so that the pullets shouldn't be able to reach it - their nutritional needs are different when they're growing from when they're laying, so we don't want them eating each others' food. I'm not sure how we'll manage when the pullets get to be full-size (probably July) but before they start to lay (sometime in August), but we'll figure something out. This set-up should hold us for a while.

2. We've started harvesting! We harvested more than ten pounds of spinach out of the greenhouse last week, most of which we sold to local restaurants. We've also started pulling radishes, but they're still pretty small and just snacks while we're working in the greenhouse. The scallions should be ready in time for market (which starts May 9!), and it looks like we should have carrots in time for CSA.

3. The field has been harrowed! We plowed a new piece of ground last fall and have been anxiously waiting for it to dry out enough to harrow, which finally happened this week. Of course, it's raining again now. Hopefully, we'll get a stretch of dry weather soon so we can till and plant.

4. We made the front page! Neighborly CSA was featured on the front page of last Thursday's Addison Independent! If you have an online subscription, you can read it on their website, or click here to download a PDF that we scanned. It's a pretty great article!

Things have been busy around here. We were traveling for the holidays, for visiting family, and then because of a death in the family, so we were scarce about the farm for a little while. It feels really good to be back. We went to the NOFA-VT winter conference this past weekend, which was really great. It's two days of workshops and yummy food and being surrounded by farmers, gardeners, foodies, homesteaders, and activists. I went to a home butchering workshop where they actually butchered an actual entire pig right there. It was pretty crazy.

And it didn't really prepare me for the chicken we're going to have to butcher this week. She's prolapsed and probably eggbound and you don't want me to go into any more details, I promise. She doesn't appear to be suffering -- chickens aren't especially demonstrative, but she's acting like a chicken and not like a sick chicken, as far as I can tell -- but at this point it's pretty clear she isn't going to get better. So it's just a matter of time before she gets infected and everything gets worse. It's part of farming, unfortunately; the animals you love end up dying, and you end up killing them.

I've assisted in chicken slaughter before, but I haven't actually done it myself yet, and neither has Jeremy. We're a little nervous, but I think it will go alright.

Because that's how things are, the thaw last week preceded the coldest temperatures of the year for this week. With both heat lamps on in the chicken house, it got down to six degrees in there; as long as they have enough to eat, they won't freeze, but they can get frostbit. Egg production has dropped a little with the cold temps, but now that we're past the molt we're getting a pretty steady dozen a day. We're in the position again of needing to find some more egg customers - we were selling three or four dozen a week last summer to a restaurant that since has gone out of business, and now our regular customers can't keep up! In the meantime, I guess I'd better get back in the habit of baking lots of cakes and making lots of pasta. One day I'll post my "how to use over a dozen eggs in one day without anyone realizing they've eaten that many eggs" menu.

It rained and rained yesterday, and almost all the snow from the winter so far has been melted away. The brown fields look a bit sad, but the chickens are loving the snow-free ground (and the snow-free compost pile!). They've been running around outside all day today, whereas usually they only venture out a little ways, and only on sunny days. For their sake, I hope that it stays like this a while, but really I'm wishing for more snow. There will be plenty of mud and muck in spring - I don't need any now!

At dawn this morning I was outside chasing a chicken. I don't know how she got out of the fence (well, I suppose she flew; what I don't know is why) and I don't know when, except that it was yesterday. I saw her tracks, yesterday, in the garlic field, which is near the chicken yard, but all I thought was, "Hey, neat bird tracks!" Usually when a chicken gets out of the fence, all she does is pace around trying to get back in, which is what Sylvia was doing this morning; I don't know where she was yesterday when I was admiring her tracks in the snow. What else I don't know is how she survived the night without freezing or even - as far as I can tell - frostbite, since it was at least -2 and probably colder with the windchill. Even with the rigged-up oil-pan heater we use, their water was frozen this morning.

Sylvia is a silver-spangled hamburg, a small black-and-white spotted chicken with big dark eyes, blue legs, and a rose comb. She's the only one we have of that breed, which I think may have been a mistake. It's a smaller breed than all the others, who we chose for their meatiness in addition to their laying ability. She came along because she's the only white-egg layer and because she's so pretty. But as the smallest hen, she seems to be at the bottom of the totem pole by default, and often gets picked on and chased away from the best treats. I think maybe if we had two, they could at least band together. Maybe not, though; the subtleties of chicken politics are beyond my meager comprehension.

We had a big storm a few days ago, with so much wind that we lost power for a while and thought were going to lose the plastic off our greenhouse. We went running outside to tack down the roll-up sides, pack snow around the bottom seam, and tighten up the ropes along the sides. It held together, but we were scared for a minute.

Temperatures have been dropping like crazy, but the broccoli in the greenhouse and the chard in our cold frames are still going strong. We finally set up the heat lamp in the chicken house, for which they seem to be very happy. We decided to get light-less infrared lamp, which just produces heat. Since it's infrared, it only heats the chickens, not the air, and hopefully is therefore more efficient, since their roost is not very snug. To keep their water from freezing, we bought a magnetic oil-pan heater which we stuck to the bottom of their galvanized waterer. It seems to be working really well so far.

People keep telling us that there's going to be a lot of snow this weekend, but the local forecasts and radar don't seem to agree. We'll see!

We got our first real snow of the winter yesterday! The chickens are not happy about it at all - they've stayed in the coop since it started accumulating. Hopefully, they'll venture out at least a little bit today. We've been lucky, with such a mild November, that they've been able to keep foraging and grazing so late into the year. Once the ground freezes and the snow sticks, their diet becomes much less interesting. We feed them some of our kitchen scraps, which they really enjoy (they especially like corn bread and kale), and we'll grow some sprouts for them so that they have good green food all winter, but they'll be lacking in bugs and grass, which they definitely love. They like their grain pretty well, too, though - I don't think they're too upset.