February Chickens

Everyone enjoyed some time outside today, before the next cold front and snow comes in tonight.

Obsessively herding his chickens is the only thing we've every found that tires Charlie out. This is all of them, except for Stellaluna, our Black Australorp, who has gone broody and was back in the coop sitting on some eggs. From the left is Egglantine, the Black Cochin; Fialka, the Ameraucana; Colette, the Buff Orpington; Fialka's sister Cricket, also an Ameraucana (they are the ones that lay blue/green eggs;) Marigold the Light Brahma; and Felicity the Cuckoo Maran.

It was a gorgeous, warm day. The ladies got in a lot of dust baths.

Don't look Charlie in the eye unless you have a clear conscience. He is very good at ferreting out disobedient thoughts in his hens.

Marigold is the cuddliest. She knows how to open the screen door with her beak, and tries to come in the house.She will follow you around chuckling at you until you pick her up.

I'm so proud of our hardy chicken girls, making it through stretches of below zero temperatures this winter without any problems. We've gotten kind of attached to them.

Sweet Peas

One year not too long ago, we had sweet peas in the front yard garden that looked like this.

They were started from seed indoors and planted out as seedlings. In the years following, I direct-seeded them, and hardly any even bloomed.

This year I want them to be spilling over the fence again, so I'm going back to the space and labor-intensive method and starting them from seed. Here they are after soaking and scarifying with a nail clipper, in their soil blocks before being covered with the top layer of soil.

I'm trying these for the first time, soil block makers for seedlings. The idea is that there are no plastic pots to buy /save/sterilize, more room for seedlings in each flat, and stronger seedlings that survive transplanting. I'm excited about using the micro blocks when it's time to plant basil and other plants that need heat to germinate. Heat mat real estate is so precious, and this should quadruple how many seedlings I can start on heat. The roots air prune, which means they reach the end of their blocks and stop growing, rather than circling around the pots. You can see how that would help with transplant shock. Eliot Coleman popularized this European method in the states. I'm diligent about saving and re-using the little black plastic seedling pots, but they eventually crack and give out, and this year mine all seem to be falling apart at the same time. So it's a great time to try something different.

I bought two sizes of block makers. The 3/4" mini blocks, and the larger 2" blocks that the minis can be potted up into once the seedlings are growing.

You fill and compact the block molds with soil, press down the plunger, and end up with perfect square blocks of soil ready for planting. There are different-sized dowel pin inserts that can be customized to make a hole just the right size for your seed. There is a special recipe for the soil block mix, because regular seedling mix won't hold together in the blocks. I think the micro might be too small for seeds as big as sweet peas, but I'm planting so many seeds that it's important to save space, so I'm giving it a try. I did one batch in the 2" blocks as a test, to see if those grow faster than the ones that start small and are potted up. Maybe one day I'll invest in root trainers, like Matt Matus in his Growing With Plants blog. His blog is so beautiful and well-written, and such an inspiration. Here's to a glorious fence-full of sweet peas again, if everything goes well.