It's HOT! Working on the garden, a new pet/project, hatching out babies, and we had a visitor!

Wow! This week has been a scorcher so far and today is no different.  Right now at 4 p.m. it is 97 degrees.  Too hot to be outside working much in the sun.  All the critters are out of their pens and trying to stay cool in the shade of the woods. During the hottest part of the day we provide extra water, fans, a misting hose and frozen gallon jugs of water for all the outside critters. 

My farmer man and I worked outside until about 3 p.m. and decided to come in and cool off with some fresh strawberries and a bunch of water. It's almost too hot to eat...almost. We will be heading back outside in about an hour or so to finish working on the garden.

The garden is doing well!  We have had our first pickings of green beans, wax beans, cucumbers, peppers, zucchini, yellow squash and even our first tomatoes.

Our picking on Wednesday

Our picking on Thursday!

I'll be preparing to start the canning season this weekend.  Need to be sure we have plenty of canning salt and lids.  My Farmer is looking forward to canning some pickles, beans and spaghetti sauce among other things this year. We are having a gas cook top installed Monday so we can can INSIDE this year.  I love my flat cook top, but it won't allow the canner to heat up enough so we are going to replace it.  It will be good to have a gas cook top the next time we have an ice storm too!

The plants are doing well considering we haven't had much rain. We water everyday, but they just seem to do so much better when we get old fashioned rain.

"Roma" tomatoes starting to ripen! We will be canning a bunch of spaghetti sauce!

The "Unknown" pepper. We started all our own plants from seed this year and this was supposed to be a California Wonder Green Pepper....It is either a Banana, Cubanelle, or Corno di Toro. We will see!

That little bloom is growing into a nice Black Beauty Eggplant

The vines are going crazy! This one has cucumbers, winter squash, and cantaloupe.

The trellis hold pumpkins, winter squash, and cantaloupe.

One of the Turban Winter Squash....Burgess Buttercup Variety

Spaghetti Squash....they will soon need support from some pantyhose!

Our first Hale's Best Cantelope

This is from a mixed pumpkin seed package... it looks like Cinderella Pumpkin!

One of our little blueberry plants. Only going to have a few blueberries this year, but they have been really sweet!

We are working on putting landscape fabric and cypress mulch down all around and between the raised beds. Here's the progress from last weekend to this weekend:

Just getting started!

We managed to finish half of the mulching last weekend

We are planning on finishing up the rest this weekend!

Just this last little bit to finish up once it cools off a bit.

My Farmer Man has a new pet/project.  He found a Tobacco Hornworm on one of the tomato plants in the greenhouse.  He has always wanted to raise on through the various stages until it becomes the Sphinx Moth so...we have a tabacco worm in our greenhouse munching away at a sacrificial Roma tomato plant.

I learned the difference between a Tomato Hornworm and Tobacco Hornworm.....Both will eat tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and tobacco.  The Tomato Hornworm has 8 V-shaped marks on it's side and the tell tale horn on it's back end....the Tobacco Hornworm has 7 diagonal lines on it's side and has a curved horn on it's back end.

We need to find a name for our newest resident!

 We have had a bunch of babies hatching out this past two weeks as well.  We hatched 17 Golden Laced Wyandottes and 28 Guineas.  They are all so cute and doing well. 

Golden Laced Wyandottes...cute little chicks.

Our Little Keets in the brooder!

We were surprised with 7 Buff keets in this hatch!  Buff color is a rare color...we hope we will have more!

This little keet is a Royal Purple color

This little keet is the Pearl color...this is the color most people are familiar with.

Our clean up crew

We have one more incubator full of Guinea eggs that are due to hatch June 28th. We are hoping for another good hatch and maybe even some more Buffs!

The Old Five Notch Farm had a visitor this week.  The neighborhood peacock, known as "Sam" came for a visit. Everyone was out of their pens and Sam seemed to enjoy hanging out with the guineas.  I was glad he had found some feathered friends and as long as he stayed out of our garden he would be welcome. Well, that didn't last long!  Sam decided HE was going to be the top bird!  He went after the guineas first and I chased him off and then he went after "Tommy"!!! No way!  I had to run him across the field and into the woods. I sure wish he would behave himself so they could all be together. Maybe he'll come to his senses, but for now he is just roaming the neighborhood.  We'll see how his next visit goes.

"Sam" checking out the turkeys pen

Well, I hope you have enjoyed the update on the farm. It is now a "cooler" 96 degrees so I guess we better think about going back out to finish up. There is a pick up truck full of mulch that needs to be unloaded and spread around the garden. If there is enough I'd like to spruce up around the Poultry Palace with some mulch too!  A Farmer's Work is never done!