Humble Garden

The young chickens have moved into their new chicken house and are loving it. We are enjoying an indian summer here in central MA so they are doing fine with the transition (we also have some heat lamps for when it gets chilly at night and for the coming weeks when fall gets down to business).

Today we are looking at 83 F as a high so I am hoping they stay cool enough. We have yet to finish the outside enclosure but the husband is working as fast as he can to get it done.

Let me know if you cant see the slide show above!

What do you think?

You may or may not remember from my earlier posts that I want to integrate a home-use aquaculture pool to grow our own fish (vary the types of protein we eat and we also really like fish).

One can spend a LOT of money on this sort of activity but I want to be as frugal but as productive as we can be. I also want to choose fish species that are native to this area so that they do not need out-of-region living requirements (high temperatures, long days, salt water).

One Massachusetts native species that I find very attractive is the stream trout. It has special needs, like any fish type (doesnt want to go above 70F for one and needs well aerated, running water for another) but its delicious and tolerant or even loving of the Massachusetts environment.

We visited the McLaughlin Trout Hatchery up in Belchertown, MA, right next to the Quabbin Reservoir to see how the “big guys” raise these fish (for stocking the streams of this state).

Here is a bit of a photo essay on what they have set up, its VERY nice.

I learned that fish released from the hatcheries in MA (some 1.3 million from this hatchery alone) last only 2 WEEKS before being caught.

All that you see here (and a whole lot more not shown) is not paid by general taxes but by fishing licenses!

As I mentioned obliquely before, perhaps in the comments only, my vine crops were hit with a double whammy of powdery mildew and then 6 weeks of drought. No amount of spraying milk helped so I pulled out the spaghetti squash, the watermelons, the zucchinis, the scallopini squash, and then my poor little moon and stars which also got the mildew.

I just had to pull out the turnips because they started to mildew as well and they were also heavily fed on earlier by bugs.

This is what I got, tiny stunted things.

But you can see we are still getting tomatoes and now some of the cranberry beans are drying up very nicely! I am very much looking forward to those bean crops.

I have planted spinach, beets, and green onions where the squash and zucchini once were.

I also planted some bibb lettuce some weeks ago.

Some delicious braising chards and such were planted some time ago but the baby bok choy have been eaten to bits.

I will grow the bok choy again but under row covers for certain!

Here is a patch of straw potatoes that I wanted to dig up and see what was what.

I pulled back the straw on some 4 or 5 plants and the yield is very low. This is because we didnt put enough straw on these to make a deep thatch.

KD points out some of the potatoes.

A close up.

We have quite a few more patches that we will be letting go for some time to allow all the tiny potatoes to grow to adulthood.

I think I like this method but next year I will also be planting them in the ground.

Can’t have too many homegrown organic potatoes!