They Grow Up so Fast

So we were gone for a few weeks and while out of town it rained every day, which is unusual for late-summer in Cincinnati but not a bad thing. We came home to full rain-tanks (easily 600 gallons of water) — more than we’ll use and our flowers, vegetables and fruit/nut trees flourished. Only the tomatoes seemed to be struggling as the dampness allowed blight to set in (talking to farmer’s at the market assured us that we are not the only ones with sickly, blighted tomatoes). The weeds in the pepper patch are taller than the peppers — but the plants are still covered with peppers and look quite heavy. The beans are 8 feet tall and loaded with long green pods. The squash looked like it was doing well (see: squash beetles) when we came home, late-planted eggplants were thriving and we just picked the first eggplant a couple days ago, and the invincible chard is still going strong.

Our chickens also survived our absence and began laying just a week after our return. The first layer was an Americauna who is also the chicken who loves to be petted. She will walk up to me and hold her wings out so that I can scratch her back…she also loves LOVES to eat tomatoes and runs up to grab whatever cherry tomatoes are offered.

Next year we will have to fence the gardens to keep the chickens from devouring so many tomatoes. They only eat the very red, very ripe ones tear them right off the vine (even the really BIG ones) and cluck over the fruits, peeling back the skin to eat the seeds. If we hadn’t more-or-less given up on most of the tomatoes anyway it would be a problem but the fruits have some black, crusty spots and it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice to let the chickens have them.

Especially since now 3 or 4 of the ladies are laying eggs and so they are officially the only “pets” I’ve ever had that actually contributed something tangible to the household. Pretty amazing…and the taste of eggs that are only a couple hours old is truly different, better even than farmer’s eggs from local markets. We are getting between 1  and 4 eggs a day; they are all similar shades of brown/pink — Wyandottes and Buckeyes lay brown eggs and Americaunas can lay eggs that are blue or green so we can’t tell who is laying what at this point.

Two of the eggs were really, really small and I think of those as “first-try eggs” but it’s all guess-work except for the Americauna who laid the first. During the last week of August we could tell she was wanting to lay an egg…but she couldn’t quite figure out how. She would jump up into the laying boxes, turn around, squat down, get down and go outside and cackle and then a few minutes later start walking around in a crouch like her stomach hurt. Funny, I wonder if having older generations of chickens to teach the little girl chickens where eggs come from would have eased her confusion? At any rate, she figured it out!