A fertile time

Things are going like gangbusters here on the homestead right now, especially where fertility is concerned. I am pleased to report that Ellen is sitting on a small clutch of fertilized eggs which I got from the neighbors across the street.  They lost several hens at once to old age and disease about the same time that Ellen went broody for the third time in her three-year life, and so I took four eggs from their non-broody hens and put them underneath Ellen who is happily clucking and mothering them under her fluffy wings.  

We will see if this pans out; if these eggs hatch I am guessing it should be around May 15 or so (chicken eggs incubate 21 days) and I would love to see Ellen become a mother in her golden years. All the other times she went broody I had to break her of it, meaning she did not get to do what she most wanted to do, which in those cases was hatch a batch of sterile eggs, a pretty useless endeavor for something as energy-sapping as brooding is.  We shall see!

Mama in-waiting.

The other fertilization project is going on outside, in the vegetables.  I have some peppers and eggplant with clear nitrogen deficiencies, but before I start monkeying around with organic fertilizer I am going to try a gentle, natural nitrogen booster, which is our own urine, diluted at a 1 to 10 ratio and used to water the plants around their bases.  I do not use this on anything where we'd be eating the crop either from or on the ground, but with peppers and eggplants this is not a concern. (And it's probably OK to use for other crops like lettuce, I'm just concerned about splash-age and don't want to risk it. 

Urine great shape, vegetables! Or will be soon.

So hopefully we will have green vegetables...and maybe even some chicks running around here soon.  Just two of the reasons spring is my favorite season. It's all about fertility...fertile earth, fertile animals, and hopefully fertile crops.

Vegetables, re-animated?

My Monsters?

Well, my cucumbers and squash are basically spent at this point, but taking a tip from our chef at the winery I decided to add some organic fertilizer into my raised beds yesterday, in order to see if I could kick-start my crops back to life for a few more weeks of "re-animation" production. (I watched "Young Frankenstein" on TV last night, and so basically today I feel like Gene Wilder playing scientist to Peter Boyle's monster, which in this case is my cucurbits. They're alive I tell you!  Alive!)

I'm not sure how I feel about this; on the one hand, a vegetable has a natural lifespan wherein it produces abundantly for awhile, then tapers off until there are no more blossoms to be fertilized and plants to be grown.  But if I can, through a natural fertilizer, push a little more fruition out of my plants, then I'm all for it. After all, it's only August and I'm not quite willing to let go of those fresh summer veggies just yet.  

In some ways, this is the hardest time of year -- we're at the clear end of summer, but here in the west the heat will be with us for at least another two months and the leaves won't turn in abundance until early December.  But everything has been moved up here because of our early spring; we will have grape harvest in the vineyards earlier than ever before, and some vines are already turning brown, defying the usual December leaf-change date.

It seems like most of the plants in this region have already given their best, produced their crop, and are now readying themselves to settle down for a nice period of dormancy.  If only we could all do the same.  But as long as we're in a protracted end of summer, at least I want some summer veggies, so I'm hoping Chef's fertilizer tip does the trick and gets my veggies started again.

After all, what's summer without zukes and cukes?

And at this rate, it's looking likely that I may have some tomatoes by Christmastime.

 

Still extremely green. Hoping for some Christmas red.