Guineas a Go Go

Let us in!

Were's the door?

9-22-11; We kicked the 4 oldest Guinea's out of the aviary due to their aggressive and competitive personalities. That was no easy feat as they really did not want to go. We did this because they have been just plain mean and have been harassing the smaller chickens and guineas to the point of them staying in the chicken coop all day and not coming out to feed or drink. These guys reacted to the boot out with constant chatter in the way only a guinea can do. And it was loud! But we did our best to ignore it and kept on with our chores. We provided them with food and water close to the flight run and they ate off and on all day. Not to much bug activity this late in the season. They ventured from the immediate area for very short periods visiting the ducks and geese in the duck yard and they even flew up to the roof of the barn. By the way - nails on a metal roof is almost as bad as nails on a chalkboard, LOL!

When evening fell, these silly birds didn't roost in any of the available trees in that immediate area so for their protection, we closed the other birds into the aviary and let the adult guineas into the flight run. That was easy as they really wanted back in.
Today we put them back outside and they stayed pretty close to the flight run and visited the ducks and geese again. They don't seem to aware of the need to roost at night so I guess we'll be putting them back into the flight run again tonight. I hope we can keep this up until the younger guineas get bigger. And I guess when winter comes they will need to spend it in the aviary. All I can say is that if they continue to harass the smaller chickens, those guineas could very well wind up on our dinner table as I hear guinea meat is quite delicious.

2012 Straw Bale Garden Design

Well here it is. Drum roll please :-) ................ My 2012 Patchwork Prairie Straw Bale garden design. Click on the picture for a better view.

I'm quite please with myself as I worked it out with Excel inserting shapes to get the bales, whiskey barrels, work bench plus decking for chairs and a table. What a cool program for designing gardens! The garden entrance gate is on the west side near the whiskey barrels, the beans are on the north and so on. With all my excitement in designing this garden I totally forgot to consider companion planting, shesh, LOL! My garden book that features this subject is tucked away in a box somewhere so I Binged "companion planting for gardens" and found a good site that explains it in a no nonsense way. Wohoo! After consulting this information I see that I don't need to change a thing! All I need to do is add are some pest deterring flowers and herbs which I can do when I begin planting. By the way, I chose to use straw bales due to the poor quality clay soil here and the unbelievably high cost of having top soil hauled in. Straw bales are also cheaper than lumber for raised beds and the straw will compost and improve the soil for future gardens.

What you can't see in the picture is the watering system I will have. One or two long soaker hoses connected to a timer so I can water while I'm at work and then off the timer so I can water when I get home from work. We still have some drip irrigation hose left from a previous garden and we may use them, but for now I'm going with the soaker hoses as we already have those too. Additionally, we fenced in my garden spot and will complete it with electric wire on top and rabbit fence on the bottom to keep 'said' critters out. My first and last garden here was a disaster as the deer and rabbits ate everything down to nubs on the ground! I believe I'll have the advantage this time. And who knows, I may have enough excess produce to can! That would be just too Cool!!! 

Meet Rocky

This is our Ameraucana rooster. He's such a beautiful bird and quite a happy feller with 8 hens to keep him crowing. Several of his hens are also Ameraucana's and I can't wait to see those blue and green eggs!

We Have Beans!

This spring I planted some pole beans next to the deck in hopes that the plants would wind their way up the deck sides providing for an easy way to harvest the beans. The plants would also serve as a privacy barrier on the deck. I chose a variety called Kentucky Wonder, which is stringless and has brown seeds. I normally opt for bush beans but I wanted to see how my idea for pole beans would turn out. As the season progressed, extremely high temperatures and a draught assaulted Missouri. I watered my beans faithfully for about a month but the high temperatures made it hard for me to continue in my faithful efforts. 

Now that those high temperatures have passed and we have had a few rain showers so I have been planning my fall preparations for my herb beds. I figured I would just be tearing out the beans in an “oh well, better luck next year” frame of mind. Much to my surprise today, I found loads of nice looking green beans on my plants. The foliage is dying back which makes it so much easier to see the bounty these plants have produced to spite the harsh temperatures and lack of water. They aren’t the most glamorous of beans but they are beans :-)

 I steamed a batch this evening and ate them plain. They were delicious. However, their being stringless did not happen. Tomorrow I will remove the strings and use a nice Greek recipe I found in my Traditional Greek Cooking book that was given to me by my good friend John. It sounds awesome, however I did change the recipe a bit. I’ll use;

A couple of pounds of beans

½  cup of olive oil

1 pound of tomatoes

1 TBSP tomato paste

a few shallots

2 TBSP chopped parsley

Salt and pepper to taste.

After rinsing and trimming the beans sauté the onions, combine strained tomatoes and tomato paste diluted in 2 cups of water. Bring this to a boil then add the beans. Simmer until all of the liquid is gone and only the oil remains as a sauce. 

It’s nice to try new things and I really like the flavor of these pole beans so next year I will give them a place in my new garden. So, the spot I used for these beans this year will once again be used for my herbs.

Getting Ready for Winter

It’s only September but as far as I’m concerned, it’s never too early to get ready for winter. Our 8 chickens recently saw 3 more chickens and 7 guineas move in so the coop needed to be remodeled to accommodate the whole brood comfortably. The coop, by the way, is nestled inside a very roomy aviary and measures 12 ft wide by 4 ft deep by 8 ft tall. The Aviary is 12 ft wide by 24 ft long with a 12 ft ceiling. Our birds have 2 large summer roosts inside the aviary but winter here in Missouri is too cold for those. We installed 3 stair step roosts on one side of the coop and situated it for ease of cleaning and placed a single roost on the opposite side. The single roost is for our original 3 production reds - the queens of the coop. This remodel also allowed room for nesting boxes and even food and water if necessary. Since it completion, all our birds have been roosting at night in the coop and have completely stopped using the summer roosts.   

The pictures below are of the aviary and the newly added roosts in the coop. 

Outside the Aviary and inside the flight run.

Looking into the spacious Aviary. Note the summer roosts on both sides.

Blossom doing her quality inspection.

Chickens and guineas getting comfortable.

Morgan, Harriet and Blossom. The Queens of the Coop.

Late Summer 2011

There hasn’t been much going on here at Patchwork Prairie this summer as the unusually intense heat and humidity kept us from achieving many of our goals this year. Therefore, as the heat winds down we will be a blur of activity in our attempt to get all that we wish to achieve for 2011 completed. Thus far, we have gotten all the posts up around the new garden spot and completed the wooden posts and metal gate for the entrance. Next, we will be adding the welded wire fencing to the posts with chicken wire added to the bottom and an electric wire to the top. My woes with gardening in the past-included deer that ate the tops off everything I planted or pulled plants out of the ground, and rabbits that chewed on all my new plants down to nubs. I am determined to eat my own produce next year!

I am so excited about my garden spot for next year. It will consist of raised beds with a thick layer of sawdust in between the beds to prevent weed growth. We should be able to get the sawdust placed and the raised beds made and filled before the first flakes of snow stop our progress. Our land is pretty much void of top soil and this area of the country is clay, so the fill dirt is going to be coming from someplace else and amended with the compost we make every year. We make our rich compost using the waste we get from scooping the poop out of the chicken coop and duck house. We use sawdust for bedding in those areas, and the composted wood and poop combined with grass clippings, tree leaves and produce waste is fantastic for plants. That combination has yielded us fabulous herbs, which thankfully, the deer and rabbits don’t seem to like.

A few weeks ago we replaced a few chickens and added 8 guineas to our stock due to a raccoon raid last month. That raid took 6 of our young chickens. What a horrific disaster that was! It left us with only 8 chickens but thankfully, spared one rooster. Fortunately, the raiders were still in the aviary so Bill was able to permanently stop 2 of the 3 involved. I really don’t believe the one that got away will want to come back any time soon. That afternoon, after he got home from work, Bill did a thorough check to find how they were getting in. We had checked over the aviary in the spring but we didn’t see the holes created by raccoons walking on the top of the flight run. The area where the flight run attaches to the aviary was the location of the holes that allowed the raccoons to enter because the staples had popped out!

Bill now has those areas secured but then we lost one guinea last week. I’ve learned that the critter was either an opossum or a raccoon as it found an area where the chicken wire had come loose from the fencing at the ground, and took it right through the fence. Now we have those areas are more secure. We have never had much of a predator problem until this year. Those buggers are teaching us a lot related to just how cunning they are. I believe the extremely hot and dry weather we’ve been experiencing this summer is affecting the natural prey the raccoons and opossums normally eat so they are concentrating their efforts in getting to our birds. And naturally, we are learning from them and concentrating our efforts in keeping them OUT! Next year I want loads of produce to eat and can as well as loads of eggs and baby chickens to sell. It’s been a struggle this year but next year our Patchwork Prairie could actually begin to pay for itself.

Jetta

It is too hot to cook!

Why heat up the kitchen and the rest of the house when the heat index is in the triple digits here in Missouri? This evening instead of eating another salad or a cold sandwich, I prepared a delightful dish of raw spaghetti with raw marinara sauce. No really, it is very good and very nutritious since it’s not cooked. Plus, it’s extremely fast and easy to make. Here’s how it is done. You take;

½ cup tomato, chopped
½ cup sun dried tomatoes soaked for 30 minutes or you can use oil packed.
½ of a red or yellow bell pepper
1 tbsp fresh minced basil, if you have it
1 tsp Italian seasoning
1 small garlic clove or less depending on the individual, minced or crushed in a garlic press.
1 pitted date
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
Dash of salt, pepper and cayenne pepper

Mix all ingredients in a food processor fitted with an S blade until the mixture is blended thoroughly. You may need to scrape the contents off the side of the processor with a plastic spatula a few times. I let this sit for about 30 minutes so it can come to room temperature and so all the flavors have a chance to blossom. See, easy peasy!

Then place about 3 inches of a medium zucchini or yellow squash on the plate of a spiral slicer and spiral away. You can also use a peeler and make lots of thicker fettuccine type pasta. Place the vegetable pasta on a plate and top with the marinara from the food processor. I top that with parmesan cheese and devour it with great pleasure. This can be served alone or with a side salad. Sometimes I soak ½ cup walnuts for a few hours and add that to the marinara for a more meaty texture. This sauce will keep for a few days in the fridge if needed. I rarely have any left over to store. Give it a try and leave a comment about how you like it.