Well it seems like it’s been forever since we have done an update! Three weeks or so I believe, lots of stuff going on so let’s jump right in…..You reach that point when your body is telling you that you are ready for fall, but the temperature in the 90’s every day is telling you otherwise. Well this morning we woke to temps in the low 50’s and high today in the upper 70’s. The outlook for the next couple week looks like much of the same, so I am going out on a limb here and say Fall has arrived! We had a cold snap back in August that stunted the garden growth and production, but our late plant peppers and tomatoes are doing pretty good, I expect them to keep delivering well into November. It not huge production but enough for us to eat fresh tomatoes & Peppers until Thanksgiving!
We have not had too much success with fall gardening before and it looks like out luck is staying the same, we planted cabbage, carrots, radish, a couple different lettuces, winter squash and some kale. Well except for the radishes we have struck out.
We need to do some more research I am thinking it has something to do with the weather, the transplants all looked great when we planted them but everything died for the most part. We will do better next year, I was looking forward to fresh salads until Thanksgiving……
Fall Friends have showed up!
We had a pleasant surprise in the garden our strawberry patch is producing a cup or two of strawberry's a day, makes for a nice treat!
We got in a shipment of Cornish Cross chicks, last one for the year. Pre-sale commitment are filling fast I suspect we will be sold out prior to the butchering date. I am not sure if it is just this batch of chicks but I have never seen such an active bunch of Cornish Cross before, check out the video:
Our laying hens are finally laying again, molting season is finally over! I believe we are starting to get some action out of the new hens we added to the flock a month ago! We are pretty excited about that!!!
I am wondering if Roo, our rooster, is happy about having 53 girls to take care of or not, I know I would have a headache!
You may remember awhile back we started to play with mushrooms.
We love mushrooms and put them in just about everything!
Well our first try at growing them was a total bust, we had a good grain spawn but when we moved them to our straw bales they never got started so into the compost bin it went. You can see the post here:
https://steemit.com/food/@svfarms/shrooooms-we-started-growning-our-own
When I busted open the bag I found some growth of the mycelium but it was contaminated with mold in other areas. We learned a lot from our first try, we start everything on a small scale to get our mistakes out of the way before we scale up anything.
We received some great advice from @ecoknowmeand I am sure we will be reaching out to him again. We are on our second try having some better luck but no fruiting yet and surprisingly no contamination yet so we are hoping for the best! Look for a future post on how we did….
We that's all for this homestead update, thanks for visiting with us.
Will see y’all next time!
Bob & Colleen Browning
Serenity Valley Farms
Monticello, KY
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