A lot of things are halfway done.  We could always do more, and we did more than some.  I’m on break to post this, and here’s my halfway photo to prove it.

If you click on the photo you can see a bit more detail, but among the projects visible are (far left) the garage (which is halfway cleaned up for the spring), and the newest chicks in their fenced coop (30 of them, about half the total chicks we should have housed there by the end of May), the kitchen garden (distant background fenced in, which is about halfway planted), the “big field” with a rowcover tent (foreground, with tiller marking the halfway mark of the tilling), our two biggest apple trees in full bloom hiding our neighbor’s house, and behind the big field on the right are a bunch of our spindly new apple trees, just starting to bloom.

I just finished (no halfway job) some coding that needed it.  So I’m going to take a break and head out to push the big field tilling job to a little beyond halfway.  I expect M will have the field halfway planted within another half day.  And when I get the big field done, I should be halfway through the tilling I intend to do.  And the green green grass here will be half again past where it should be when I should mow it.  I can’t wait to get the new hoop house halfway finished.  Now that’ll be progress.

This weekend’s weather was beautiful, in the 60s and delightful for gardening in short sleeves, and for getting the first taste of sunburn.  Earlier in the week though, we planted out a bed where we weren’t using our sprouts from the living room, but instead sowing tiny seeds in long rows.

The weather was alternating between overcast sunny and scudding cloudy, but the wind was constantly whipping us this way and that.  We in our winter coveralls laid things out the bed, and I learned a new trick.

We got the bed ready, and M started laying out the rows the way she does, with a board making tiny Vees in the soil.  I added the steel wire hoops across the bed, about every 18″.  Then we unrolled a fresh piece of row cover cloth, long enough to make it easy to fasten down at each end after the last hoops.

Usually we plant the seeds and cover them and then put the row cover cloth over the hoops.  But it was so windy there was no way we could keep the seeds from blowing away, so on went the row cover first.  Then M ducked her head under the cover’s edge on one side of the row while I held on to it (and took a picture one handed).

Won’t tell you what we were planting though.  Secret stuff.  You’ll get to see it later this summer, at the market we hope.  Some of it.  The other is even more secret, and we’ll all have to wait until late next fall, or even early winter before we know for sure how it comes out.  But the seeds of this secret are planted.

We spent most of yesterday in the gardens, digging out grasses, planting out lettuces, readying other beds for more of the same. Two tables in the living room are taken up with sprouts under grow lights, and the porch overflows. Conservatively Mandy has 5000 plants growing in pots and/or already planted out.

It is so nice now to be eating fresh greens every day, and sometimes at two meals a day already. Fried eggs on a bed of baby greens, mmmm.

Coldframe littuces getting some fresh air. Missing ones in the middle have been planted out in the new bed, top left.

Two days ago I found Mandy planting out some rows of 3-4″ tall deer’s tongue lettuce… I didn’t recognize them from the sprouts she’d been growing. Instead, these had been planted as seed last fall outside and then covered with a cold frame… a small garden spot about 3′ by 3′ with a hay bale back end, bricks and hay sides, and a south-facing 50-year old wooden window frame to make a tiny greenhouse. All winter the lettuces sat there mulling things over, and in the past two months of slow spring they came out of hibernation. Now they’re so crowded that she took out just two handfuls and filled rows of lettuce sprouts ready to grow big and strong.

And much more to do in the garden.  Mmmmm.  Recently we’ve been doing a lot, as is our wont in April, weather and circumstances permitting.

Red, red newbarb.

There’s rhubarb to discover under the leaves, to expose and (for some of them) to cover under ceramic pots.  We get nice long juicy stalks with less energy going into making big big leaves.  The first of the season though (the newbarbs) are just so red and beautiful and luscious.  Rhubarb custard does not last long around here.  Very nice with coffee for first breakfast (before the eggs and greens).

Last week, not in our gardens but a few steps away in the hens’ free-range territory, I found a patch of white tucked away in the barbs of the black raspberry patch.  We hadn’t seen it before, but there it was, a nice patch of Bloodroot flowers.  I haven’t tried breaking off a stem to see the reddish juices inside.  They’re just too nice.  And the hens have completely ignored them, it seems to me.  They might know something I don’t about bloodroot’s flavor (or perhaps the aftereffects).

And finally, inside, we find Sassy expressing her innermost desire for the high diving board.  Nearly every day she finds a comfy spot and assumes a near-10 quality tuck position in her sleep, dreaming of her splash-free pool entry at the bottom.  May we all have such dreams to tuck into as we sleep.

Diver cat, tuck position.

This is another Dragonwood egg report… we haven’t had one in a while.  In short, February has been nothing short of amazing.  In the first week of February the hens were laying about 6 eggs a day (range 3-8) and had been doing so since November.  It’s now the 26th of February as I write this, and today we got 26 eggs.  That’s an increase of about one egg a day for three weeks straight!  Go ladies go!

For reference, this is the way egg season seems to work.  As the hours of daylight get longer, the ladies lay more eggs, more frequently, and as the hours of daylight wane across the summer, the egg laying falters.  For us, it means eggs start coming back in February, peak in June, and start waning in earnest come September.  From mid-October to late-February we don’t get enough eggs to sell, and barely enough to eat ourselves (and an occasional dozen for nearby family).  In mid-summer, we get roughly 2/3 production daily - two of three hens lay each day.

Our flocks are pretty naturalized… we don’t give them artificial light or artificial anything during the winter to force them through molting faster or to stimulate laying.  The most artificiality they get from us is that a couple times a winter when the temperature at night is going to fall below zero we might turn on a heat lamp for the coldest hours.

By contrast, it’s standard practice at egg farms to completely manage lighting cycles for hens so that they lay as many eggs as possible with as little seasonal downtime as possible.  This is equivalent to cracking the whip over those slave hens.  The hens have a brief molting period artificially imposed, and then it’s back to work.

Them: Egg Slave Factory Farms.

Us: Hey, take four months off, you deserve it.  Thanks for all the hard work.

So, now it’s February and the eggses are landing.  We’ve got lots of teeny pullet eggs coming in from the new flock we raised last fall, as well as increasing numbers of large eggs from the older ladies.  This photo is the first dozen eggs I collected today, laid out in the fresh snow on our picnic table.

We get so used to our big eggs that we think the pullet eggs are just SO TEENY that we call them “culls” and never sell them to anyone.  But I began wondering, just how small are these eggs?  And how big are the big ones?  So I got out the market scale to measure a few, and now I can quantificate our eggsitential nature for your edification.

Our littlest pullet eggs:  6 of them weighed in at 9.8 oz.  That means a dozen would weigh in at 19.6 ounces… not bad.

Our big bruiser eggs: today’s biggest three eggs weighed 8.4 oz together.  That means a dozen would weigh about 33.2 oz.  Wow.

Last fall I measured a couple of our average dozen we were selling at the Westside Farmer’s Market in Ann Arbor.  The dozens (with a range of all our sizes except for “culls”) averaged a hair over 30 oz.

Perspective?  At yer local store where sellers have to actually sort them by size and such, the size categories are: small (18 oz), medium (21 oz), large (24 oz), extra large (27 oz), and jumbo (30 oz).

Holy ostrich, Batman!  Our teeniest pullet eggs are halfway between small and medium.  Our average dozen we sell are jumbos.  What does that make our real bigguns?  Extra jumbo?  Super jumbo?  Ginormous?

And then talk about yer bargain pricing.  We sold eggs last year for $4 a dozen.  Chemical free, free-ranging, practically pets, beautiful browns and greens and blues in the jumbo size for $4.  By comparison, you can drop in at the People’s Food Co-op and get somebody else’s eggs there that look just like ours, browns and blues and greens all pretty, for $5.75 a dozen, in the “large” size.  Large.  That’s 24 oz of eggs.  Dragonwood’s Dozen, by comparison, is running 25% more egg (30 vs 24 oz) for about 25% less, which works out precisely to… oh, that’s not easy math.  Instead, those eggs from somebody else would only be about $3.25 at the pricing scale we use, not $5.75.  And if we sold our eggs at somebody else’s price, our jumbo dozens should cost about $7.20 per dozen, instead of $4.

Get yer Dragonwood Bargain Basement Eggs now!  Whoohoo!

M called me this morning from up the road about 4 miles, and practically shouted “I just saw an eagle!”  There was more to the story, but the sighting was nearby, so I threw on my boots and grabbed my camera and the bird book and headed up there.

I didn’t see it.  I drove back and forth in the area for about 10 minutes and nothing happened.

I was just starting home when, about a quarter mile ahead I did see a big bird wheel across the road.  I marked the spot mentally and slowed the car over to the edge where I thought it should be… and there it was.  Big and brown on a tree branch about 40 feet up, way bigger than a hawk.  I turned on the camera and turned off the car and started the video recording.  I shot just a few seconds then slowly started to open the car door… and saw him lean forward and take off.  So then I jumped out of the car and tried to keep him in the viewfinder, all zoomed up close, and not get hit by passing cars.  I didn’t do too well, most of the 60 seconds is not of the eagle.  But there were a few seconds that were just breathtaking, big swooping sweeps of wings in the gentle snow as he wheeled around and then headed off east.

Juvenile Bald Eagle, near Manchester Michigan, Feb 26 2011. Click for high resolution version.

Click it for the high resolution version.  Here are 13 sequential frames (one big wing flap down and up) starting from upper right.  I cut and pasted these all together onto the background of the first frame.  It seems to be a juvenile bald eagle, from what we can see in the books that we have.  Here’s a single frame:

It was pretty stunning.  I’ve seen eagles before, and they’re always breathtaking, but we’ve never seen one so close to Dragonwood.