Seedlings and Sad Chicken News

Above is a photo of our chickens earlier in the winter out in a garden.  You can see the door of the chicken dome to the right.  For most of the winter the chickens were able to get out in the orchard during the day.  Near sundown they would return to the chicken dome to roost. 

Peas and Harmony now has organic vegetable seedlings for sale at our orchard.  They have many kinds of healthy organic tomato, pepper, eggplant, squash and other plants that are ready for planting .  Their website is now set up so that people can also order and pay for plants through the Peas and Harmony online and pick up your order later at the fruitstand. Of course, you can also still just stop by the orchard and look at the plants and pay at the fruit stand.

The sad news about the chickens is that a few days ago some dogs came over to the orchard and killed most of our chickens. The chickens were not even out in the orchard, a dog actually got into the chicken dome.  Eight chickens and our rooster were killed, so now there are only two chickens left to live in chicken dome just by themselves.

Now we have to decide what to do.  Do we want to raise more hens from chicks or try to get adult laying hens somehow so we can keep having enough eggs to sell?   If we start with chicks now, they won't lay eggs until about August.  Also, maybe we have to build a new pen or have more than one smaller pen that we could move around the orchard more easily.  The chicken dome we have now requires three people to move it and it's now  bent a bit from the wind.

The fruit stand is still open regular hours, although it hasn't been very busy lately.  Hours are 9-6 Tues.-Sat., 10-6 on Sunday.  Mondays we're closed. 

Here's what we have for sale at the fruit stand now:  

• Organic Vegetable Seedlings from Peas and Harmony 
• Grapefruit--white variety
• Oranges--navel
• Lemons--Meyer, Eureka
• Asian Pear--okusankichi (small quantity left)
• dehydrated fruit from our orchard
• Eggs
• Firewood--seasoned firewood (peach, plum, pear, persimmon)