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| Baby lettuce, spinach, radishes, beets, and carrots growing happily in the cold frame. |
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| Jumbo-sized brown eggs from our layers. |
Spring was all the buzz this weekend! We had gorgeous weather to garden in South Carolina. There's not much in season, just some early mixed greens, lemons, and farm-fresh eggs (sounds to me like a recipe for lemon bars and spring salad; oh, we added a couple early radishes on that salad, too). Plans are being put into action for this summer's food garden, and already some vegetable seeds are sprouting under fluorescent lights indoors. It's our fourth year on this property, and fruit trees look like they are going to put on a heavy crop - 10 bush cherries are lit up with hundreds of thousands of white blossoms; if there are no late freezes, we will need braces for peach and apple trees.
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| Meyer lemons ripening indoors. |
Last spring we introduced laying chickens to our hobby farm; there has been no more fun and rewarding endeavor. Our jumbo-sized eggs do not fit well in standard egg containers. We're adding meat chickens this year of the Cornish Rock variety, which top out at 6-8 pounds by eight weeks of age. It's the same breed chicken in any grocery store; ours will be raised on an organic diet and free-ranged over grass, as natural a life as possible, which should yield highly superior meat at less cost per pound than market free-range organic chickens.
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| Laying hens in their movable chicken run. |
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| Cornish Rock chick |
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| Cornish Rock chicks get their first meal in the brooder. As cute as they are, these are livestock, not pets. |
