Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Harvesting the chicken garden

Admittedly, this harvest took place early October, not November 1. I'm playing a bit of catch-up.

Last Spring I threw old seed around in the chicken garden fully intending that anything that grew would get fed to the chickens. I frankly didn't expect anything to grow. I also transplanted some corn when Dad thinned out his corn plot. Didn't expect that to grow either.

I was proved wrong.
Small but fully formed
The corn didn't do all that well, but it did form ears and many of the ears had kernels. More importantly, they were excellent - tender and full of flavor. The chickens got a few malformed ears but had to settle for the cobs from our cooked corn for the rest. Not that they minded. They actually seemed to really like picking over the cooked cobs.
We ended up with a dozen ears
Out of the scattered seed, peas, acorn squash (both green and white), and watermelon grew. We managed to harvest two melons.
Finding the melon
Unfortunately, since we'd never tried to grow watermelon before (and because I didn't keep track of types, germination dates, nor days to ripen) we picked the biggest one too soon. Still tasted like a watermelon, but more tart.
Oops
The chickens loved it.

They also liked the smaller one that we let go too long.

Yum!
"Next time keep track of the due date!"
Lessons learned: chickens like melon; old seed will still germinate; corn transplants; and keeping track of dates is kinda important. Good enough.


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