Cobbles and Pebbles and Peeps

The Cobbles and Pebbles pattern is live in the store and on sale for the first week.

Some time between now and next fall, I need to figure out how to handle the social media end of pattern production. I am terrible about posting on Instagram and I only check Facebook when I get a notification of activity on my page. The time I do spend online is usually in a homesteading chat group, which is full of people who actually do things rather than wasting their time on social media yelling about stuff they can’t change.

As a result, there is no coordinated social media campaign to launch this pattern. I will try to fix that before I release any more patterns, but farming is the big focus for me right now. With the nice weather, we’ve also had some visits from friends and neighbors, and sitting on the porch enjoying the sunshine with people we haven’t seen all winter is important.

******************************************************

This is not my first rodeo. I am convinced that the farm store really has no clue when they are getting chicks. An employee might tell you the chicks are expected on Friday, but when you get there on Friday, you discover that the shipment came in on Thursday and all the chicks have been sold. I had a hunch the store might get a shipment yesterday, so I drove in to town midmorning. I heard the telltale peeping noises as soon as I walked in. The stock also bears no resemblance to what the chick schedule said was supposed to come in. I get a different breed of chickens every season so we know how old each cohort is. I needed black or white ones this year. There weren’t enough of one breed of either color, so I ended up with 10 black Jersey Giants and 10 White Plymouth Rocks. That works.

[I think that next year, a group of us is going to have to get together and order directly from the hatchery. I’m not interested in playing chick roulette with the farm store again next year.]

I also bought six chicks (a variety of breeds) for Susan, although when I dropped them off and she opened the box, she discovered that one was missing. We still don’t know where it went. She drove back in to town with the receipt and got a replacement.

Our peeps went into the brooder box where they settled right in:

This is a very active group of peeps. The chicks I hatched out last year slept a lot.

We made a change this year and put the brooder box in the old garage instead of the coop. The old garage stays at a consistent 55 degrees, which—along with the heat lamps—provides a better environment than the temperature swings in the coop. This also means that big chickens are not standing on top of the wire cover looking down into the brooder box. And I can pop out to the garage several times a day to check on peeps without the big chickens mobbing me for scratch grains.

I spent a few hours in the greenhouse yesterday potting up seeds. We are having a plant sale later this spring to help raise funds for our local community group, the Mountain Brook Homestead Foundation, so I am planting extra of everything. Last year, Susan gave me two Dirty Girl tomato seeds that she got from a farmer in California. (This is an open pollinated tomato similar to Early Girl.) Only one of them germinated, but I saved all the seed from that plant’s tomatoes. If they germinate, I’ll have several dozen—plenty for us and some to share. I also saved the seed from the largest Cherokee Purple and Indian Stripe tomatoes. Plant genetics are kind of fun to play with. I keep thinking that as promiscuous as my lavender plants are, the chances of a new variety popping up are pretty high, but I don’t have time to spend trying to isolate and propagate it.

I’ll plant the cukes, melons, and zucchinis today. This morning, though, I am going to assemble Bertha’s Flower Garden blocks, which I finished appliquéing last night.