Working Girls...

So yesterday I promised you all a post about our Egg Factory but I did not get those pics done so instead I will post about our Egg Factory workers.  We have 3 chickens who are 1 year and 1 month old today!!!!  We have Carmen who is a New Hampshire Red and she is also known as Big Mama.  She is the foreman of the group, she walks around and makes sure that everyone is doing their jobs and she alerts the whole neighborhood when an egg has been laid.  We have 2 Buff Orpingtons, Bernice and Mae.  Bernice is the friendliest and neediest chicken you will ever meet but a very hard worker.  She will dig to China if given enough time in her spare time she loves to watch TV and sit in your lap.  Mae is the shy, quiet one but also a very hard worker...here she is in the midst of laying an egg.
When we clear out any of the garden beds to replant, we cage them up and let the girls do their job.  They scratch and dig through the soil looking for bugs or bits of vegetation to eat.  Meanwhile this is tilling the soil for us and their poop fertilizes the soil to make for bigger, better plants.  

Great job ladies...keep up the good work!!!!

Yes, I am back...

Sorry, been on a blog hiatus for a bit but I am back and this time to stay for good :)  A lot has happened on the farm since my last post.  Here are just a few highlights:
- we had quite the tomato crop and everyone fell in love with our Cherokee Purple tomatoes, best ever!
- ate our first homegrown broccoli a couple weeks ago...wow...just wow!
- we have arugula coming out of our ears, thankfully everybody but Terra likes to eat it.
- unfortunately we lost one chicken, Edith due to a prolapsed vent (Google it if you really want to know about it) but the other 3 girls are happy and healthy and egg producing machines.
- I have completed the first version of the automatic chicken feeder but more on that in my next post.
Stay tuned for the next post about our Egg Factory :) and I promise not to be a stranger on here anymore.

It has been a hot summer here on the farm...

It has been a while since I have blogged, maybe it is because I have been melting and don't want to do anything but sit in front of the fan :/ but when I do get outside I have to get some love from the sweetest chicken ever, Bernice.  I think she may be Peeps reincarnated :)

One thing that I have been able to work on and get finished is my automatic chicken waterer.  Very excited about this because chickens make such a mess of their waterers that it is a gross chore I had to do twice a day and sometimes more!  But with the automatic chicken waterer they always have 3-4 gallons of clean fresh water.  It all starts on the outside of the coop with this 5-gallon bucket which is the water reservoir for the system.  The water is gravity fed down through the PVC pipe on the side of the coop...

 ...and then into the inside of the coop where it is capped off and 2 drinking nipples are available.

The chickens learned in about 2 days that if they peck at those funny red things then water comes out to drink...they are geniuses ya know ;)  So that is the amazing, time-saving automatic chicken waterer.  A couple less things this farmer has to do every day :)

EGGcited!

So we got to eat our first 2 DragonFly Farms eggs yesterday.  Here they are next to a store bought Grade AA Large egg.  You will first notice the shell color...not white!  You can usually tell the color of egg the chicken will lay by the color of their ear tufts.

In this bowl is a store bought egg on the left and one of ours on the right.  Notice the rich orange yolk color...that is how an egg should look!

You will notice that our egg on the bottom is smaller than the AA Large but it is packed with flavor and nutrition :D

a VERY Happy 4th of July!!!!

It has been quite a day here at DragonFly Farms!  Here is our watermelon patch before I harvested that big one in the middle.

While I was taking this picture of myself I was leaning on the chicken coop I saw a little surprise in there!

AN EGG!!!!!  our first one!  The watermelon is 4lbs 15oz and the egg is 1.4oz :)

We will be eating the watermelon later at my parents' and doing a blind taste test to see how it measures up to her store bought one.  I know mine will win.  Update to come later.  Meanwhile for a job well done i gave this big ol' mater to the girls :D

2 years in the making...

Have been wanting to do a side by side comparison of the backyard for some time now and here it is...

On the left is what the yard looked like back in 2010...yuck!!!!  There was "grass" patches, those horrible bushes, the equally horrible scalloped brick border and whatever that overgrown vine thing was in the corner.  And now in 2012 I am proud to say we are growing food, composting and will soon have fresh chicken eggs.    That's life on DragonFly Farms...personal tours available for a small donation :)

Watermelon Update & The Pumpkin Patch

Man that darn watermelon gets bigger overnight it seems.  I want to set up a time lapse camera on it.  

I don't want to be picking it up anymore for pictures for fear that it will injure or break the stem so I am back to putting objects next to it for size comparison.  That bottle is solution that I keep in my pocket.  The bottle is about 2.5 inches tall.  Grow little watermelon, grow!!!!!

In another part of the garden we have our pumpkin patch which consists of one pumpkin plant...yep you heard right...that is ONE pumpkin plant grown from ONE pumpkin seed :)

 This picture of the pumpkin patch is taken from the point of view of one of our resident lizards.