Onions & chickens: photos!

Isn’t September the most gorgeous month? Work in the fields is a pleasure at this time of year. In addition to the mild sunny weather, we’re enjoying the changes in the field: we’ve been planting like mad & cleaning up old beds & harvesting lots. As I mentioned in the last newsletter, we harvested our onions last week. I know that I said we have a lot, but I thought I should share two quick photos to better illustrate the onion volume.

First, here is Casey with just one of many full Gator-bed loads of onions. (Once again, the gator proved itself indispensable on the farm, & we’re not sure why we hesitated to buy one for as long as we did … also, I think this is the first Gator photo we’ve posted, so for those of you who have never seen one, this will give you an idea.)

And, here is a glimpse of our onions drying under the walnut tree. You can only see about a quarter of the total drying onions in this photo, but it gives a good sense of the magnitude.

Of course, what seems enormous to us is still small potatoes for most of the farming world. But it’s definitely more onions that we’ve ever seen in one place — that’s for sure.

We’re anxiously watching them dry now, so that we can trim, sort & store for the winter. Until they’re put away, they’re still somewhat tenuous since they’re not under the best shelter. For example, we had a scare the night we finally finished pulling all the onions. At 2:30 the next morning, we woke up to a downpour … fortunately, we had an inkling that could happen & had left out tarps by the onions, just in case. We ran outside in the dark and pulled them over the onions to good success. Most of our onions stayed mostly dry, despite the quarter inch of rain that fell before morning.

And in other fun field news: we are finally putting our mobile-gypsy caravan-luggage cart-hen house to good use. As you’ll remember, we received our chicks in the mail three months ago, and since then we’ve kept their house in one spot — under an apple tree close to the house. We put up a little fence around it so they could explore outside, but it wasn’t much of a chicken yard. Lately they’ve been getting out continually, to the point where we stopped even putting them back in (they can do it on their own). They seemed to be fine even without a fence, so Thursday night after the girls all went to sleep in their house, we hitched it up to the Gator (yay, Gator!) and pulled them out into the middle of our oat field.

The next morning, when we let them out they were confused at first, but then they realized they were surrounded by their favorite food! Much excitement. They spent all of the day without a fence and only seemed confused once, when two hens wandered back to the apple tree, looking for the house. And, so far, we haven’t had any predator issues during the day. (They’re closed up at night.)

We love having them out in the field — it immediately expanded our sense of ‘home’ on the land. Until then, I think that both of us thought of the area around the house as ‘home’ and the fields as ‘work.’ We rarely just ‘hang out’ down there, since we’re usually scurrying around or working. But with the birds out there with us, we found ourselves lingering at the edge of the field at the end of our day, just to watch them. The weather helps too, of course, since we don’t immediately seek shade or shelter whenever we can. But the birds are definite plus.

Here’s a photo of the house from afar.

And, here’s a closer view. You can just barely see the chickens among the oats!

That’s all our news for now. More photos to come soon!