On Monday I picked the first two homegrown strawberries of the year. The one on the right is from a plant I picked up last year from the Silverlake Farmers' Market, and the one on the left is from a plant I got last weekend at OSH.

I always have a hard time deciding exactly when to pick my strawberries. I want them to get as dark red and ripe as possible, but if I wait too long they get mushy or--worse--eaten by birds. Happily, I chose a good time to pick these two because they were both firm, sweet and delicious.

With my two new OSH-purchased plants, I now have four strawberry plants growing in pots in the backyard. I'm not sure I'll ever get a substantial harvest of fruit, but they should keep providing us little treats for the next few months. Before last year, I never would have thought strawberry plants were so easy to grow.

Turns out, they're pretty simple and low-maintenance. Plus, since strawberries are perennials, the same plants provide fruit year after year. If you've never grown them before, you really should. Just plant them in a wide pot with soil and compost, put the plants in a sunny (but not too sunny) spot and water frequently. Wait a few weeks and enjoy some sweet berries straight from the plant.

A couple of weeks ago, we welcomed three new additions to our chicken family: Betty, Rita and Janice. These pretty girls were ordered from My Pet Chicken back in February and delivered to my chicken-pal Noah sometime in March. He and his wife generously took care of the chicks for me until I was able to pick them up and bring them to their new home. Here are the girls moments after I took them out of the cardboard box and put them into the chicken tractor in the back yard.

Betty, the white one, is an Easter Egger. She'll lay light blue or green eggs, like Peggy. I'm not sure if the fact that she's all white and Peggy is gold and brown will mean their eggs will be different colors or not. We'll see. Rita, with the white feathers on her head and mostly-black body is a Silver Laced Wyandotte. This is one of my favorite breeds, looks-wise, and I have always wanted one. Wyandottes are supposed to be good layers. Some friends of ours in Portland have a couple, and I know they've always got tons of eggs. Janice, who is the largest of the three girls, is a Cuckoo Marans. She'll have that speckled black and white look even when she's an adult hen, and her eggs will be a pretty dark brown color. Once these three start laying in a few months, I expect my egg basket to overflow with a beautiful variety of colored eggs.

After a couple of weeks of spending their days outside in the chicken tractor and their nights inside in a brooder box, I decided it was time to try moving the new girls into the big coop. Honestly, I was getting sick of moving them in and out every day, and I felt like Betty, Janice and Rita were almost big enough to defend themselves--or at least run away quickly. Still, one never knows how a chicken integration is going to go, so I was a bit nervous.

In the weeks that Rita, Betty and Janice were out in the tractor, Peggy and Tina barely even noticed them. The big girls were much more focused on eating weeds, getting into my garden and following me around until I gave them their morning feed. Still, I was concerned Peggy and Tina would beat up on the little ones once they weren't separated by wire mesh. Last Saturday, I tried my usual tactic of having everyone free range together. Again, the big hens paid almost no attention the pullets. So, I figured I'd just go for it. I put Betty, Rita and Janice into the big coop with Peggy and Tina, stepped inside with them and closed the door to the run. And...

Nothing really happened. The little girls cowered a bit and ran away when Peggy or Tina approached, but that's about all. No drama. No pecking. No frightened or angry clucks from anyone. I was kind of stunned. After watching them a bit more, I decided that everyone was fine and left them alone for a while. I came back as the sun was going down, and no one was bleeding. So, I decided to have the little girls sleep in the coop with Peggy and Tina.

Being new to coop and run living, the pullets weren't exactly sure how it worked. So, I ended up putting them into the chicken tunnel and then shoving them inside the coop. Once they were inside, I couldn't really see how everyone was behaving, and I was a bit nervous. I stood outside the coop listening for clucks of pain. Luckily, I didn't hear any. So, I went back inside to cook dinner. About an hour later, I came back down to check on everyone, opened up the nesting box and found this...



Yes, that is all five chickens crammed together into one nesting box (where, by the way, they are not supposed to sleep). They were cuddling together for warmth, I guess. After finding them this way, I was confident there would not be any bloodshed. Easiest flock integration ever! I guess Tina and Peggy are friendlier than I thought they were. I'm sorry I misjudged them.

It's now been almost a week and the chickens are living together pretty happily. The only real issue involves the little girls getting enough to eat. Tina and Peggy tend to be hogs, and they'll try to eat both from their feeder (which is too high for the pullets) and the little girls' feeder. It also took a few days for Betty, Rita and Janice to figure out how to go to bed on their own. Two nights in a row I went down to find them huddled in a corner of the run, and one night they were huddled in a corner of the chicken tunnel--just outside the door to the coop. They figured it out eventually, and now they're just one happy chicken family. Hopefully it'll stay that way.

I whipped up this tasty, colorful salad last week from my first bunch of homegrown fava beans. It's a variation on a recipe I found here. I used fresh goat cheese, because that's what was in the fridge, and added a bit of lemon thyme from the herb garden along with the fresh parsley. The salad was a nice, simple way to eat favas, which is key since fava beans themselves take a while to prepare.

Speaking of taking a while, until recently, I was afraid my fava plants were never going to make pods. The stalks grew like crazy and made lots of flowers, but the bean pods didn't appear until mid-March. Happily, when they did finally appear, the pods quickly grew big and thick.



I think I'll get one more decent harvest from the favas. I had hoped to get more, but I think the weird Spring weather--warm, cold, warm, cold--may be confusing the plants a little bit. I might also space them a bit farther apart if I plant favas next year. I suspect the plants might make more pods if they have more room and aren't competing with each other for nutrients.

Still, it was a successful and satisfying first fava crop. I'll definitely grow fava beans again, especially since they can be hard to find fresh at the store.

After a night of heavy rain, I was listening to the radio this morning, and a brief story on APM's Marketplace caught my attention. They mentioned that the Los Angeles Public Works department is considering an ordinance to require developers to eliminate storm water runoff when building new homes and developments. Basically, they'd have to capture all the runoff on-site, rather than letting rain run into storm drains and out into the ocean.

As most Angelenos probably know, storm water runoff is a major source of pollution along our coast. Many beaches must close for days or weeks after a storm because the water is so full of nasty, oily toxins. The idea that the city is working to reduce stormwater runoff through building codes sounds great to me.

I did a little more digging, and came across the website for the Low Impact Development plan. Apparently, this initiative has been around since last summer, but I was completely unaware. Here's a somewhat-recent LA Times article about the proposed ordinance, which, if it's passed by the City Council and the mayor, could go into effect sometime in the next few months. I plan to do a bit more research, and if it still sounds like a good idea, I'll send a letter to my city council member supporting the LID ordinance. If you live in Los Angeles, maybe you'll consider doing the same.

Of course, there are immediate ways we can all reduce storm water pollution, including picking up our dog's poop, not dropping trash (especially evil cigarette butts) in the street and planning our own landscaping so that it traps rainwater rather than letting it run out to the curb. Eric over at Ramshackle Solid has been digging trenches to move the water around his yard. I hope to someday to redirect our runoff as expertly as he has. In the meantime, we're doing our best to grow native plants, build berms around fruit trees and send rainwater down a little trench on the side of our stairs that ends at an orange tree.



Next up, we plan to get a rain barrel. Apparently the city had a pilot rain barrel program last summer, which, unsurprisingly, was extremely popular. No word on whether they're going to expand it. If not, I guess we'll have to make our own.

Yesterday, I was out in the garden picking fava beans when I noticed a bunch of these little dudes hanging out on my fennel. At first I mistook them for ladybug larvae and got all excited. But when I looked at one more closely, I realized it was actually a caterpillar.

Specifically, this is a Black swallowtail caterpillar. Apparently, they love fennel and other members of the parsley family. These small black, white and red caterpillars will eventually grow into big, green, black and yellow caterpillars--and then, of course, turn into butterflies. I've never seen them around my garden before, but this is the first year I've grown fennel, so maybe that's why.

They don't appear to be hurting the plants too much, but I plan to keep an eye on them. I also found a few cabbage worms in the garden yesterday. Those guys can do some damage, so I picked them off and fed them to the chickens.

Perhaps in anticipation of Easter, Tina finally decided to start laying eggs again. She'd been taking a break since January, when both my hens started molting. The girls took their sweet time getting back into egg production mode, probably because of the dark, gloomy winter weather.

Peggy started laying again a few weeks ago, but Tina still hadn't produced an egg until last week. As you can see by the photo below, she decided to get back to laying in a big way.



That is Tina's HUGE egg on the right. On the left, for comparison, is a store-bought grade A normal-sized chicken egg. Tina's is essentially twice the size of the store egg. Clearly, she had been saving up all her egg-making powers so she could wow me on her return to production. It worked.

Now, Tina is back to a roughly 4-egg-a-week schedule, as is Peggy. That suits us fairly well, although it doesn't provide enough eggs to do any serious baking. I have plans in the works to solve this little dilemma, but more on that later...