Due to recent baby-having events, this summer's garden is smaller and more focused than I've had in years past. I didn't plant the larger, lower bed at all this year. It's just too much work to prepare the soil and plant that big space. Instead, I'm focusing on the uppermost, medium-sized bed, as well as my usual container crops.

Rather than experimenting with new things, this year's garden is (mostly) focused on crops I've grown successfully in previous years. I have the summer staples of tomatoes, peppers, green beans and squash all growing vigorously from seeds I purchased online from Botanical Interests.

The pole beans have taken off nicely, as beans usually do, and have already reached the top of the tripods I made for them. Dakota brought me some long poles from his shop, so perhaps the beans will climb even higher. The pumpkin plants are spreading into the space between the beans, in classic summer garden style. Although I haven't done well with winter squash in the past, I decided to try pumpkins this year because I think it would be really cool for my son to be able to pick his Halloween pumpkin from his very own backyard patch.



I am also trying okra again, despite past failures. Okra really should grow nicely in my bright, sunny garden, so we'll see. I've started the okra in small pots, and so far I have three seedlings, which I hope to plant in a couple of weeks. I'd love to eat fresh-picked okra in August, so I've got my fingers crossed that this year I'll finally get my wish.



Of the three tomato plants currently growing in containers, I have one pear tomato, one cherry variety and one that I'm not sure of. I noticed a volunteer tomato plant growing in my strawberry pot, and, considering that time is short this year, I decided to scoop it out and see what it might produce. It's just starting to make baby tomatoes, so I should know in a few weeks.



Alongside these new crops, I have three eggplants and four pepper plants from last year that survived the winter and are making fruit for a second year. I have to watch them closely for pests and disease, but so far they seem to be doing well. In my garden, I've found peppers prefer a bit of shade for part of the day, and then they'll make me lots of colorful fruit.

So, that's it for this summer. I have given up on growing corn. I just don't think I have enough space or rich enough soil to be truly successful. I'm also taking a year off from zucchini, after last summer's embarrassing failure. Besides, I can get zucchini for $1.99/pound at the grocery store or farmers' market, so it hardly seems worth it to grow my own.

Last weekend, I discovered these weird insects on one of my pepper plants. I have never come across these guys in my garden before, and there were quite a few of them camped out on various parts of my large Lemon Drop Pepper plant. Does anyone have any idea what they are?

The spiny, black and brown, almost prehistoric-looking insects were located at the crooks of the pepper plant where thinner stems branched off from a main stem. As pictured, there were two larger insects, and then numerous smaller bugs surrounding them. I'm not sure if the smaller insects were babies, worker drones or complimentary insects. I am guessing babies.

The area of stem where the bugs were located had some brown scarring on it, so I made the educated guess that these insects were not friendly to the plant. Happily, my insecticidal soap was very effective in wiping both the big and little spiny insects out.

So... Anyone seen these insects before? I'm really curious about them.They're so weird-looking.

Back in April, Ilsa Setziol of Rambling LA had a really great series on the Los Angeles Times Home blog about nonnative invasive plants. If you're at all interested in gardening or the preservation of natural habitats, I encourage you to check it out. Ilsa runs down a list of the plants commonly found in garden centers that can do serious damage when they get out of the garden and into the wild.

One of the posts discusses fountain grasses, which have spread through Southern California open space and parkland and pushed out the native chaparral. I'm sad to admit that, after reading the article, I realized that I have some in my front yard. I planted two clumps of purple fountain grass several years ago. I think it's probably sterile, because I haven't noticed it spreading, but I am considering removing it after reading Ilsa's article.

I also realized that my front yard had been invaded by another variety of invasive grass: Mexican feathergrass. It showed up among my native plants last year, and grew into two or three smallish clumps. Informed by the invasive plant series, I removed the grass last month and threw it in the garbage, rather than the green bin, so hopefully it won't spread. Since then, I've noticed the feathergrass in other peoples' yards and in public landscaping. Hopefully those gardeners will hear about the danger of nonnative fountain grasses and take their invasive species out as well.

Last Christmas, I was up in the Russian River Valley in Northern California, and I noticed large clumps of pampas grass growing among the redwoods. It looked really weird on the otherwise woody hillsides, and I know this aggressively-spreading grass is a pretty serious problem up and down the California coast. It was kind of a bummer to see the obviously out-of-place pampas grass among the gorgeous redwoods. If we're lucky, the park service will beat it back before it chokes out the native vegetation.

Hopefully, the more people are aware of problems with invasive nonnatives, the more they will turn to the just-as-attractive native plants. The California Native Plant Society has a good list of nurseries here. Many of the plants in my front yard, including native grasses, are from Matilija Nursery in Moorpark.

Finally, some fruit tree success! I picked these lovelies from the Desert Gold peach tree in the backyard a couple of weeks ago. Since then, I've picked and eaten three more peaches, which were all the tree produced this year. That's actually a pretty good crop from my sad little backyard orchard, so I'm happy about it.

Unfortunately, the first two peaches were not very tasty. They had a watery, mushy consistancy that I didn't really enjoy. I think it may have been because I was watering the tree too much as the fruit was ripening. I picked the rest of the peaches after taking a break from watering and they were delicious. So, another lesson learned.

I should probably get a book on fruit trees so I stop making these rookie errors. I've had a book called The Home Orchard on my wish list for a little while. Do any of you have that book or another that you'd recommend? I don't have a lot of reading time these days, so I need more of a reference I can turn to for tips rather than a book I'd need to read cover-to-cover.

Anyway, I am happy about the small peach crop, and I hope next year brings even more fruit on that tree. There's really nothing like a freshly-picked summer peach.

Next up: the fig tree. I spotted some baby fruit this weekend. I don't expect a bumper crop, but I'm hoping to get a handful of figs before the bugs and squirrels get to them. Wish me luck!

I was just thinking that my next chicken update would be kind of boring because there haven't been any interesting developments with the girls lately. Then the chickens were attacked by a hawk!

Let me put your mind at ease because I know you're worried: everyone is fine. Last night, I was out at dusk watering my garden, and all five girls were free ranging, snacking on the embarrassingly thick weeds in the back yard. I wasn't really paying attention to the chickens when all of the sudden I heard furious clucking and flapping wings. I turned around just in time to see a hawk swooping over the yard. All the girls ran for cover, hiding under bushes, and the hawk flew up and away. I ran over to check on the chickens and they all looked okay. No one was bleeding, and they didn't even seem to have ant rumpled feathers. After they confirmed the coast was clear, all five girls rushed back into the safety of their run.

The whole hawk incident lasted about 60 seconds, but it was pretty exciting. I was really impressed by the chickens' awareness of their surroundings. It seemed like one of them must have made a warning cry so the others knew to hide. The hawk wasn't very big, so I'm not sure it would have been able to carry off the bigger hens like Tina or Janice, but it could have possibly grabbed Rita or Betty. I'm not sure how much weight a hawk can carry.

Speaking of the new girls, here they are hanging out in their run a couple of weeks ago. They have settled in nicely, although there are definitely two chicken cliques--Tina and Peggy, the older girls, versus Betty, Rita and Janice.



The new girls' personalities have started to emerge. Janice seems sweet, but maybe not so smart. Rita is a bit shy. Betty has a similar attitude to Peggy, which makes sense since they're both Easter Eggers. Both girls are fast and a little feisty. Betty has been taking flying leaps off the top of stairs and wood piles, testing out her wings.

None of the new chickens have started laying, and we may have a while to wait because they don't even have combs or wattles yet. I hope they don't take too long because Peggy has pretty much quit laying. Tina's doing her best to provide for us, but there's only so much one hen can do.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you may been wondering why I haven't been posting much lately. Well, I have a really good excuse: I had a baby!

He's a boy and he's pretty great so far. But, unsurprisingly, he's been using up some of my gardening, chicken keeping, cooking, crafting and blogging time. I did still manage to plant a partial summer garden, which I'll write about soon, along with a chicken and kitchen update. And there are many, many baby-related blog posts in the works.

As you may have guessed, we are trying to be frugal, resource-efficient and sustainable parents. That started before the boy even arrived, with solicitations to friends for their hand-me-downs and purchases of gently-used items off of craigslist. (No one should ever buy a new co-sleeper. There are so many practically new ones for sale online.) And it continues now that he's here, with cloth diapers, handmade toys and green cleaning products.

For now, though, I'll leave you with this photo of his tiny baby toes. Because, let's be honest, all I really want to talk about is how cute he is.

This year, I was really happy to have some success with the wildflower seeds I planted in the winter months. (And by "planted" I mean scattered around the yard mixed with some organic fertilizer and a little compost.) I ordered most of them from my favorite place I've never been, the Theodore Payne Foundation. Not all the seeds I planted came up, but the ones that did were really pretty.

We were treated to a nice variety of blooms appearing at different times throughout the spring and summer. Here they are, roughly in order of bloom. First to bloom were the Baby Blue-Eyes and Tidy Tips, which I posted about back in March.

Next came the Chinese houses (Collinsia heterophylla), which grew quickly produced tall stalks covered in blooms. Some were white and some were a nice shade of bright purple.



These Salvia columbariae, also from Theodore Payne, grew here and there in the backyard. They were hard to spot, but really cool once I found them. Tiny complex blue flowers bloom off their spiny-looking heads.



The sunrise cosmos (Cosmos sulphureus) are from seeds I planted last year. They're annuals and self-seeding, so maybe I'll get lucky and they'll spread further across the backyard.



The lacy phacelia (Phacelia tanacetifolia) also have fluffy, spiky heads covered with small purple flowers.



The elegant clarkia (Clarkia unguiculata) came up here and there in the backyard, mixed in with the weeds. There's also a thick patch of them in the small bed on the side of our house, which is a little shadier and has better soil. I really love their bright, complicated blooms. They must have some specialized pollination purpose, although I haven't noticed any particular bees or other pollinators hovering around.



There are still a few stragglers growing that haven't bloomed. We'll see what happens to them now that the weather is getting hot and dry. And, of course, some of my seeds didn't come up at all. I can't seem to grow lupines, which is frustrating since I hail from the Bluebonnet state. At least the hillside below me is covered in lupines every spring. I just hope it's never developed.

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...

Last year around this time, I wrote about my future orchard. I'm happy to report that, after a year, I've made some small progress towards my dream of picking fresh fruit from the back yard. Some of my older trees have made some progress towards fruitfulness, and I've added a couple of new trees to the mix. Best of all, all my fruit trees survived the summer. I think my fruit tree murdering streak is finally over.

The Panamint Nectarine I planted last February still looks like a stick most of the year, but it recently produced some gorgeous light pink flowers. I have my doubts that it will make any fruit this season, but I'm hopeful it'll branch out a bit and perhaps produce some nectarines in 2011. Fruit trees are all about patience, I've learned.



My old-timer navel orange produced quite a few little green babies last month. But now is the critical time when the fruit will either set and grow or harden and fall off. I am trying my best to tend to this tree so the fruit can mature, but citrus can be fickle. I also feel like the naval orange got confused by some warm winter days and fruited at a weird time of year. So, I'm not sure if I'll really get any oranges from this guy or not. Time will tell.



On the bright side, the year-old Desert Gold Peach is covered in baby fruit! I am so excited by the prospect of harvesting tree-ripened peaches that I can hardly wait for summer. So far, the fruit have continued to grow bigger and I really really hope they hang in there and make it to maturity. Unlike the nectarine, which was bare root, this guy was a potted tree. Maybe that's why it's fruiting after only a year in the ground.



My Pink Lady Apple is currently in bloom, but still shows no sign of fruit. I gave it a good pruning in early January, hoping that would help, but it hasn't made much of a difference. There are still buds forming, though, so perhaps it'll make some baby apples in a couple of weeks. I'm not sure what schedule apple trees should be on. The weather has been so variable lately that none of my trees seem to be following a normal schedule.



I picked up another apple in late January at a Tree People giveaway in my neighborhood. The variety, Anna Apple, is supposed to do well in warmer climates with fewer chill hours. I planted this bare root tree just before we got all the big rains, and it's thriving already.



In fact, I was stunned to discover a baby apple on it this weekend. This tree has only been in the ground for two months and it's already fruiting! We'll see if this guy makes it to maturity, but either way I think the fact that it's fruiting at all bodes well for future crops. (Perhaps my Anna tree should have a little chat with the Pink Lady and show her how it's done.)



In other orchard news, I planted a bare-root peach tree, courtesy of Tree People, at the same time as the Anna Apple. It's still a stick. The fig tree is looking good, though, as is the lemon tree down by the chicken coop.

I'm hopeful that, after a summer of careful watering, plus a good stretch of winter rains, this will be the year when my backyard orchard dreams start to come true. If nothing else, I really hope I get to pick a couple of sweet, juicy peaches in a couple of months. Wish me luck!

Every once-in-a-while, someone contacts me through this blog looking for advice about chickens. Since I am always happy to lure more people into the life of backyard chicken-keeping, I usually set up a little meeting with my new blog friends (if they're local), and proceed to lay all my chicken knowledge on them. Hopefully, they find it helpful.

A couple of months ago, while preparing to meet with my new chicken-friend Noah, I started thinking about my top chicken tips. What have a learned in my two years of chicken ownership that would be worth sharing with others? After mulling it over for a while, I came up with the following random assortment of tips, all pulled from personal experience. I hope any of you who are contemplating chicken ownership find this advice useful.



Be careful where you purchase your chicks or chickens.

Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that it really matters where you get your chickens. My first two hens, Jackie and Lisa, died of Marek's disease, which I suspect they caught due to the less-than-sanitary conditions at the feed store where I bought them. I lost another pullet, Becky, to respiratory disease because of similarly shady sanitation at a different feed store. These losses were very sad, but you can avoid my mistakes by making sure you get your chickens from a clean feed store or directly from a hatchery.

At the feed store, make sure the day-old chicks are kept separate from other animals in a clean, well-ventilated brooder. Examine the chicks or hens carefully before you buy them. Look for signs of disease--listlessness, funny smell--and overall cleanliness. Ideally, get your chicks from a place that only sells chicks. Just-hatched chicks are usually disease-free; they catch diseases from the older fowl around them.

Start with at least 3 hens.

Hens need friends, so you should definitely get at least two chickens, but three is safer. That way, if you lose a chicken to disease or predators, you won't end up with one lonely hen. You can always get a replacement chicken, but hens that are raised together from the beginning tend to get along better. Plus, three hens are really no more trouble that two. In fact, odds are you'll be lusting for more chickens by the time your first batch gets to laying age--if not sooner.



Plan for predators.

When it comes to predators, chickens are, um, sitting ducks. They don't really have any way of protecting themselves, so it's your job to keep them safe. The best way to do this is to build a very secure coop and run, considering all the possible predators that might come after your girls or their eggs. In most urban/suburban environments, these include: raccoons, skunks, rats, dogs and snakes. We also have foxes and coyotes in our neighborhood, although I've never seen them in the yard. Still, I'd rather be safe than wake up to a bloody chicken crime scene.

Here are some coop-building tips that have kept our chickens safe from predators for several years:

• Elevate your coop to keep predators and pests from burrowing underneath and/or making their homes below your chickens
• Bury wire or metal at least 6" deep around the edge of your run to keep predators from digging under the walls
• Put a protective barrier--metal, wood or hardware cloth--up to chicken-height around the base of your run. This will keep raccoons from reaching in and grabbing your hens (it happens)
• Lock your doors and windows. Some animals are crafty enough to open coop doors that are simply closed and not latched
• Chicken wire is too wimpy. Use a heavy-gauge wire fencing that can stand up to clawing, jumping or biting

If you follow these rules and build a secure coop and run, you'll save yourself a lot of worry. Our run is such a fortress that we don't even have to close the coop door at night, or wake up early to open it in the morning. We can even leave our chickens for the weekend without hiring a sitter.

Never chase a chicken!

As I learned during the Great Chicken Escape of 2008, chasing a chicken is usually a bad call. They may be small, but most hens are both quick and wily. If you try to chase a chicken down, you will likely end up out of breath, frustrated and yelling swear words your hen. So, if you need to get your hen to go back into her run, I highly recommend using trickery or bribes.

One of my best tricks involves pretending to find something extremely exciting in the dirt or straw. Basically, I scratch around in the soil with my hands and act all excited. Chickens are pretty curious--and greedy--so they'll probably come running to see what you've found. The scratching in the dirt trick works pretty well on my hens, and as you get to know your girls, you can discover what peaks their interest and use it against them later.

To bribe your chickens, food is the obvious choice. This can range from a handful of weeds to a special treat like meal worms or their favorite fruit. It really depends on your chickens' taste and how much they want to stay outside. Sometimes, you can even trick your hens with a fake bribe by shaking their feeder or bringing out the scoop you use to refill their feed. Chickens aren't as dumb as you might think, though, so don't use the fake out too often or they'll stop trusting you.



Well, I think that's all the chicken wisdom I can dispense for today. I have a few more thoughts that I'll share in a second post soon. For now, I hope you find this information useful and that perhaps it starts you on the road to getting some hens of your own. It is baby chick season after all!

It's amazing how a scrubby vacant lot can transform into a thing of beauty thanks to the random scattering of seeds and some good winter rains. The hillside below our house has exploded with blue lupines in the last couple of weeks. As I drive by this lot full of wildflowers every morning, I'm reminded of how great Springtime can be in Los Angeles.

I also really hope the developer who bought these lots a couple of years ago never manages to get the money and permits to build his planned six identical stucco boxes of hideousness on the hillside. If the current recession has had one upside, it's been to stop guys like that from ruining views like this.

Due to some unexpected craziness in my life, I was away from my garden for almost the entire month of February. In that time, several storm systems blew through Southern California and deposited several inches of rain in our yard. The timing was excellent, because my vegetable plots were all in the middle of their growing cycles, and it meant I didn't have to ask anyone to water the garden in my absence. In fact, the rains were so substantial that I returned to my garden at the beginning of March and found it like this.



That crazy mess of green is what happens when you leave a vegetable garden untended but well watered. At first I was kind of overwhelmed by the disorder, but when I looked closer I realized that ignoring my garden for a month meant I could now enjoy the satisfaction of some pretty hefty harvests.

My first harvest is pictured below: three baseball-sized turnips and their green tops, a handful of peas and two eggs. (Yes, Peggy finally started laying again at the end of February, perhaps to welcome me home.) We cooked up the turnips with some carrots from our produce delivery box using a delicious recipe for braised root vegetables from How To Cook Everything. The peas were delicious raw, pods and all. Fresh-picked peas are so much sweeter and crisper than the ones you buy at the store. There's really no comparison.



Subsequent trips to the garden provided us with a delicious salad mix of oak leaf lettuce, arugula and cilantro--which Dakota and my mom both raved about--and this lovely bunch of chard. The chard went into one of my favorite simple winter recipes, Bacon and Swiss Chard Pasta. Yum.



A few days later, I filled up my basket again with more peas, a big pile of peppers and some spinach, all of which were consumed with some grilled bratwurst.



All this harvesting has been extremely satisfying. I think I'm having my best vegetable garden season ever. There are so many more crops yet to pick--beets, fennel, fava beans--and the greens and peas have shown no sign of slowing down. Dakota and I can count on at least another month's worth of home-grown vegetables in our meals.

Who knew that the best thing I could do for my winter garden was abandon it?

I'm so glad I planted my wildflower seeds early this year so they could take full advantage of the big rains we had in January and February. Thanks to those winter storms, I now have several patches of well-established California native wildflowers growing in both the front and back yards. Some have even started to bloom.

So far, the early bloomers include this Baby Blue-Eyes (Nemophila maculata), which is happily flowering in several spots in the front yard.



And this lovely yellow flower, a Tidy Tips (Layia platyglossa), has just started to bloom as well.



A few other varieties appear to be on the verge of flowering, although I'm not sure which ones. I got so many different seeds from the Theodore Payne Foundation, and my planting method involved mixing them all together and then scattering them on any available bare ground. Wildflowers are much easier to identify once they've bloomed.

I've also been enjoying the big patch of lupines--or Blue Bonnets as we called them in Texas--that's growing on the grassy slope below our house. I'm not sure how the seed originally got there, but every Spring there seem to be more plants with their beautiful blue flowers covering the hillside. Every time I drive by, it makes me happy to see them growing there, especially since I have a hard time growing lupines in my own yard.

Luckily, I've got lots of other wildflower blossoms to look forward to over the next couple of months. The good rains this year have made sure of that.

A couple of weeks ago, my hens started acting a little strange. Mainly, they were more skittish than usual. One morning before work, I spent about 45 minutes trying to coax them into their run. Normally, this is an easy process: pour feed in feeder and the chickens coming running. Instead, Peggy and Tina were acting really skittish and even a handful of carrot peels couldn't entice them inside. I was feeling really frustrated and couldn't understand this sudden change in behavior, until I looked inside the coop and run the next day and saw a giant pile of feathers. Peggy and Tina are molting.

According to Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, chickens molt about once a year. Usually, chickens begin the process in the late summer or early fall, when the days start to shorten. Peggy and Tina are a bit off schedule, but I'm not surprised considering that we don't have typical seasons here in Southern California. I just hope they're not too cold now that the weather has changed from 70-degree to 50 to 60-degree days.

I find molting a bit gross, for some reason, but it's not too bad. The major downside is that hens don't lay eggs when they're molting. So, we haven't had any backyard eggs for the past several weeks. And we may have to wait quite a while longer, because Storey's Guide says they can molt for between 14 and 16 weeks! It kind of depends on the breed, though. So maybe my girls--an Easter Egger and Black Sex-Link--will be on the faster side.

I just hope they calm down a bit so I don't have to worry about letting them out of the coop in the morning before work. I like our routine, where they scratch around and sample some weeds in the yard while I tend to my garden. But if they won't go back in the run when I need them to, they may have to just stay inside during the week until the molt is over.

We've made some more progress on the kitchen lately, and I really mean "we" this time, since I was able to help paint the walls.



Dakota, who knows way more about paint than I do, thought we should use Benjamin Moore Natura Paint. It's a zero VOC paint, so it basically has no scent, and is presumably better for your indoor air quality. Benjamin Moore has a lot of great color choices, and we finally decided on "Seedling," which is a light green. The idea was to paint the walls a lighter, but very similar, color green to the cabinets. Dakota got this idea from an architect he really admires who did a gray-on-gray kitchen. While the idea of an all-gray kitchen didn't sound so good to me, the green on green looks really nice.




The Natura Paint went on very smoothly, and I was able to get two coats on the walls before Christmas. Dakota then added a simple, white trim around the French doors and along the base of the walls. The overall effect is really nice and bright, and having the walls painted makes the kitchen seem so much closer to completion.

Another exciting kitchen improvement was the removal of the ugly, aluminum windows over the sink and the installation of new wood windows. For this endeavor, Dakota built a scaffolding on the back corner of the house.



There was a lot of discussion over what type of windows we should install, and whether we should buy them or Dakota should make them. As you may know, windows are extremely expensive. So, we ended up going with the significantly cheaper Dakota-made variety. Let me assure you, though, they do not look cheap. Dakota decided on a simple casement style, which I think was a great idea because the single pane allows us to fully admire the view. The view from the sink, which looks Northeast towards the San Rafael and San Gabriel Mountains, may actually be the best view in our house.



We also spent some time discussing whether we should use regular glass or double-glazed with a layer of argon/krypton gas in between. This second variety, also known as insulated windows, are more expensive but also more energy-efficient because they prevent heat gain in the summer and heat loss in the winter. Initially, we thought the insulated windows would be a good idea for our "green" remodel, but after thinking it over, we realized that the benefits in our kitchen would be pretty minimal. We don't have central heat or air, and since we already insulated the kitchen walls and the attic, we're in pretty good shape when it comes to heat gain and loss. So, we went with plain old glass.



To help with energy efficiency, Dakota added a small awning over one of the windows, which will shade it during the summer and also keep rain off the sill. It's invisible from inside, but did a good job keeping the window relatively dry in our most recent rain storm.

There is still work to be done on the kitchen, although, at this point, it's mostly details. Dakota is adding more trim, touching up some paint, refurbishing a small window and finishing up the new door. Then we just have to get the tile installed, and we'll be done! Hopefully all that work can take place in the next couple of months.