week 43: when you (finally) get a win

this week on the little dream farm

Be sure to read to the end of this week’s Farm Note as I have an ask of something I’d like to hear from you!

If you’ve followed our life on the farm for any length of time then you know we’ve dealt with a whole host of issues with hen health in the past two years. Even with the chicken health handbooks and the Facebook groups and the consulting with other chicken keepers you can still come up short in resolving issues when they come up.

It’s not that taking care of chickens is hard—it’s that it can be tricky to diagnose what exactly is wrong, and then depending on how long the chicken was having issues will depend on what kind of timeline you’re working with to help them. Like many animals, chickens are super tough and they hide illness and weakness. Many times their noticeable symptoms don’t present until it’s sadly too late.

Fortunately…we’ve finally, finally, finally had a win…multiple wins in fact…on the sour crop front and saving hens!!!

Tucking Opal in. She’s decided she likes to sleep on the floor of the cage rather than her roost bar and who are we to argue with that…Opal gets what Opal wants!!

Between Opal and two other hens, Big Red and Posey, we were finally able to resolve Opal’s impacted crop that led to sour crop and then treat and clear the very same thing for the other two. For Opal, the care was a pretty grueling (grueling for her, poor thing) month-long endeavor, but the other two we were able to resolve in a matter of days. We’re definitely onto something here and I’ve been keeping lots of good notes and have saved all my most recent research from this last bout of trying to help these precious hens get better. If it should come up again, we’ll try some of these same things again and if they work…well then by golly I think we might have a reliable solution we can depend on and hopefully share with others!

With the three girlies out of the chicken hospital (the chicken hospital, in this case, was a series of three cages in our barn’s milk house where we could keep them in an isolated space to be able to treat them) Chris and I were finally able to catch a day off of work together so that we could go on a late leaf peeping adventure. We headed to Katterskill Falls in the Catskill Mountains and had a chance to catch what seems to be the last of fall foliage up in this area. It’s amazing how fast this foliage season has come and gone! The leaves are dropping from all the trees around the farm and by next week I’d venture a guess the trees will be bare.

We’ve got our first freeze in the forecast for the coming week so our weekend plans shifted to knocking out lots of items on our handy checklist for getting the farm prepped for winter.

I love this old garden way cart. David had this in storage after he sold the farm, unsure of where he was going to go next. When he settled on a condo in Florida he sold this to us so it could stay on the farm and we use it for absolutely everything!

We spent the most gorgeous, sunny, 70-degree day cutting down canna lilies and dahlias, breaking down potted plants and the patio planters, putting away patio furniture, and mowing and weed whacking the yard and all the fences. We’re putting away irrigation hoses, tucking some plants into the ground for overwintering, and bringing in some roses I’m going to attempt to store in the barn for the winter. We raked leaves to use as mulch over the garden beds for winter and we cleaned up and tidied up some spaces to give us a head start on next year’s growing season.

For the past two years I’ve left all the growing spaces in tact for winter interest while everything goes dormant. This year I wanted to completely clear them out in order to prepare now for next year’s growing season. I’ve got a lot of pretty little ideas floating around in my head these past few weeks and felt that it would be best to do some of the leg work now so that we have less on our plates come Spring when it feels like everything is coming at us all at once.

One of my big goals for next year’s growing season…and this will likely surprise many of you…is to do less. I’ll talk more about this in future Farm Notes but I’m feeling a very strong pull to focus on simply doing a really great job with what we’ve already put in place, rather than adding more. I know I’m on the right track because I’m already so giddy about how much fun the next growing season is going to be, and I know I’m feeling that way because I’m going into it with the sole intention of making it really manageable so that it continues to be enjoyable.

This year’s growing season was filled with so very many lessons, those of which I’ll detail in a future Farm Note as well, and has given me a deeper appreciation for this farm and for what we’re capable of. We showed ourselves this year that we can do really big, awesome things when it comes to growing, and I’m excited to take all that learning and a year’s worth of trial and error and experimentation and turn that into next year’s plans.

While we’re over here wrapping things up from the season, I am dying to know from you:

Are you interested in more info about gardening or seed starting or growing food or flowers?
Would you like to see more of our process?
Interested in how we plan and prepare our garden layouts, beds, and growing plans?
Would you like to learn more about my philosophy on organic gardening, regenerative agriculture, and how we work in partnership with nature to grow without chemicals?
Are you interested in more behind the scenes of what goes into getting all the growing spaces up and running and maintaining them here on the farm?
Do you want to learn more about how to do this for your own home/yard/patio/balcony/container garden?

If so, either way, let me know that in the comments below this week! If there’s specific things you’d like to learn or would like to see more of from us, be sure to let me know that, too! Based on your responses, I’ll take that into account as I plan next year’s growing spaces. If there seems to be a lot of interest then I’ll gladly put more focus on sharing everything I know for you to learn and grow alongside us and hopefully apply it to your own growing spaces!

That’ll do it from us here on the farm this week…this 43rd week of 2023. I’m looking forward to hearing from you in the comments and what, if anything, you’d like to see more of in the way of gardening…or anything else, for that matter! Let me know that, too!

Whatcha got for me?!