Garden Planning Software (Free)

A screenshot of their preplanned "All American" garden

It's time to begin planning your garden and placing your seed orders.  I recently came across a marvelous website for those doing a square-foot garden.  It is really a great tool that I can't say enough about.  It lets you lay out your garden simply by dragging and dropping the crop to the square you wish to grow it in.  Then it tells you when and how to plant, plant spacings for a square-foot garden, when to harvest, and tips and tricks for that particular crop.  In addition to all of that, it has many very well put together preplanned gardens if you're unsure of where to put things or you just want it easy.

A screenshot example of instructions provided

(click to enlarge)

A couple of hints:

• Even when using the preplanned gardens, always rotate it so that the tallest plants are to the north and the shortest plants are to the south.
• Put the shade tolerant, moisture loving plants like lettuce to the north end of the garden.
• Once complete, print out your garden plans and use them!

I have never done business with this company, so I can't endorse them for buying supplies.  However, they are providing a valuable service to the community with this free gardening resource and were kind enough to allow me to use the screenshots above.  They also told me that they will be adding berry plantings to the online tool soon!  I added their blog to my blogroll on the right for my readers that are interested in that.

Here's the link:  http://www.gardeners.com/on/demandware.store/Sites-Gardeners-Site/default/Page-KGPJS

Enjoy!

Winter Eggs and Flock Management

Wintertime.

New feathers!

For those of you interested in starting your own flock or just learning about it, HERE is a very good article I just came across.

You'll recall from our post HERE, that as the first killing freezes of the year arrived in October, our backyard flock began the molting process.  Molting is a natural event where the birds completely replace their feathers once or twice a year.  It takes so much energy and protein to do this, that they shut off or diminish egg production.  A good rule of thumb for a backyard flock is 10 months of egg laying and 2 months molting.  Before the molt, our six birds gave us 35+ eggs per week.  During the 2 1/2 month molt, the average dropped to right at 12 eggs per week.  Now they are back into full production again.

Now down to the brass tacks discussion.  As chickens get older, they produce fewer and fewer eggs per pound of feed consumed.  Most commercial operations these days replace their flock every year to maximize production.  We plan to replace ours every two years and this seems to be a good balance of flock replacement cost and efficiency for a backyard flock.  In mid April, we will get a shipment of day-old chicks to replace our current flock.  Our current flock will lay all spring and summer and then our new flock will start laying at 5-6 months old in early October.  Once the new flock reaches full production, we will slaughter and can up our current flock to be used in soups, chickens salads, and the like.  We've found that pressure canning the meat makes these tough, old birds quite edible.  These are hard choices to make, but in the end these chickens are livestock, not pets and our suburban backyard doesn't afford us enough room to allow our older birds to stick around.