From: Amy Swanson
Big news –Taxes aren’t due today! Only kidding, we don’t care about taxes. But Barbara did drop off the new scale and we got to play around with it. It’s a small sleek electronic gadget that can speak metric or American, as well as tell you the temperature…in Celsius. Barbara put it in a white box, marked “Interfaith Garden” on a shelf in the barn, ready to use on Saturday when Carla expects to pick a bit more of the asparagus and scallions before dropping them off at the Lexington Food Pantry. One caution is that because this is a “precision piece of electronic equipment”, it should not be used near cell phones since the RF might interfere with its operation. And for fun, there is a tape measure that pulls out of its side so you can measure the size of that zucchini that didn’t get away!
In the picture below are 2 of the more productive workers from today, Heidi and Kelly, with little green onions that were harvested. We learned that harvesting them now makes them scallions. Had we waited, they would have grown into onions.
Harvesting Scallions
Good thing we prepped the onion bed on Tues, because Carla was able to find dormant live onion plants for us to plant. So red and white onions were planted, as well as some leeks. Sorry I don’t have much more to report since I spent more time fooling around with the scale in the barn than working in the garden! We did find out that chickens live about 7 years and are most productive in their first 2 years. Also, the egg-laying cycle is fascinating . It takes about 27 hours for a hen to lay an egg, but she won’t do it after 2pm. If she is approaching her 27th hour and is about to lay an egg but then 2pm comes, she will not lay the egg until the following morning. Their bodies are very regulated to sunlight. That’s why they lay fewer eggs in the winter, when there is less daylight.