We've still been having an issue with rats in the chicken coop.

I sent one to an early grave thanks to some help from a box of Rat Shot.

You can find a box of 20 for around 8 dollars. The small pellets spread out making it easy to hit a moving rodent while at the same time any extra shot ends up bouncing off nearby structures.

Last year at this time, we were chowing down on kale and lettuce leaves that survived the winter under quick hoops and started rebounding as the weather warmed up.  Not so in 2014.  I was able to find a handful of brussels sprouts that had been protected under the mulch for dinner Wednesday, but otherwise it's a waiting game right now.  The new lettuce I planted a few weeks ago has sprouted and some of the kale plants survived and are sending out new leaves, both of which we'll be eating in a few weeks.

In the meantime, Mark is pouting because we're down to butternut squash, carrots, sweet potatoes, and frozen green beans from last year, and both of us are used to a more rounded vegetable diet.  I'd rather wait and eat real food than expand the selection out with grocery store offerings, though.

The positive side of the cold winter is that it helped me get a more solid handle on the cold hardiness of various greens.  Last winter, Fordhook Giant Swiss chard survived the winter with no protection, so I thought the Swiss chard might be just as hardy as our kale.  Not so.  Swiss chard I protected with quick hoops this winter completely perished, along with the Laciniato kale, but my troopers (Red Russian and Dwarf Siberian kale) survived the subzero temperatures under their quick hoops.

I used to think of Red Russian as the more delicate of my two dependable kale varieties, but it turns out that the smaller variety did better during this excessively cold winter.  Those of you in the true north should take note and plant accordingly, although I'll admit that if we started having winters like this one more regularly, I'd follow Eliot Coleman's advice and erect a high tunnel over my quick hoops.

What would I do differently when installing another heavy duty shade trellis?

Use fresh trellis wire. We used some recycled wire on the first loop and straightening out the kinks used up most of the tension in the turnbuckle.

The second loop was from a fresh roll and looks a lot tighter.

As you may have noticed, I've been running a bit of an ongoing series here with answers to questions new chicken-keepers might have.  Previous posts included how to hatch homegrown chicks and how to choose the best chicken breeds for homesteaders.  Today I want to touch on a topic that's not so photogenic, but that needs to be considered by anyone who wants to get into chickens --- how to protect those delicious morsels from the wild animals who'd love nothing more than to eat them up.

Baby chicks are most likely to be eaten by rats and snakes, but adult hens tend to succumb to dogs, hawks, raccoons, opossums, and similar predators.  Your first line of defense against predators is to protect your flock when they're most vulnerable --- at night.  A solid chicken coop is optimal, and if your predator pressure is high you'll want to shut the birds in each evening (or to invest in an automatic chicken door to do the job for you).  Raccoons, especially, can reach right through small holes, so be sure your birds' roost is far enough away from gaps so that a predator can't rip their heads off without even entering the hen house.  To be truly predator proof, the coop will also need to have a solid base that extends for several inches into the soil to prevent diggers from entering the coop.  Finally, even though I love giving scraps to chickens, I'm starting to lean away from putting those kitchen scraps in the coop since the scent attracts predators who stick around to eat my birds.

What if your chickens are getting picked off in the daytime instead?  If you have a small run (which you shouldn't), you can beef up the walls just like you did the coop, then can string fishing line over the top in a woven pattern to keep out hawks and owls.  But if you prefer giving your birds larger pastures, or even letting them free range, it's going to be nearly impossible to keep predators out of their daytime living area.  Instead, I recommend adding a rooster to your flock, since he'll sound the alarm and do his best to fight off any invader during daytime hours.  A good dog (trained to protect, rather than eat, chickens) is the second line of defense --- our dog comes running as soon as she hears our rooster's alarm call, and she has managed to chase away a hawk that had pinned a hen three times over the past winter.

Chickens are pretty alert to predators during the daytime, with hawks being their primary downfall.  After a rooster and a dog, I have two more lines of defense against raptors.  First, I make sure that our chickens roam in areas with lots of bushes and other things to hide under.  Hens often see a hawk coming as the raptor dives down to dine, so if they have something to scurry beneath, the chickens might be able to evade capture.  Second, I raise dark-colored chickens, since I've learned the hard way with multiple breeds over multiple years that letting white chickens free range is like putting up a flashing neon sign: "Chicken take-out, now hot!"

I'd be curious to hear from others who have dealt with their own predator problems.  Which predators are the most likely to eat your chickens?  What do you do to protect the flock?

And for those of you in the planning stages of starting your own chicken operation, be sure to check out our chicken waterers, which keep you from having to handle manure and keep your birds from having to drink it.

We upgraded our grape shade trellis today.

Thanks to one of our constant readers Brian we realized the 2x4's we planned to put up would block a good deal of Winter sun.

It's two loops of 10 gauge galvanized trellis wire that uses a couple of heavy duty turnbuckles to increase the tension.

I'm always of two minds about the first spring flowers.  On the one hand, I really, really want to see them, not just for myself, but for my hungry bees.  But on the other hand, I know that early blooms on the fruit trees often mean no harvest that year due to late freezes.  So I decided to poke back through the blog to determine when our peaches and crocuses have bloomed in past years, and how that relates to the subsequent peach harvest:

The first thing I noticed --- late peach blooms do seem to be correlated to an actual peach harvest that year.  But do early crocus blooms mean no peach harvest?  Nope.  In fact, the date of the first crocus blooms seems to have very little bearing on when the peach flowers open, suggesting that the two plants are using different cues to decide on the proper time to pop open their flowers.  (Last year's crocus blooms might have been a bit of an outlier, though, because I had transplanted the bulbs in late winter to a new location.)

This post is all a long and geeky way of saying --- okay, crocuses, open up those buds!  And, peaches, stay sound asleep as long as you can.  Because, of course my plants listen to my wishes, right?  (Maybe I should hedge my bets by dumping the ice from my maple sap concentration campaign around the bases of our fruit trees.)

This Snap On extra long ratchet driver made these hard to reach jobs easier.

It's one of the few tools I've held onto since my copier repair days.

After quite a bit of experimentation, last year I settled on a very simple (but effective) method of propagating figs.  I take hardwood cuttings and sink them about eight inches into damp stump dirt in a pot, put the pot on a heating pad, and ignore it for a few weeks until I need the heating pad for something else.  I water occasionally during those heating-pad weeks and during the subsequent weeks, keeping the soil at the moisture level appropriate for seed-starting (or just a hair drier), and put the pots in a sunny spot once the leaves begin to push out of the buds.  By the end of the summer, the cuttings are extraordinarily well rooted and are ready to go into the ground.

I treated the Brown Turkey cuttings from Daddy to last year's methodology, and also potted up the rooted shoot we teased away from the base of his mature fig bush.  The latter will go into the ground soon after our frost-free date, and I'm thinking of putting it on the west side of our wood-stove alcove so the fig will enjoy lots of winter sun and heat while helping shield the trailer from summer sun.  I'll probably keep one of the rooted cuttings as well and then will give the rest away to blog readers or local friends, so stay tuned for future giveaways.

A popular chicken hang out during snow days is under our old camper.

Lucy likes this same spot on hot summer days for the shade and cool ground.

If you want to go to a conference 45 minutes from your father's house and want to squeeze in a visit at the same time, do you attend the conference first and visit afterwards, or do you have family time right off the bat?  Mark's gut said the latter, and I think he was right, since I wanted to see Daddy more than I wanted to learn at the conference...and some weeks I can't manage even one night away from home.  After a wonderful visit on Friday, I managed to net two whole hours of sleep, and that only came once I gave up on the bed in the guest room and on the quiet and comfortable couch and went to squeeze myself into the back seat of the car.  (Yes, I am the world's weirdest sleeper and really like small spaces.  I should have brought my tent.)

Anyway, that's all a long way of explaining why --- even though Mark and I were itching to hear Tradd's newest talks and to check out the South Carolina Organic Growing Conference --- we only managed to enjoy a delicious lunch there before heading home.  On two hours of sleep, even pastured pigs, medicinal mushrooms, and biointegrated homesteads didn't sound as lovely as returning to the peace and quiet of our own farm.

I did get one of the nicest February tomato plants I've ever seen out of the weekend, though, plus some cuttings and a rooted sprout from Daddy's Brown Turkey fig.  That brings us up to five fig varieties we're trialling for cold hardiness here at the edge of their range.  More on what I'm doing with my new figs in a later post.