Friday, January 07, 2011

New baby, veggies and taking it easy

A bit of everything today.
Firstly a chick hatched! It had 'silver laced wyandotte' on the egg, but it could be a light sussex! (what do you think Charlotte?) or a throw back? I remember you showed me one and I think it was all white? Whatever it is it's super cute and most obviously a girl, of course! And just to make sure of this I've called her Emily.

There are also cracks appearing on a(nother) light sussex and an araucana...so far. Much excitement here today. I love baby chicks hatching and find it really difficult to leave the mummy chickens to get on with it. I keep wanting to have  peek to see what's happening. I can't remember if I said already, but I divided up the fertile eggs between Buttercup and Millicent as they both went broody one after the other. Can't wait to see what's happened when I get up tomorrow.

It's been absolutely scorching. The chickens are wandering around with their beaks open or resting in the shade. Much like the humans really. The resting in the shade part, not the open beak part.

On the veggie front, the tomatoes finally look like they may have a slight tinge of orange to them, either that or wishful thinking. I was worried about them for a while, they looked like nothing was happening, but now they have lots and lots of tomatoes on them so I think they'll be fine after all.

I'm not sure if I've ever posted a photo of our bananas before? Well here they are. Doing well. Lloyd loves bananas, me not so much. When we were in Rarotonga in August we learned how to cut the bananas so that you get the best out of them, so we tried it this year and we certainly seem to be getting the best crop we've ever had.
You need to keep the 'stem' that has the biggest, healthiest looking hand of bananas on it and chop all the others in the clump down. This way all the energy goes into the stem with the bananas. The other stems will grow back, so don't worry! 

 Peapods, to show that they do get to a decent size before I gobble them all!

This is a Bolivian rainbow chilli, I'm not sure if this is the real name for it - we bought it from the chilli man at the market and he said this was it's name! Supposedly it goes all colours of the rainbow - sort of!  It's a really pretty plant.

Tomorrow is the Kaikohe A&P show. We're going to try and go fairly early before it gets too hot. It was 36c/97f  today that's flipping hot.

8 comments:

  1. Laura, your tomatoes look so much better than mine, as in the plant section especially...do you prune all your lower leaves off?
    Suzanne

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  2. I do. I've been reading about how best to grow tomatoes over the last few years. This is what I've come up with that works best for our soil etc etc...
    take lower leaves off as plant grows taller - it gets sun to the tomatoes to ripen them and also allows a breeze through the plant so if it's humid it means the blight stays away longer.
    I also take out the wee shoots that grow inbetween the leaves - so in theory there's only one stalk. They grow so fast that even though I check them every day ( tomatoes are a lot of work!!) I sometimes miss one and have a plant with 2 stalks. This way I seem to get lovely big tomatoes.
    I feed them every 10 days and dust them with this green powder stuff that's supposed to be good for them! Pampered or what!!!
    Only problem now is they are growing taller than my frames...
    It's trial and error! I used to let them just grow like triffids and did nothing to them at all - I got loads of tomatoes, but they were much smaller, and everything got tangled and rotten because no air got to the plants. This way works better for me.

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  3. oh I should say, you can't see any leaves cos the pic is just of the bottom half of the plant - the top half still has leaves and only flowers, as the flowers turn into tomatoes I'll remove some leaves etc etc. Does that make sense?

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  4. Good luck with your chicks, Laura. It's exciting isn't it? Your tomatoes look great and so does that purple chilling.

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  5. That makes HEAPS of sense...thank you...my tomatoes look half dead, but still are producing...I am going to try this on a few of the plants we have just recently put in...xx

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  6. Anonymous8:31 am

    You are roasting in the heat and we are bracing ourselves for another snow storm. Ugh!!

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  7. Hmmm, I'd be renaming that chick to Emile! If it had SLW on the shell and it's hatched white then 'throwback' for sure, and so far all my throwbacks have been male. But you never know!

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  8. Heehee Emile it is then! It definitely had SLW on the egg because it was first to hatch by a day so was the only shell to collect. Looks like he'll be coming back your way then :)

    Mel you'd be welcome to some of this heat - it's too hot to do anything!!

    All bar 2 eggs have hatched now and I'm still hopeful for them!

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I love it when you leave me comments, it lets me know there are folk out there reading my ramblings! Thank you, I appreciate them loads and loads
Laura x