• Ridgetop Farm and Garden

May is busy, busy, busy – mostly prepping the gardens for summer. We also have been busy with the aquaponics, installing a pond & keeping critters.

Gardening for Food

There has been lots of weed pullin’, ground tillin’ & seed plantin’ this month.

Making rows for herb seeds.

Typically Farmer John does the food type gardening, while I do the flowers. This year, though, I planted one row in the garden. It’s mostly herbs that I hope to cook with & share with the chickens.

We planted a ton of squash, gourds & pumpkins this year.

Flower Beds

The flowers are blooming & the bees and wasps are loving it.

Aquaponics

The Aquaponics system is coming along, but not quite yet at its full potential.

Farmer John plumbed the entire system, ran it for a couple weeks, then redid it all.

We received our tiny tilapia. Yippey!

Goats

I love, love watching the kids play with the goats. There are lots of laughs.

Oh Sven! Apparently creeping phlox is yummy to goats. I put him back in his fenced area right after taking this pic.

Ducks

We moved the ducks out of the garden & into the goats fenced area. I also got them a new pool to swim in.

Unfortunately, they squeeze out of the goat fence & prefer to swim in the pond.

Quail

Our quail are very low maintenance – until one day Mr. Quail got out. He had gone to a place where I couldn’t reach him to put him back. I recruited my boys to come help me, but they couldn’t reach Mr. Quail either. And, he didn’t like being out. He called & called for his lady friend. Eventually, he moved and we were able to grab him & reunite him with Mrs. Quail.

Chicken Keeping

Of all our critters, the chickens take the most time. I’m sure part of that is because of the amount of chickens we have & the number of coops. Most of the work I don’t mind doing & some of it I even enjoy – like collecting eggs. But, I don’t enjoy cleaning coops. Does anyone enjoy that chore?

More chicks hatched this month.