Hooray! The chickens have pretty much ended their molting and we are getting 2 eggs a day reliably now -sometimes 3! During their molting, we were lucky to get 2 eggs a week from 7 layer hens... Although our rooster (named 'Duck') hasn't regrown his beautiful iridescent green tail feathers back, they all seem a lot happier, and I am happy for the increasing egg supply. Pretty soon I may be able to put the "fresh eggs" sign back out on the lawn.
Otherwise, life is pretty normal. Another snow storm is predicted for Wednesday, and is supposed to bring us 10 more inches of snow on top of the 4" still left on the ground. For a treat we did buy new ice fishing gear this weekend, but that's for another post. I also used up all but one jar of the tomatoes as well as the jalapenos I canned from our garden this summer. I canned 19 (12oz) jars from the tomato harvest, and only about 7 (6oz jars) of jalapenos. This is a good way for me to estimate how much I will need to jar next year though. On average, we go through 5 jars a month of tomatoes. Thus, I will have to can around 30-40 jars this year in order to make it a year round supply. The jalapenos I can eat day in and day out, so I plan to do more plants and larger jars this year. I also hope to attempt making my own tomato paste this year, but it may be to ambitious for the size of our garden. Last year we had 13 tomato plants, but only certain varieties were good producers. We had around 3 plants of 4 different varieties. I found -by far- the best canning tomatoes were of the Plum or Roma types, so I will plant mostly those this year. The orange tomatoes also canned very well, but didn't produce much. Their taste in cooking is much too sweet in recipes where you want or need the acidity of red tomatoes, but are a nice novelty.
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