Getting the birds and bunnies ready for winter

Time to get the birds and buns, that is the chickens ducks and rabbits ready for winter. I gave the coop a full cleaning, moved in the cage the rabbits stay in during the worst of winter, spruced up the covered run area and added in various boredom busters. I did not roll down the plastic side wraps since it seems just a bit too early and that doesn't take long. I'll leave that for a couple more weeks unless we get snow in the forecast.  The chickens always love  a clean coop and clean nest boxes and they also love new bags of shavings or bales of hay. Anything cozy they love!

First frosts how did the gardens fare? And super late surprise peaches!

We've had two frosts so far this autumn. The first about 2 weeks ago, didn't do any damage to the vegetable gardens. The second frost, which was last week did kill some plants but not all. The affected plants were all summer squashes, bean plants , cucumber plants and some tomato plants. Most flowers are still fine as well as greens, beets, some beans,  a couple winter squash/pumpkin plants, some tomatoes, peppers and the few potato plants still in the ground. One surprising survivor is another peach tree which is looking set to bear ripe fruit soon! I really did not think this tree would give us anything because it still had tiny green peaches a couple weeks ago. I pulled some off to see if that would help and the remainder are looking to be nearly ripe now. What a treat that will be to have fresh peaches when it's very nearly winter for us. I brought 6 in the house to ripen but taking a chance to leave the majority on the tree and reassess day by day. As for our GIANT pumpkin plant, it topped out at about 50 feet long! It grew us 5 nice pumpkins which now decorate the front walk area. A few more pumpkins are coming along on another plant.

Some plants succumbed to our first freezes.

While others are still growing strong

KitKat is always a great help and entertainment when working the gardens.

And some surprise  very late peaches are nearly ripe! This is our Reliance peach tree and this is its first year bearing fruit.

Hazelnuts and Walnuts

Out two hazelnut bushes produced well this year and I beat the squirrels to the nuts! I think deer have also taken the nuts in the past so the fact that the hazelnut bushes are now fenced in helps with that. I harvested about a month ago. Left the nuts to dry out in a warm dry place for a few weeks and then when I saw that some nuts were falling free from their pods I knew they were cured and I could remove all the nuts from their coverings. It seems like a lot of work for just a few pounds of small nuts but they are organic and from our own bushes. Can't do much better than that. We may add more hazelnut bushes next year.

Hazelnut bush. I believe it's 4 years old, they grow fast.

Hazelnuts ready to harvest.

I harvest as late as possible but before they are fully ripe so as to beat the wildlife.

KitKat of course helps.

A few weeks later the hazelnuts are dried out and ready for husking and eating.

many nuts had fallen right out of their husks but some needed taking out.

Most de-hulled now. 

The hazelnuts look like toys to Linnea!

Walnuts on the other hand...our harvest was not so big...three nuts. Haha. BUT this is the first year we got nuts from our two English Walnut trees so this was very exciting indeed! Hopefully the trees will continue to have good growth and many more walnuts will grow next year. The trees are only a few years old so this is pretty good. The walnut I tasted was delicious. The English Walnut trees are a bit away from other gardens and trees since their roots can produce a substance that can cause other plants to fail. The walnut trees could be accessed by wildlife but nothing found our tiny crop of walnuts this year. Having said that I believe their were FIVE little nuts at the start so maybe two were taken early on. More likely they dropped off the trees very early. One walnut fell off the tree a couple weeks ago and I found it. Then the last two we waited until the were starting to go just a bit brown.

Walnut tree approx. 3 years old. 

A walnut about ready to harvest

One of the English Walnut trees. 

Two walnuts.

I tried one, it was very  good!

Another nut tree we could try planting would be chestnuts either a hybrid or Chinese. There have supposedly been American chestnut trees on our road that hadn't yet succumbed to the great chestnut blight. At times I have looked in our woods to see if I can spot one but I have never found one. I have found beechnut trees but the wildlife always beats me to those nuts and they are so tiny not worth the effort.

That is our nut harvest for this year done.