I refuse to apologize. There is nothing more annoying than reading a blog post that starts with the author apologizing for taking so long to update. Nuff said.
What I have learned this week: Chickens grow fast. Very fast. If you listen carefully at night, you can hear their bones stretching. OK maybe not, but I will feed and check on them before work, and by the time I get home at dinner I swear to you that they look bigger. I have also learned that they do not like 1. driving through tunnels and 2. being separated from each other.
Before driving to Asagi Hatchery in Honolulu to finally pick up my much anticipated pair of one-day-old brown hens (I hope hens, please let them be hens), I had a last minute panic attack that the rats I have seen running along our fence would break into the coop and attack my babies. This led to frantic nailing and stapling of scrap wood and hardware cloth over any openings I deemed insecure, fretting and googling questions like "how long does it take a rat to chew through wood", and the purchase of a sixty dollar rat electrocution chamber that, horrible as it sounds, I decided was the most humane way to dispose of rats, and has yet to actually catch a rat. After they survived the first night I reluctantly decided it was ok to sleep in my bed instead of on the couch, which is forty feet away through the open lanai door, and so far every morning when I get out of bed to peer anxiously into the coop, I still find two baby chicks (larger than they were the night before, really they make me think of the alien thingies in that terrible 90s horror flick "Species") strolling around nonchalantly, chasing the bugs that are attracted to their heat lamp, or snuggled up together and resting in a pile of pine shavings.
Now let's hope they are big enough to eat centipedes before I find one in my kitchen.
In other news, I planted some coffee trees that I obtained from Glenn's Nursery in Waimanalo. I decided on four, because that was how many they had. Since these "trees" are only 18 inches high, I ended up landscaping the area around them so that it doesn't look so pathetic. I used my experimental grass-killing garden bed from an earlier post. Three months in, the cardboard was much softer but still intact; everything underneath was dead, friable, reasonably moist even in the dry season, and incredibly easy to work. My shovel cut nicely through the soft cardboard, so I dug where I needed to plant something, then topped off everything with a couple bags of topsoil and compost. Grass did grow along the concrete edge where I had decided not to dig a trench, but it pulled out easily. I threw down some clover seed (clover is nitrogen-fixing and won't need to be mowed) and planted some flowers, then installed a path of stepping stones to aid access and add some interest. The end result was attractive enough that I have received the green light from my husband to smother the rest of the grass on that side of the property, so now I am earning myself a reputation by walking up to store employees, neighbors and any other unsuspecting empty-box-holding passerby and asking if they are going to recycle that cardboard and if so, could I please have it? I have not resorted to dumpster diving for cardboard, but only because I haven't gotten around to it.
On a related note, if you walk into any coffee shop and ask for their used grounds, chances are they will gladly unload them on you. In fact, my local shop already had them boxed up and ready to go out the door, just in case anyone asked. Coffee grounds are supposedly rich in nutrients, and our planter box soil is oddly alkaline according to the test we had done, so I'm hoping this will help remedy the problems in my vegetable beds.
I also managed to overcome my social anxiety long enough to approach my neighbor when he was out watering his prolific tomato plants. I asked him if he had any advice, and like any good gardener he was overjoyed to talk about his tomatoes, gave me some to take home with me, and even offered to give me some of his amendments. His secrets: use a high phosphate fertilizer and make sure they have plenty of calcium (he sprays the blooms with a calcium solution once). He added some other things, and now I really wish I had taken notes. He bought his seeds from Tomato Growers Supply http://www.tomatogrowers.com/, which is where I am headed after I finish this post.
Which is now.
Happy homesteading!
P.S. I also refuse to apologize for sloppy editing, run-on sentences, and lack of pictures in this post, unless you want to wait another two months for it. So. There.
