Chinese School~

Chinese School is almost starting...not the most exciting news, but inevitable..Anyway, the photo is of some pens and other writing utensils and the books are the textbooks my brother and I used to study for our skip grade test.(A test that we both passed...) It was rather difficult but we managed to learn a school years' worth of Chinese in two months.




我們快要上中文學了。。。我並不太期待，可是我們一定要上課。上面的照片是文具和我和弟弟用來學我們跳級考試的中文。。。雖然蠻難的，可是我們把一個學年的中文學會了，而且過了考試。。。

We're back from Taiwan!

Our trip to Taiwan was, overall, fun....(We took our vacation from June 24 to August 20) The photo above is from our trip. It is of us, during the day of the typhoon, which destroyed a lot in the southern part of Taiwan (we we're in the northern part at the time). The food was really yummy and we visited relatives.

我們去台灣過暑假的日子蠻好玩的。。。(我們在那裡是從六月二十四日到八月二十日） 上面的照片是我們 颱風天照的。那時候，颱風把台灣的南部毀了。。。台灣的食物很好吃。我們也有去看我們阿姨叔叔。。。

More garden

Here are some of our garden plants.



Baby Bok Choy. This is still very young. We hope they will be big enough to eat by mid October. We'll see.


Green onion. We just moved these so they will have more room to grow.



This is Gai Lan a kind of Chinese broccoli. It was hit really hard by some kind of bug. Some of the plants looked like there was nothing left. Most of them have come back now.


This is also Baby Bok Choy. It is from an earlier planting and so it is much bigger.



We have some strawberries. They had fruit in the spring and it looks like they have more now.



We have some nice Swiss Chard plants but this one got killed by something (Not sure what). Hope the others will not suffer the same fate.



This is Buttercrunch Lettuce. It seems to be growing fine. We will let some of them develop heads and others we will pick leaves off as they grow.




These are Romaine Lettuce. They seem to be doing well.



We have two tomato plants. We should get some tomatoes from this cherry. The other one is a big tomato variety and it just now started to flower. We don't expect any tomatoes from it before it is too cold but we will see. When we pull the tomatoes out hopefully there will still be time for some spinach or something.

Not shown here we also have some endive and some peas.

Gardens

We have been working on Gardens this summer. We got to it too late for much of a summer garden but just in time for a nice fall garden.


The chickens are part of the garden system. They stay for a time (not sure how long yet) over one of the garden beds. Their poop is supposed to help the soil. Then we will move them over another bed. Throughout the year the chickens will always be covering one bed, one bed will always be resting (the one the chickens just left), and five beds will be available for planting.
The frames for the gardens are smaller than the chicken tractor so when we move the chickens we will take the garden frame up and move the heavy chicken frame over. The chicken tractor and frame are separate so the chickens can be moved onto the lawn to wait while all the heavy moving takes place. We use a hand truck to move the coop.

Our little chickens have grown quite a bit. They eat a lot of chicken food and they are starting to love eating greens like the dandelions below.


Watch them eat.

Grit

We didn't know that the chickens need grit along with food at first. They were with us for over a month with out any. We got grit from a small feed store near us. Nathan attached an empty tuna can to the tractor and we put the grit in there. Our chickens emptied it in two days. Two days later they emptied a second can. Cans three and four each only lasted one day. The picture below is can number five. We put it out this morning and it is already half gone. We are starting to think they are eating it for fun. We don't want to take the grit away because we don't know how much they actually need.

We have a plan. We attached this pie tin to a block of wood to make a feeder. (The block will hopefully keep it from being tipped over.) Today we filled it with the outside leaves of lettuce that we didn't want to eat. Our plan is to give them something other than the grit to focus on. Hope it works. We are about out of grit.

Goodnight

Every night at dusk (about 8:30 this time of year) the little chickens climb into the coop for bed.


The chickens all want to sleep on top of the nest boxes, which means I have to clean this space off every day. (This picture is just after cleaning.) I'm not sure if I should try to stop them from sleeping up here. They make quite a mess and there is plenty of room on the roosts. It's not hard to brush it off once a day but if I ever miss a few days I'm sure it will become intolerable.