Dear Farm Journal,

As mentioned in other journal entries, farm record keeping has not historically been our strong suit at Keewaydin. Last spring we started out pretty strong, but as the season grew busier with each planting, the journal got progressively harder to keep track of. Today I worked on building a Google Sheets document that I hope will help. It needs some work, but, I must say that my Capricorn brain likes to see the organizational layout of all the greenhouses, gardens, seedings, and plantings. Of course, I had to go color coded as well. We tried an application called Tend last spring, but it proved to be too complicated and time consuming to manage. The thing is, for us to keep up with a system, it has to be nearly kindergarten simple, streamlined, and familiar. I hope this document will be functional for us, but we will see what it looks like in June.

In chicken news, the girls are looking better. I got the egg laying boxes moved into the coop and some of the hens look like they are starting to build nests, but they are on the ground, not in the boxes. I checked on them after dark and 2 of them have started roosting up on the plank, which means they can definitely fly up into the laying boxes. For some reason, my father thinks that the hens need some type of handicap ramp up into the nesting area. While he visited, I was fixing up the laying box, putting a new roof on it to stabilize the boxes. Instead of holding the roof while I nailed it down, like I asked, he took it upon himself to fashion a handicap chicken ramp. I reiterated that this was not the plan. After we got the roof secure, my dad, (unhappy with the rampless set up) moved a wood block over to the edge of the coop. This is apparently supposed to function as a makeshift step for the chickens….who can fly.  

~Joy