Where have the posts gone?

Boy last week flew by! I wanted to post a bit about the chickens we are raising, but it seems as though I don't know enough about them to tell you anything yet. They are growing, and enjoying the variety of plants offered to them in our orchard. I find myself watching them each morning after I move them to fresh pasture to see what they eat. They graze like they are at a salad bar-a nibble of plaintain, a peck of clover leaf, and a small piece of chicory. I wish I could offer them a wider variety each day to see if they might like grazing in our fallow vegetable beds. Our long term plan for our farm involves grazing animals in parts of our vegetable fields to remineralize them. This batch of birds is our first step toward this goal.
Last week we made the decision to take control of pollinating our cucumbers ourselves. Usually we leave the crop exposed so bees can visit the flowers and impregnate all the female flowers with pollen from the male flowers. Unfortunately we are under attack by cucumber beetles. They are a small green and black striped beetle that carries the Cucumber Mosaic Virus from infected plants to healthy ones. Infected plants wilt and die within 2-3 days after infection. If we did nothing, we could lose our entire crop within a couple of weeks. We decided to spray Pyganic in the early morning and still found plants were wilting at midday. We covered the plants with row cover in a effort to keep any new beetles away from the plants. This is helping, but now we can not rely on bees to pollinate the flowers for us. Every morning now we must hit the fields, remove the row cover, locate a male flower (it has a straight stem and long pointy center), peel off its petals, and rub it in the center of the female flowers (it has a tiny, fuzzy cucumber on the stem and a creased center. We hope that we will be able to keep the cucumber beetles away from the plants long enough for us to get tired of eating cukes. More tomorrow night.