Once Upon a Farm April Newsletter

Sam Once Upon a Farm
April 30, 2026

🌱 The Backyard Farm Update

Welcome back to another month at Once Upon a Farm!

The chicks are at that stage where they've decided I'm worth knowing. The Red Star chicks in particular are hilarious. They come running to see me when I walk out into the backyard, flock around my feet, and sit on my shoes. I've never had chicks this people-confident this young before. Their mother is not amused, but there doesn't seem to be much she can do about it. The two hatches are eggs from a different flock than mine, and they're a bit of an experiment — one hatch are Red Stars, North Hampshire rooster crossed with brown hybrid layer hens, and the other hatch are mostly Black Stars, North Hampshire rooster over Barred Rock hens. The Black Stars are sex-linked at hatch, the boys come out barred and the girls come out black. The reason I went outside my own flock for these crosses is first to maintain genetic diversity in my flock, but also my chickens are big and beautiful, but they don't lay particularly well, they eat a lot because they are so big, and the hens go broody all the time. I'm trying to bring better lay rates into the mix without losing the heritage qualities I love. I'm also curious to see whether a heritage breed father can soften some of the issues commercial hybrid layers run into like shorter productive lifespans and reproductive problems. I guess I will see how it plays out as the hens grow up!

The rest of the month has been about end-of-season garden prep, and I'm doing it with one eye on the world. With the war in the Middle East and the inflation that's already coming with it, I've been thinking hard about how to shore up my family's food security in a year where I just don't know what's going to happen. So I've been planning with flexibility at the front of my brain. Mineral amendments are going into the soil now, before winter, so soil biology has time to get them cycling into plant available forms, ready to support main-crop plants when spring rolls back around. The cover crop plan I talked about last month is rolling on, with more beds going in as the chickens and I clear them.

The idea is that by the time we hit spring, I've got beds that are alive, full of cycled nutrients, and ready to grow whatever makes the most sense at that point. Because I don't want to lock myself into a set plan when things are this uncertain, I want flexibility to pick from a range of options

🤔 Pottering Ponders

I've been thinking a lot lately about how to plan when you can't predict.

It's a question that's been pressing on me with the war and the inflation and the supply chain wobbles, but the more I think on it, the more I realise it's not really a new question. It's the same situation farmers have always had to live with. You don't know if it's going to be a wet spring or a dry one. You don't know if the broody hen sitting on your eggs is going to be a good mother or abandon them halfway through. You don't know if cover crops will get well established before it gets too cold, or if too much or too little rain will come at crucial points. Farming has always been a long dance with uncertainty. The difference now is that the uncertainty is spreading to everyone, not just farmers planning their crops. Uncertainty spreading out beyond the weather and the soil into the bigger systems that hold our lives together — the supermarket shelves, fuel pumps, availability of fertiliser, prices on the tags.

What I keep coming back to, once I calm down, is the only thing I can do is what I'm already trying to do. Building flexibility and resilience into as many systems as I can that sustain our lives. Planting more than one kind of each thing, keeping multiple breeds of chicken. Building soil that's alive enough to grow whatever I decide to put in it, rather than soil that depends on a particular bag of fertiliser arriving on a particular day. The traditional farmers who came before us understood this better than we do. They kept multiple kinds of livestock, multiple crops, multiple ways of preserving food, multiple skills. Because they understood that the world is the kind of place where things go sideways, and the people who do best are the people who have other doors to walk through (or a window to clamber through if things have gone really off the rails).

So I'm trying to stop trying to figure out what's going to happen. What I'm trying to do is set things up so that whatever happens, I've got something to work with..

🌍 What's in Season?

What's In Season? — April 2026

Northern Hemisphere — Spring

Planting: This is a big month for the spring garden in most temperate zones. You can be sowing or transplanting beans, corn, squash, cucumbers, melons, and tomatoes once the last frost has passed. Brassica transplants like broccoli and cabbage want to go in early before it gets too warm. Direct sow carrots, beets, lettuce, spinach, peas, and radishes. Herbs like basil, dill, coriander, and parsley can go in now. If you're somewhere cooler, you might still be sowing under cover, but the season is opening up.

Harvesting: Asparagus is the great gift of spring. Rhubarb is coming in. Early lettuce, spinach, rocket, radishes, spring onions, and the first of the strawberries in warmer zones. If you overwintered any leeks, kale, or chard, you'll be picking the last of them before they bolt.

Recipe — Asparagus and Soft-Boiled Egg on Toast

Sometimes the best recipe is the one that gets out of the way of beautiful ingredients. Snap the woody ends off your asparagus and either steam them for three minutes or pan-fry them in butter until just tender. Soft-boil an egg for six minutes, peel it carefully, and break it open over a piece of good toasted sourdough. Lay the asparagus across the top, salt, pepper, a squeeze of lemon if you've got one, and a little crumble of feta or parmesan if that's your thing. The yolk runs into the bread, the asparagus is sweet and grassy, and you remember why people get excited about spring.

Southern Hemisphere — Autumn

Planting: This is the last big push before winter. Garlic can go in, the earlier the better to beat rust if that's an issue in your region. Onion sets and shallots can go in. Broad beans are a classic autumn sowing for an early spring harvest. Cover crops like oats, lupin, mustard, and crimson clover want to go in now. Brassica transplants — cabbage, kale, broccoli, cauliflower — should already be established and growing. You can still direct sow spinach, lettuce, rocket, and Asian greens if your zone is mild.

Harvesting: Apples, kiwifruit and feijoas are the fruit of the moment. Late tomatoes if you've got them, the last of the peppers and chillies, pumpkins and winter squash, kūmara, late beans.

Recipe — Feijoa and Apple Crumble

Feijoas are a New Zealand obsession that doesn't quite make sense to anyone who hasn't had one. They're a small green fruit with a soft scented flesh that tastes a bit like pineapple, a bit like guava, and a bit like nothing else. Scoop out about two cups of feijoa flesh and chop two large apples. Toss them with a tablespoon of brown sugar, a teaspoon of cinnamon, and a squeeze of lemon. Tip into a baking dish. For the topping, rub together one cup of rolled oats, half a cup of flour, half a cup of brown sugar, half a cup of cold butter, and a good pinch of salt until it looks like rough crumbs. Scatter over the fruit and bake at 180°C / 350°F for about 35 minutes, until the top is golden and the fruit is bubbling at the edges. Cream, custard, or yoghurt — your call.

🔬 Science Spotlight

Science Stuff — Cover Crops as a Soil Insurance Policy

Soil isn't dirt. Dirt is just the mineral fraction — broken-down rock, sand, clay. It's inert. Soil is alive. A single teaspoon of healthy soil contains billions of microorganisms, all feeding on each other and on plant material, and that community is what drives nutrient cycling. Plants can't absorb nutrients directly from rocks and minerals. They need biology to do the work.

That whole biological community runs on carbon, and the primary source of that carbon is living plant roots. A growing plant pumps a significant portion of the sugars it produces through photosynthesis straight down through its roots and out into the soil, literally feeding the microbes. The microbes feed back by delivering minerals to the plant. It's a constant trade. Living roots are how the soil eats.

Leave a bed bare over winter and you cut that food supply off. The biology goes dormant, nutrients leach away with the rain, soil structure breaks down. By spring, you've gone backwards. A cover crop keeps the biology fed all winter long, holds the nutrients in living tissue instead of letting them wash away, and then becomes a slow-release feed for the next crop when it breaks down. The mineral amendments I've put in this autumn get taken up, held, and released back into a primed system right when spring planting needs them. That's why I think of cover crops as insurance — for the asset that matters most, which is the soil itself.

Did You Know?

Plants can release up to 40% of the sugars they produce through photosynthesis directly into the soil through their roots — because feeding the soil community is, from the plant's perspective, the most important investment it can make.

📺 Last Month’s YouTube Spotlight

Thanks for reading. The chicks send their regards, in their own way, and I hope wherever you are in the world the season is being kind to you. If you're in the North, enjoy the asparagus. If you're in the South, get the garlic in soon. Either way, keep something growing in the ground if you can!

Until next month,
Sam