The new mother has the run of the barn. As you can see in this picture, we spared no expense in decorating the nursery. Finest barbed wire bales we could find.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
Happy Family
The hen finally adopted four chicks. We discovered one dead chick in the doghouse (possibly smothered by the dog's blanket) and the other five were probably eaten by something. Here's the happy family:
The new mother has the run of the barn. As you can see in this picture, we spared no expense in decorating the nursery. Finest barbed wire bales we could find.
The new mother has the run of the barn. As you can see in this picture, we spared no expense in decorating the nursery. Finest barbed wire bales we could find.
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
More broody hens
The ladies are really thinking babies right now. We had TWO girls trying to hatch eggs in the stroller, often at the same time.
Here's one of them:
It was hysterical to see them in there, one on top of the other. One time, one had her wing over the other, like they were sisters, in this motherhood thing together. :-)
Unfortunately, hatching chicks in a stroller is not so great for chicks... nowhere to go to catch a breath of fresh air. Not to mention the fact that these hens weren't the most attentive moms and would hop off only to come back to an empty stroller thanks to the egg-stealing dogs. At last we took the hens out and folded up the stroller. This was not enough of a deterrence, as you can see:
The stroller is now in the barn and the hens are looking for other places to brood. There's one girl in the hen house that seems to have decided to send roots into the floor, so I suspect she's got babies on the mind.
I can understand the feeling; spring does make one long for something soft and little, doesn't it?
Here's one of them:
It was hysterical to see them in there, one on top of the other. One time, one had her wing over the other, like they were sisters, in this motherhood thing together. :-)
Unfortunately, hatching chicks in a stroller is not so great for chicks... nowhere to go to catch a breath of fresh air. Not to mention the fact that these hens weren't the most attentive moms and would hop off only to come back to an empty stroller thanks to the egg-stealing dogs. At last we took the hens out and folded up the stroller. This was not enough of a deterrence, as you can see:
The stroller is now in the barn and the hens are looking for other places to brood. There's one girl in the hen house that seems to have decided to send roots into the floor, so I suspect she's got babies on the mind.
I can understand the feeling; spring does make one long for something soft and little, doesn't it?
Saturday, May 28, 2005
Chicks in the Barn
Yesterday morning all 10 chicks were still alive, but Mama Hen was pecking at them so they were keeping their distance most of the time. Here they all are in the dog house:
You can see one little cutie peeking out from under Mama's wing... that was not by choice, she was put there as an experiment. Eventually Mama pecked at her too, so she ran away.
My hope was that by today Mama would have accepted the babies as her own. Unfortunately, she doesn't seem to have, but the babies are doing fairly well nevertheless. We may have lost two, because this morning's count was 8. Most of them were out of the dog house running around the barn, so the lost two may have been hiding, or may have wandered out of the barn and been eaten. :-(
They are 2 weeks old and have enough feathers that they can fly short distances. They are so cute!
Stephen said, "I can just see it now. They get to be 4 weeks old (teenaged chickens), and they're gonna be saying 'You can't tell me what to do. You're not my REAL mother.' And the hen will say, 'Your REAL mother was just a hatchery egg laying tramp!'".
You can see one little cutie peeking out from under Mama's wing... that was not by choice, she was put there as an experiment. Eventually Mama pecked at her too, so she ran away.
My hope was that by today Mama would have accepted the babies as her own. Unfortunately, she doesn't seem to have, but the babies are doing fairly well nevertheless. We may have lost two, because this morning's count was 8. Most of them were out of the dog house running around the barn, so the lost two may have been hiding, or may have wandered out of the barn and been eaten. :-(
They are 2 weeks old and have enough feathers that they can fly short distances. They are so cute!
Stephen said, "I can just see it now. They get to be 4 weeks old (teenaged chickens), and they're gonna be saying 'You can't tell me what to do. You're not my REAL mother.' And the hen will say, 'Your REAL mother was just a hatchery egg laying tramp!'".
Thursday, May 26, 2005
Chick Saga
The chick who hatched died. Disappeared. Without a trace. So did all the eggs under the hen. We suspect the dogs.
The hen kept sitting, despite her lack of eggs and chicks, so today I went and bought 10 Araucana type chicks.
Remember how I said "No more livestock in the house"? Well....
Yup, back in the tub. Bit of a softie here.
Stephen moved the dog house the hen was nesting in into a dog-proof barn during the day, and after dark we went down there to slide the chicks under the hen. To our surprise she was gone. She had returned to the carport, under which (in that dog house, mind you) she had been hunkered down for a good month. So we plucked her sleepy hen self off the roost she'd not slept on for ages, brought her, and the 10 chicks, down to the barn, and tucked them in in the dog house.
During the walk in the big Rubbermaid tub she had already gathered 4 of them under her wings by the time we got to the barn, so I am hopeful.
Stay tuned!
The hen kept sitting, despite her lack of eggs and chicks, so today I went and bought 10 Araucana type chicks.
Remember how I said "No more livestock in the house"? Well....
Yup, back in the tub. Bit of a softie here.
Stephen moved the dog house the hen was nesting in into a dog-proof barn during the day, and after dark we went down there to slide the chicks under the hen. To our surprise she was gone. She had returned to the carport, under which (in that dog house, mind you) she had been hunkered down for a good month. So we plucked her sleepy hen self off the roost she'd not slept on for ages, brought her, and the 10 chicks, down to the barn, and tucked them in in the dog house.
During the walk in the big Rubbermaid tub she had already gathered 4 of them under her wings by the time we got to the barn, so I am hopeful.
Stay tuned!
Tuesday, May 24, 2005
Duck Update
The ducks are fully feathered out and quite pretty. We keep trying to get them to live at the pond, but they make their way back up to the house. So we are herding them down in the morning when we go to see the goats, and using the opportunity to have the goats eat away at the poison ivy around the pond. It's fun, actually. Never thought of myself as a duck herder, but I actually enjoy it!
Here they are the very first time they swam in the pond...
Thinking about it ("That's the biggest bowl of water I've ever seen!"):
Fully in and eating weeds ("Yum! Yum! Hey! My feet aren't touching ground! Hey! This is fun!"):
They have done a nice job cleaning up the weeds around the edge of the pond. This kind (Pekin) does not eat fish. Between the ducks and goats the pond is really tidying up. Now I've decided I want some sheep so I don't have to spend three evenings just to mow the area we currently consider our "yard"!
Here they are the very first time they swam in the pond...
Thinking about it ("That's the biggest bowl of water I've ever seen!"):
Fully in and eating weeds ("Yum! Yum! Hey! My feet aren't touching ground! Hey! This is fun!"):
They have done a nice job cleaning up the weeds around the edge of the pond. This kind (Pekin) does not eat fish. Between the ducks and goats the pond is really tidying up. Now I've decided I want some sheep so I don't have to spend three evenings just to mow the area we currently consider our "yard"!
Monday, May 23, 2005
Baby Chick
One of the hens hatched out a chick today in the dog house. Very exciting for all of us!
Unfortunately the pictures came out really blurry:
Unfortunately the pictures came out really blurry:
Monday, May 16, 2005
Remembering Fred
Old Fred, my parents' elderly dog who came to live out his golden years on the farm, has left us. We believe he has died, but we are not completely sure. He disappeared two weeks and two days ago. We have seen no sign of him, and we have not found him in "doggie jail".
Fred came into my parents' life in dramatic fashion some 10 years ago. We were living with them as we transitioned from RI to TX, and with us had come our first baby, our lab mutt Lucy. Lucy was 4 at the time, and as I recall it happening, one weekend afternoon my father was sitting out on the porch reading the paper when Lucy started barking at the porch. Suddenly out from under the porch burst big fluffy Fred.
Fred hung around, despite being discouraged (especially by my dad), and eventually managed to worm his way into even Dad's dog-opposing heart. The vet figured he was quite a bit older than Lucy, that he had been well cared for at some point in his life, and that he had probably been abandoned. My parents' search for his owner was unsuccessful, and he became part of the family. He was named "Fred" at the suggestion of my parents' dear friends visiting from England. Apparently "Fred" is like the British equivalent of "Rover": a generic name for a dog.
Fred and Lucy fell in love. They were miserable when separated, which they usually were since not long after Fred appeared we moved 2 hours west of my parents. Eventually we decided that we'd all be happiest if Fred and Lucy lived together, so they began a nomadic life of visits with us and visits with my parents.
Fred had his share of adventure. We have no idea what kind of stories he'd have told of his life before my parents, but while in their care he was hit in their driveway by a visiting teenager backing a car out in the dark (broken leg) as well as attacked by something, the vets believe a cougar, that left him quite torn up. He had a lengthy recovery from both.
Lucy died a year and a half ago, at close to 14, and Fred was miserable. By then we owned some of our land but not the house, so we brought her body up here to bury in the pines. We brought Fred with us; it just seemed like the right thing to do. He didn't seem too affected by her body; he was almost disinterested. But when we got back to my parents' he fell into a long depression. He hardly ate anything for the first week. He would lie around and whimper; it was heartbreaking.
Fred was an old old dog. We don't know how old, but if he was even the same age as Lucy (and the vet thought he was older) he would have been 15 now. He had gone from jet black to quite grey in the face, had hip trouble and was a, well, very audible breather. When he came here in December, Molly was in heat and just about killed Fred with her constant demands for his attentions. He did his best, and in fact almost seemed to drop a few years thanks to Molly's birth by fire into the rigors of farm life. A lot is demanded of a farm dog... one must be fit, you know.
While he lived here he spent most of his time lying in the dirt or barking at cows. When he could get up from the dirt he would make his way to the pond for a swim sometimes, but mostly he liked to bark at cows. He was not the smartest dog, nor the sweetest smelling (in fact Fred had an odor problem that defied even my parents' local pet spa). But he was loyal and constant... the giver and receiver of much love over the years.
Thank you Fred. You were a good dog.
Fred came into my parents' life in dramatic fashion some 10 years ago. We were living with them as we transitioned from RI to TX, and with us had come our first baby, our lab mutt Lucy. Lucy was 4 at the time, and as I recall it happening, one weekend afternoon my father was sitting out on the porch reading the paper when Lucy started barking at the porch. Suddenly out from under the porch burst big fluffy Fred.
Fred hung around, despite being discouraged (especially by my dad), and eventually managed to worm his way into even Dad's dog-opposing heart. The vet figured he was quite a bit older than Lucy, that he had been well cared for at some point in his life, and that he had probably been abandoned. My parents' search for his owner was unsuccessful, and he became part of the family. He was named "Fred" at the suggestion of my parents' dear friends visiting from England. Apparently "Fred" is like the British equivalent of "Rover": a generic name for a dog.
Fred and Lucy fell in love. They were miserable when separated, which they usually were since not long after Fred appeared we moved 2 hours west of my parents. Eventually we decided that we'd all be happiest if Fred and Lucy lived together, so they began a nomadic life of visits with us and visits with my parents.
Fred had his share of adventure. We have no idea what kind of stories he'd have told of his life before my parents, but while in their care he was hit in their driveway by a visiting teenager backing a car out in the dark (broken leg) as well as attacked by something, the vets believe a cougar, that left him quite torn up. He had a lengthy recovery from both.
Lucy died a year and a half ago, at close to 14, and Fred was miserable. By then we owned some of our land but not the house, so we brought her body up here to bury in the pines. We brought Fred with us; it just seemed like the right thing to do. He didn't seem too affected by her body; he was almost disinterested. But when we got back to my parents' he fell into a long depression. He hardly ate anything for the first week. He would lie around and whimper; it was heartbreaking.
Fred was an old old dog. We don't know how old, but if he was even the same age as Lucy (and the vet thought he was older) he would have been 15 now. He had gone from jet black to quite grey in the face, had hip trouble and was a, well, very audible breather. When he came here in December, Molly was in heat and just about killed Fred with her constant demands for his attentions. He did his best, and in fact almost seemed to drop a few years thanks to Molly's birth by fire into the rigors of farm life. A lot is demanded of a farm dog... one must be fit, you know.
While he lived here he spent most of his time lying in the dirt or barking at cows. When he could get up from the dirt he would make his way to the pond for a swim sometimes, but mostly he liked to bark at cows. He was not the smartest dog, nor the sweetest smelling (in fact Fred had an odor problem that defied even my parents' local pet spa). But he was loyal and constant... the giver and receiver of much love over the years.
Thank you Fred. You were a good dog.
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Singing the ineffable
It is impossible for me to convey the emotions I feel as I walk through our fields of flowers, picking deep black ripe dewberries while our goats and dogs run and roll and leap circles round me.
I have moments when the feelings are so overwhelming I have to stand still, then find myself gasping as my body realizes I haven't been breathing. Other times I catch myself staring at the animals with a goofy grin on my face. And tears, yes, tears.
Along with the now usual gift of an evening walk with the goats to pick dewberries, tonight I discovered a huge squash plant growing out of our compost (a "volunteer"). It is so big I can't imagine why I didn't notice it before. Tonight I saw it in an orange glow, as the sun set behind me... a glorious backdrop to grazing horses. A short while later, while cleaning out the truck (how is that small children can destroy order in any space so quickly?), I saw a flash out of the corner of my eye, and turning, I saw it again... my first firefly sighting on our farm.
What I realize is that it truly is impossible to convey the force of these emotions that surge so tangibly that I feel as if my chest is going to burst. The closest word I can come up with is joy. It is pure, completely without pretence. I can't paint a picture of how I feel, I can't tell you with mere words. Perhaps singing is the only way I can find to put it out there.
I find it interesting that I feel compelled to even TRY to put it out there. It feels like it doesn't belong to me, this exquisite experience. I feel as if I am in the presence of God, every second I walk on our land. I know I am in the presence of God all the time, why is it so much more obvious to me when I am out in our fields?
What would I sing? Would I sing of the changing colors of the flower blanket in our fields? Last week red and white, this week pink and yellow and fuschia. Each flower perfect, all the flowers together glorious...
Would I sing of my reluctant releasing of my desire to plant food for us this season, as I realized that learning to care for all these animals was already enough for this year... only to find unexpected bounty at every turn... berries, squash, wild onions, grapes...
Would I sing of how I always wanted to be a mother, and now in the middle of living it I am awed by the life that screams out of our two beautiful curly haired children; life that I helped bring forth but that is so far beyond me, so decidedly other, so forward moving, so precious...
Would it be about the ever changing sunset? The sound of hundreds of tree frogs wishing each other good night? The feel of warm eggs in my palm? The smell of the cat as I kiss her before sending her off with the advice "Go catch a mouse!"?
I don't know, I just don't. The list would go on and on... my dream of raising goats coming true; finding out that true love really exists, and finding it with the man I married; being able to give my friends fresh eggs and bouquets of wildflowers to take home after feeding them home-cooked food...
But those are all about me, and that's not my point.
I guess in the end, it would be a song of worship. And in a language I don't speak all that well yet, but I think I am being taught.
I have moments when the feelings are so overwhelming I have to stand still, then find myself gasping as my body realizes I haven't been breathing. Other times I catch myself staring at the animals with a goofy grin on my face. And tears, yes, tears.
Along with the now usual gift of an evening walk with the goats to pick dewberries, tonight I discovered a huge squash plant growing out of our compost (a "volunteer"). It is so big I can't imagine why I didn't notice it before. Tonight I saw it in an orange glow, as the sun set behind me... a glorious backdrop to grazing horses. A short while later, while cleaning out the truck (how is that small children can destroy order in any space so quickly?), I saw a flash out of the corner of my eye, and turning, I saw it again... my first firefly sighting on our farm.
What I realize is that it truly is impossible to convey the force of these emotions that surge so tangibly that I feel as if my chest is going to burst. The closest word I can come up with is joy. It is pure, completely without pretence. I can't paint a picture of how I feel, I can't tell you with mere words. Perhaps singing is the only way I can find to put it out there.
I find it interesting that I feel compelled to even TRY to put it out there. It feels like it doesn't belong to me, this exquisite experience. I feel as if I am in the presence of God, every second I walk on our land. I know I am in the presence of God all the time, why is it so much more obvious to me when I am out in our fields?
What would I sing? Would I sing of the changing colors of the flower blanket in our fields? Last week red and white, this week pink and yellow and fuschia. Each flower perfect, all the flowers together glorious...
Would I sing of my reluctant releasing of my desire to plant food for us this season, as I realized that learning to care for all these animals was already enough for this year... only to find unexpected bounty at every turn... berries, squash, wild onions, grapes...
Would I sing of how I always wanted to be a mother, and now in the middle of living it I am awed by the life that screams out of our two beautiful curly haired children; life that I helped bring forth but that is so far beyond me, so decidedly other, so forward moving, so precious...
Would it be about the ever changing sunset? The sound of hundreds of tree frogs wishing each other good night? The feel of warm eggs in my palm? The smell of the cat as I kiss her before sending her off with the advice "Go catch a mouse!"?
I don't know, I just don't. The list would go on and on... my dream of raising goats coming true; finding out that true love really exists, and finding it with the man I married; being able to give my friends fresh eggs and bouquets of wildflowers to take home after feeding them home-cooked food...
But those are all about me, and that's not my point.
I guess in the end, it would be a song of worship. And in a language I don't speak all that well yet, but I think I am being taught.
"Store Wars"
The folks who brought us The Meatrix have a new movie out! Store Wars is brilliant! Check it out and send it to all your friends.
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
Thirty Six... and More
36 chickens (and more) running around our house
36 eggs (and more) each week to eat and share
36 dewberries (and way more) ripe each day on our land
36 acres (plus 4) to wander through and marvel at
36 cow patties (and more) to weave around walking to the corral
36 splashes of water (and more) from happy happy ducks
36 hours a day (and more) of love needed by the dog
36 hugs a day (and more) from wild and muddy kids
36 close misses (and more) as the goats race to catch up with me
36 faster beats of my heart (and more) when I hear the pound of horse hooves gleefully galloping by in play
36 holes in boxes (and more) where Miss Kitty has chewed
36 kinds of wildflowers (and more) decorating the farm
36 kisses from my beloved (and more) soothe my heart
36 years of a joyful life behind me... and more to come...
I am 36 years old today, and it looks like this year is going to be the best yet!
36 eggs (and more) each week to eat and share
36 dewberries (and way more) ripe each day on our land
36 acres (plus 4) to wander through and marvel at
36 cow patties (and more) to weave around walking to the corral
36 splashes of water (and more) from happy happy ducks
36 hours a day (and more) of love needed by the dog
36 hugs a day (and more) from wild and muddy kids
36 close misses (and more) as the goats race to catch up with me
36 faster beats of my heart (and more) when I hear the pound of horse hooves gleefully galloping by in play
36 holes in boxes (and more) where Miss Kitty has chewed
36 kinds of wildflowers (and more) decorating the farm
36 kisses from my beloved (and more) soothe my heart
36 years of a joyful life behind me... and more to come...
I am 36 years old today, and it looks like this year is going to be the best yet!
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Wonderful goats
The goats have slipped into our lives seamlessly. I was nervous on Sunday because Snowy's digestive system was clearly off, but her "issues" resolved quickly. In their previous home they were in a very small yard and all their food was brought to them. Here they have access to a lot of browse and weeds, that they are really enjoying. Snowy's tummies just needed some time to adjust to her new diet. I limited their time out of the pen for the first few days to make it easier on everyone, but now they are free to roam within a large fenced area.
The family from whom we bought the goats is a sweet and quiet family. The goats seem to have been infused with these characteristics. They are lovely.
This evening the children and I went for a walk around the pond to see if any of the dewberries (wild blackberries) are ripe. We did find a few, which means a trip to Dewberry Hill, on the other side of our property, is in order! Yum!
On a whim, I decided to bring the goats with us. They follow us everywhere and I wasn't really concerned they would run off. Happily, I was right.
Here they are, with their first look at the pond (for Sylvester, likely the first time in his life he has seen a body of water larger than a bucket):
I hade read that goats eat, and enjoy, poison ivy! Proof positive:
Finally a non-chemical method that does not entail long hours of me at the end of a shovel!
I love our goats.
The family from whom we bought the goats is a sweet and quiet family. The goats seem to have been infused with these characteristics. They are lovely.
This evening the children and I went for a walk around the pond to see if any of the dewberries (wild blackberries) are ripe. We did find a few, which means a trip to Dewberry Hill, on the other side of our property, is in order! Yum!
On a whim, I decided to bring the goats with us. They follow us everywhere and I wasn't really concerned they would run off. Happily, I was right.
Here they are, with their first look at the pond (for Sylvester, likely the first time in his life he has seen a body of water larger than a bucket):
I hade read that goats eat, and enjoy, poison ivy! Proof positive:
Finally a non-chemical method that does not entail long hours of me at the end of a shovel!
I love our goats.
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
"Today we got goats..."
This blog post was a family effort, that took several days. We actually got the goats on Saturday the 23rd....
Farmer Boy (age 8):
Today we got goats. They're pretty scary. They bolt at you real fast and jump as if they were going to jump right on top of you and kill you. Cows aren't very scary to me. Horses aren't very scary to me. Goats: too scary for me. The goats chase the dogs! Except for one: Fred the stupidest of all of them.
The Princess (age 3):
Today we got goats.
Stephen (age 38):
Today we got goats. I wonder if we'll get to eat them.
(general response of rest of family: bulging eyes, gaping mouths then cacophony of horror)
Patti (age 35):
Today we got goats. When we went to pick them up I felt like the first time mother being sent home with a newborn, feeling undeserving, unworthy, and underprepared. :-) The long drive home meant I couldn't check on them for over an hour, and I was quite sure they'd be dead by the time we got home. Of course they weren't.
When we let them out of the trailer, the dogs were very curious and annoying and made the goats nervous. They stayed by my side, or ran to me if they had moved off and were startled. I couldn't believe it! They were sweet and gentle and clearly very attached to humans.
Snowy and Sylvester are both a year old. Sylvester is a wether, purchased for company for Snowy. Here he is:
I am thinking about trying to train him to pull a cart, but I am not rushing into anything. He is very sweet, and more cautious than Snowy.
Snowy may be bred, but is still not showing signs of it. She was exposed to two different bucks about a month apart. She could birth as late as the end of June. In that case she wouldn't show clear signs of being pregnant for another month. As a (hopefully) first freshener, it is not surprising that she is not showing, even if she is bred. Also, she was bred kind of young, so she is likely to only carry one kid this time. Here's Snowy:
Already I like having goats even more than I thought I would (and if you have spent any time with me, you know I was a little over the top about wanting to get them!)
Farmer Boy (age 8):
Today we got goats. They're pretty scary. They bolt at you real fast and jump as if they were going to jump right on top of you and kill you. Cows aren't very scary to me. Horses aren't very scary to me. Goats: too scary for me. The goats chase the dogs! Except for one: Fred the stupidest of all of them.
The Princess (age 3):
Today we got goats.
Stephen (age 38):
Today we got goats. I wonder if we'll get to eat them.
(general response of rest of family: bulging eyes, gaping mouths then cacophony of horror)
Patti (age 35):
Today we got goats. When we went to pick them up I felt like the first time mother being sent home with a newborn, feeling undeserving, unworthy, and underprepared. :-) The long drive home meant I couldn't check on them for over an hour, and I was quite sure they'd be dead by the time we got home. Of course they weren't.
When we let them out of the trailer, the dogs were very curious and annoying and made the goats nervous. They stayed by my side, or ran to me if they had moved off and were startled. I couldn't believe it! They were sweet and gentle and clearly very attached to humans.
Snowy and Sylvester are both a year old. Sylvester is a wether, purchased for company for Snowy. Here he is:
I am thinking about trying to train him to pull a cart, but I am not rushing into anything. He is very sweet, and more cautious than Snowy.
Snowy may be bred, but is still not showing signs of it. She was exposed to two different bucks about a month apart. She could birth as late as the end of June. In that case she wouldn't show clear signs of being pregnant for another month. As a (hopefully) first freshener, it is not surprising that she is not showing, even if she is bred. Also, she was bred kind of young, so she is likely to only carry one kid this time. Here's Snowy:
Already I like having goats even more than I thought I would (and if you have spent any time with me, you know I was a little over the top about wanting to get them!)
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
This is my life
When I was a college student, I was mesmerized by a photo that captured the kiss of a walking couple. What I loved about it was that it highlighted to me that our lives are in many ways a series of moments, ever moving from one to the next.
A "photojournal" of 24 hours in my life...
We get home from a long day away in the big city visiting friends. I hear a strange noise. I realize it is coming from behind our barn, and is likely on the neighbor's property. I dismiss it as the neighbor digging holes for fences. Farmer Boy, however, leaps into action. He adamantly inists that it is aliens, who are disguised as dogs. The only way I can convince him to turn around and come in for dinner is by entrusting Molly the real dog with the responsibility of taking Fred and Luke (the other real dogs) with her to conquer the aliens. To my amazement, after my solemn commission, she trots away from me in the direction of the sound.
As we walk back to the house I simultaneously hear:
Farmer Boy: "I've GOT IT! They're alien echo-ologists!"
The Princess: "And then the butterfly in the pink net flew away."
Many alternate universes here on the farm.
{CLICK}
I try for 15 minutes to figure out where the cat peed only to discover that the smell was from the irises I cut from the yard, that are sitting on the table.
{CLICK}
Walking through the mud room, I find a yellow plastic toy firefighter's hat upside down on a chair, with 7 eggs in it. A creative egg collecting basket.
{CLICK}
I hear from the front, "I found Trill! I found Trill!!". I open the door to be presented with a chicken, sure enough, our long lost Trill!! She was our first injured animal on the farm, and she had seemed to vanish one day. I had not seen her for 3 months. But there she was.
You may wonder how this could be... so do I. We still have so many chickens it is hard to see them all at once, or distinguish them from each other. But there she was, with a little limp, and a strange crusty thigh, neatly hidden with feathers. It was definitely Trill.
I have no idea what makes me more or less attached to an animal. The chickens are on my nerves right now because of the poop that is everywhere, and because I can't plant anything until we build a garden fence (they eat everything, except for the irises... ohhhh, maybe I know why they leave THEM). But I spent 10 minutes watching Trill and taking pictures of her. In the laundry room. And she actually didn't poop (miracle!). It made my day to find her healthy and whole.
Injured baby Trill being offered some molasses water:
Trill in my laundry room yesterday:
{CLICK}
I have to wait to turn off the car when we get to the park for our homeschool group, because the Princess and I are jamming to the beat of "Water for the Elephants" by Dan Zanes.
{CLICK}
I open the trunk of the SUV at the library to put our huge bag of books in, and have to squeeze the books between empty recycling crates with a violin in them, and two 50 lb bags of goat feed.
{CLICK}
[WARNING: If you don't have a farm this may gross you out; if you do have a farm, you're crazy]
With herculean effort, I manage to heave a plastic sheet filled with soggy nasty pine shavings out of the tub, into a big plastic container, and drag it to the compost outside. For "fun" I weigh myself holding the thing. No wonder it's next to impossible... I'm leaning over the edge of a huge tub and lifting out 75 gloopy stinky pounds of pine shavings on a wiggly plastic sheet. Back trauma, here I come.
You know that separation of church and state thing? This one has put me over the edge: time for a more firm separation of house and farm. No more livestock in the house. UGH!
{CLICK}
I complete my day with a fine bedtime reading of "The Good Little Bad Little Pig", who is also a dirty little clean little pig. Hmmm, that rings true for me.
{FADE TO BLACK}
A "photojournal" of 24 hours in my life...
We get home from a long day away in the big city visiting friends. I hear a strange noise. I realize it is coming from behind our barn, and is likely on the neighbor's property. I dismiss it as the neighbor digging holes for fences. Farmer Boy, however, leaps into action. He adamantly inists that it is aliens, who are disguised as dogs. The only way I can convince him to turn around and come in for dinner is by entrusting Molly the real dog with the responsibility of taking Fred and Luke (the other real dogs) with her to conquer the aliens. To my amazement, after my solemn commission, she trots away from me in the direction of the sound.
As we walk back to the house I simultaneously hear:
Farmer Boy: "I've GOT IT! They're alien echo-ologists!"
The Princess: "And then the butterfly in the pink net flew away."
Many alternate universes here on the farm.
{CLICK}
I try for 15 minutes to figure out where the cat peed only to discover that the smell was from the irises I cut from the yard, that are sitting on the table.
{CLICK}
Walking through the mud room, I find a yellow plastic toy firefighter's hat upside down on a chair, with 7 eggs in it. A creative egg collecting basket.
{CLICK}
I hear from the front, "I found Trill! I found Trill!!". I open the door to be presented with a chicken, sure enough, our long lost Trill!! She was our first injured animal on the farm, and she had seemed to vanish one day. I had not seen her for 3 months. But there she was.
You may wonder how this could be... so do I. We still have so many chickens it is hard to see them all at once, or distinguish them from each other. But there she was, with a little limp, and a strange crusty thigh, neatly hidden with feathers. It was definitely Trill.
I have no idea what makes me more or less attached to an animal. The chickens are on my nerves right now because of the poop that is everywhere, and because I can't plant anything until we build a garden fence (they eat everything, except for the irises... ohhhh, maybe I know why they leave THEM). But I spent 10 minutes watching Trill and taking pictures of her. In the laundry room. And she actually didn't poop (miracle!). It made my day to find her healthy and whole.
Injured baby Trill being offered some molasses water:
Trill in my laundry room yesterday:
{CLICK}
I have to wait to turn off the car when we get to the park for our homeschool group, because the Princess and I are jamming to the beat of "Water for the Elephants" by Dan Zanes.
{CLICK}
I open the trunk of the SUV at the library to put our huge bag of books in, and have to squeeze the books between empty recycling crates with a violin in them, and two 50 lb bags of goat feed.
{CLICK}
[WARNING: If you don't have a farm this may gross you out; if you do have a farm, you're crazy]
With herculean effort, I manage to heave a plastic sheet filled with soggy nasty pine shavings out of the tub, into a big plastic container, and drag it to the compost outside. For "fun" I weigh myself holding the thing. No wonder it's next to impossible... I'm leaning over the edge of a huge tub and lifting out 75 gloopy stinky pounds of pine shavings on a wiggly plastic sheet. Back trauma, here I come.
You know that separation of church and state thing? This one has put me over the edge: time for a more firm separation of house and farm. No more livestock in the house. UGH!
{CLICK}
I complete my day with a fine bedtime reading of "The Good Little Bad Little Pig", who is also a dirty little clean little pig. Hmmm, that rings true for me.
{FADE TO BLACK}
Saturday, April 16, 2005
Super Hero Husband
I am married to a wonderful man. He just finished a week of vacation; a much deserved vacation. The man does not take vacation. He has so many vacation hours accrued for his off-farm job, they are no longer accruing.
So what did he do on his vacation? Go to Hawaii? Go skiing? Nope, he built fences. He built a lot of fences, and did it all by himself, and with no prior experience. They look AWESOME!
And now we can get goats! A week from today, on my mom's 62nd birthday, *I* get the present... two new goats!
Here are some pictures of my hero...
You can get very colorful when you have a three year old daughter:
You can also be a fierce dragon:
Working on the shed roof (don't fall!):
Hard at work on a conference call with colleagues (honest!):
One of my all time favorites, I call this "Mesmerized":
I love you, Stephen Brown! Thank you!!
So what did he do on his vacation? Go to Hawaii? Go skiing? Nope, he built fences. He built a lot of fences, and did it all by himself, and with no prior experience. They look AWESOME!
And now we can get goats! A week from today, on my mom's 62nd birthday, *I* get the present... two new goats!
Here are some pictures of my hero...
You can get very colorful when you have a three year old daughter:
You can also be a fierce dragon:
Working on the shed roof (don't fall!):
Hard at work on a conference call with colleagues (honest!):
One of my all time favorites, I call this "Mesmerized":
I love you, Stephen Brown! Thank you!!
Saturday, April 09, 2005
Happy 70th Birthday Dad!
My awesome father, Bob Duce, is turning 70 today.
"Awesome?" you say. "Tell me more!"
Okay. He is in Australia right now, with my equally awesome mother, embarking on a four month driving adventure. Yup. 7-0 today. Heading to the Australian outback.
Rock on Dad!! "And many morrrrrrrre....!"
"Awesome?" you say. "Tell me more!"
Okay. He is in Australia right now, with my equally awesome mother, embarking on a four month driving adventure. Yup. 7-0 today. Heading to the Australian outback.
Rock on Dad!! "And many morrrrrrrre....!"
Whacky birth story
Totally off farm topic here...
You may have heard of this but it was news to me:
A woman in Romania gave birth to twins from two different uteruses 59 days apart. Wow!
You may have heard of this but it was news to me:
A woman in Romania gave birth to twins from two different uteruses 59 days apart. Wow!
Thursday, April 07, 2005
Ducklings
Seems there are many creatures destined to be our teachers. Each new family of animal that comes into our lives begins with a fearless band of warriors ready to train us in how to care for them. At their expense.
The ducklings were a bit of an impromptu purchase. We had planned to eventually get ducks, but hadn't really talked about WHEN, until the Saturday before Easter. The conversation went something like this:
"Shall we get ducklings to surprise the kids?"
"Yeah, if the store is still open when I'm done with this I'll go down and get some."
You'd think we were buying ice cream, not five living creatures.
So they come home in a little box, with instructions for baby chicks. Box says on it "Chicks and Ducklings." The feed bag says "Chicks and Ducklings." Great, we know how to take care of baby chicks. No problem.
Problem.
Ducks are messy. I mean REALLY messy. They need water mixed with their food in order to swallow, which means that when they drink, they have food in their mouth, and the backwash pretty quickly "nastifies" the water. They also like to walk in the water. And dunk their heads in the water. And their poop is very, um wet. And squirts. MESSY.
They also grow really fast (at least this breed does). So they've outgrown their Rubbermaid tub already. They would have even earlier if not for the unfortunate early demise of one, at the hands of that menace to all waterfowl, that poultricidal three year old, The Princess.
Overheard talking to her grandmother:
"Well, I squeezed its neck a little too tight and it quacked really loudly and wouldn't stop, so I threw it on the ground a little too not gently and it died."
You know that thing I said about the fearless band of warriors? Exception here. Ducks are not fearless. Not at all. One is almost tempted to offer them valium they are so highstrung. I suppose given the aforementioned incident one can hardly blame them.
And while I joke about it here, I was really upset about it, which was compounded by the fact that the dead duckling was left outside alone for all of three minutes, and when I went out to bury it was already gone (dog undoubtedly). Despite the fact that chickens die at our hands on a regular basis, this was different and I'd really wanted to bury it. I also blame myself for not supervising the children with the ducklings. In one of those common farm drama coincidences, as I was cleaning the duck tub and the kids were taking care of them, our back fence neighbor came and told us our cattle were on his property, so I walked to the back with Stephen to look for them. I returned minutes later to a dead duckling and four VERY stressed live ducklings.
I have looked up duckling information, and even on the web, it has been scanty. I still have not found definitive advice for when to let them live at the pond, although I have surmised. I did find a good general site early on that the children enjoyed, called All About Ducks for Kids.
Last night I finally found this quite useful site on duckling care, and realized it was time to let them have a daily swim.
Here are the first two swimmers:
They were so happy. Absolutely delightful to watch. They are in a big rubbermaid tub (their former home), and the green stuff floating around is little pieces of lettuce. They love to "dabble". These little birds, who had never swum before, took to it like a duck to water. OH! ;-)
We sifted threw a number of ideas for places for them to live for the next few weeks (they still need some temperature control and protection from predators until they are bigger). In the end we settled on the bathtub. The lovely big jacuzzi tub that doesn't work. I lined it with plastic left from moving mattresses, poured pine shavings in, and voila! Our new and improved Chez Duckling:
Note that the water is already murky, the food is knocked over, and the pine shavings are rather "soiled". This set up was pristine four hours before this picture was taken. They don't waste much time.
I am enjoying them greatly, extensive poop cleaning chores notwithstanding.
The ducklings were a bit of an impromptu purchase. We had planned to eventually get ducks, but hadn't really talked about WHEN, until the Saturday before Easter. The conversation went something like this:
"Shall we get ducklings to surprise the kids?"
"Yeah, if the store is still open when I'm done with this I'll go down and get some."
You'd think we were buying ice cream, not five living creatures.
So they come home in a little box, with instructions for baby chicks. Box says on it "Chicks and Ducklings." The feed bag says "Chicks and Ducklings." Great, we know how to take care of baby chicks. No problem.
Problem.
Ducks are messy. I mean REALLY messy. They need water mixed with their food in order to swallow, which means that when they drink, they have food in their mouth, and the backwash pretty quickly "nastifies" the water. They also like to walk in the water. And dunk their heads in the water. And their poop is very, um wet. And squirts. MESSY.
They also grow really fast (at least this breed does). So they've outgrown their Rubbermaid tub already. They would have even earlier if not for the unfortunate early demise of one, at the hands of that menace to all waterfowl, that poultricidal three year old, The Princess.
Overheard talking to her grandmother:
"Well, I squeezed its neck a little too tight and it quacked really loudly and wouldn't stop, so I threw it on the ground a little too not gently and it died."
You know that thing I said about the fearless band of warriors? Exception here. Ducks are not fearless. Not at all. One is almost tempted to offer them valium they are so highstrung. I suppose given the aforementioned incident one can hardly blame them.
And while I joke about it here, I was really upset about it, which was compounded by the fact that the dead duckling was left outside alone for all of three minutes, and when I went out to bury it was already gone (dog undoubtedly). Despite the fact that chickens die at our hands on a regular basis, this was different and I'd really wanted to bury it. I also blame myself for not supervising the children with the ducklings. In one of those common farm drama coincidences, as I was cleaning the duck tub and the kids were taking care of them, our back fence neighbor came and told us our cattle were on his property, so I walked to the back with Stephen to look for them. I returned minutes later to a dead duckling and four VERY stressed live ducklings.
I have looked up duckling information, and even on the web, it has been scanty. I still have not found definitive advice for when to let them live at the pond, although I have surmised. I did find a good general site early on that the children enjoyed, called All About Ducks for Kids.
Last night I finally found this quite useful site on duckling care, and realized it was time to let them have a daily swim.
Here are the first two swimmers:
They were so happy. Absolutely delightful to watch. They are in a big rubbermaid tub (their former home), and the green stuff floating around is little pieces of lettuce. They love to "dabble". These little birds, who had never swum before, took to it like a duck to water. OH! ;-)
We sifted threw a number of ideas for places for them to live for the next few weeks (they still need some temperature control and protection from predators until they are bigger). In the end we settled on the bathtub. The lovely big jacuzzi tub that doesn't work. I lined it with plastic left from moving mattresses, poured pine shavings in, and voila! Our new and improved Chez Duckling:
Note that the water is already murky, the food is knocked over, and the pine shavings are rather "soiled". This set up was pristine four hours before this picture was taken. They don't waste much time.
I am enjoying them greatly, extensive poop cleaning chores notwithstanding.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves!
We have been killing roosters. As I've mentioned before, we have a lot of them. A week ago Saturday, Stephen killed 8, then last weekend, 10 more. We still have plenty to go.
Some of them are mean. Mean to each other, mean to us, and really mean to the hens. One scratched The Princess pretty badly the other day. I am ready to turn them all into stew. >:-(
One of the interesting things that happened after the first 8 were killed was that the pecking order was confused. A large portion of the hens had taken to congregating under some bushes a field away from the chicken house. A few roosters would hang out with them, but most of the roosters prowled around the chicken house and the back yard. After the first 8 were killed, the hens stopped going to that bush, and split into two big groups, one by the chicken house and one in the front yard. After the next ten roosters were killed, the split was solidified.
The chicken house girls learned a very clever way to keep themselves safe from the incessant attention of the roosters:
They mostly go up the ladder and fly down to the ground, but they sometimes go in and out the window. These girls mostly lay in the house, either in the nest boxes or in a corner. There is one rooster up on the scaffolding in this picture, but that is a pretty rare sight.
The other group is in the front. Remember Queen Suzanne, the Cornish Rock hen with a long history of barely escaping death? As I wrote a few weeks ago, Molly the Australian Shepherd is her self-appointed guardian, chasing off roosters, and even licking her wounds in the early days. For weeks Suzanne spent much of her time under the carport in a dog crate with hay for bedding and food and water, just to keep her safe from roosters and give her a chance to heal. Eventually she was well enough, Molly was vigilant enough, and perhaps the roosters were reduced enough that she wasn't being jumped on constantly, so we stopped putting her in the crate. She had become accustomed to the front by then, and roosted under the carport at night.
Molly expanded her sense of duty to include the hens who started hanging around Suzanne. At first we noticed one faithful RI Red Hen who would show up every day. Lady Robert. Soon the Lady stayed with Suzanne at night under the carport instead of returning to the hen house in back. One day I realized that there were a lot of hens staying in the front, and Molly was defending them so well that only a few roosters ever spent much time out there. These boys continue to visit the front and are about as gentlemanly as roosters can be. The rabble stays in the back, squawking and fighting and strutting about.
It is pretty fascinating to me that Molly and the hens have bonded against the roosters. I suppose I am anthropomorphising here, but the little feminist who lives in the dungeon of my past pipes up: "You go girls!" :-D
In reality, Molly adores me (undeserving though I am), and is very intelligent, so undoubtedly grasped the point when I spent days chasing roosters away from Suzanne at the beginning when I'd let her out to peck around in the grass. Still, it is cool that these critters have figured out how to survive, and more interestingly, how to help each other survive.
The split in the hens has led to some interesting egg laying spots. The scaffolding girls lay in the hen house, as I mentioned. The dog house remains a favorite for the carport girls, an occasional egg is found in a recycling box or straight on the ground, the jogging stroller sees at least two new eggs a day, and the most startling find was a solid 13 eggs on a feed bag! I actually watched a hen lay an egg there, and was shocked when she stood up!! I was careful with that find, smelling each egg before cooking, and had to toss three, so I think we had somehow overlooked this spot for a few days.
Today we broke our previous daily egg record... 23! We have to figure out something... I have 9 dozen eggs in my fridge! Time to start finding customers.
Want some eggs?
Some of them are mean. Mean to each other, mean to us, and really mean to the hens. One scratched The Princess pretty badly the other day. I am ready to turn them all into stew. >:-(
One of the interesting things that happened after the first 8 were killed was that the pecking order was confused. A large portion of the hens had taken to congregating under some bushes a field away from the chicken house. A few roosters would hang out with them, but most of the roosters prowled around the chicken house and the back yard. After the first 8 were killed, the hens stopped going to that bush, and split into two big groups, one by the chicken house and one in the front yard. After the next ten roosters were killed, the split was solidified.
The chicken house girls learned a very clever way to keep themselves safe from the incessant attention of the roosters:
They mostly go up the ladder and fly down to the ground, but they sometimes go in and out the window. These girls mostly lay in the house, either in the nest boxes or in a corner. There is one rooster up on the scaffolding in this picture, but that is a pretty rare sight.
The other group is in the front. Remember Queen Suzanne, the Cornish Rock hen with a long history of barely escaping death? As I wrote a few weeks ago, Molly the Australian Shepherd is her self-appointed guardian, chasing off roosters, and even licking her wounds in the early days. For weeks Suzanne spent much of her time under the carport in a dog crate with hay for bedding and food and water, just to keep her safe from roosters and give her a chance to heal. Eventually she was well enough, Molly was vigilant enough, and perhaps the roosters were reduced enough that she wasn't being jumped on constantly, so we stopped putting her in the crate. She had become accustomed to the front by then, and roosted under the carport at night.
Molly expanded her sense of duty to include the hens who started hanging around Suzanne. At first we noticed one faithful RI Red Hen who would show up every day. Lady Robert. Soon the Lady stayed with Suzanne at night under the carport instead of returning to the hen house in back. One day I realized that there were a lot of hens staying in the front, and Molly was defending them so well that only a few roosters ever spent much time out there. These boys continue to visit the front and are about as gentlemanly as roosters can be. The rabble stays in the back, squawking and fighting and strutting about.
It is pretty fascinating to me that Molly and the hens have bonded against the roosters. I suppose I am anthropomorphising here, but the little feminist who lives in the dungeon of my past pipes up: "You go girls!" :-D
In reality, Molly adores me (undeserving though I am), and is very intelligent, so undoubtedly grasped the point when I spent days chasing roosters away from Suzanne at the beginning when I'd let her out to peck around in the grass. Still, it is cool that these critters have figured out how to survive, and more interestingly, how to help each other survive.
The split in the hens has led to some interesting egg laying spots. The scaffolding girls lay in the hen house, as I mentioned. The dog house remains a favorite for the carport girls, an occasional egg is found in a recycling box or straight on the ground, the jogging stroller sees at least two new eggs a day, and the most startling find was a solid 13 eggs on a feed bag! I actually watched a hen lay an egg there, and was shocked when she stood up!! I was careful with that find, smelling each egg before cooking, and had to toss three, so I think we had somehow overlooked this spot for a few days.
Today we broke our previous daily egg record... 23! We have to figure out something... I have 9 dozen eggs in my fridge! Time to start finding customers.
Want some eggs?
Inspiration in the dirt and on my shoes and on the mud room floor and...
A wee poem
from my heart to yours
inspired today
by my morning chores:
Poop here,
poop there,
poop
poop...
everywhere
from my heart to yours
inspired today
by my morning chores:
Poop here,
poop there,
poop
poop...
everywhere
Tuesday, April 05, 2005
New Additions
We have some new faces around the farm.
The youngster we bought to replace our old bull:
These sweeties were a surprise for the kids on Easter. Our first feed store critter purchase. :-) We're pretty sure they're Pekins.
And... drum roll please... Farmer Brown is so proud to present his newest toy...
He has already used it to move round bales, pull our neighbor's horse trailer out of the mud and shred a badly overgrown pasture. In addition to this work, he found out they sold him the wrong drive shaft, had it replaced, broke the right drive shaft and bought a new one. Oh, and on the way home one tire blew out on the trailer. I mean blew... treads completely stripped. The tire was replaced for free. All this and more in a mere three days! Very industrious. ;-)
The youngster we bought to replace our old bull:
These sweeties were a surprise for the kids on Easter. Our first feed store critter purchase. :-) We're pretty sure they're Pekins.
And... drum roll please... Farmer Brown is so proud to present his newest toy...
He has already used it to move round bales, pull our neighbor's horse trailer out of the mud and shred a badly overgrown pasture. In addition to this work, he found out they sold him the wrong drive shaft, had it replaced, broke the right drive shaft and bought a new one. Oh, and on the way home one tire blew out on the trailer. I mean blew... treads completely stripped. The tire was replaced for free. All this and more in a mere three days! Very industrious. ;-)
Monday, March 21, 2005
Secret Getaway
I kidnapped Stephen on Saturday afternoon. My mom came out to watch the kids, and I whisked him away from his fencing work (much to his surprise) to a bed and breakfast, dinner at a nice restaurant, then live Latin jazz at The Bugle Boy in La Grange, TX. It was a fabulous get away!
First time we have been away alone in four years. We were only gone for 20 hours, but every minute of it was lovely.
It sure is cool to be married to your sweetheart.
First time we have been away alone in four years. We were only gone for 20 hours, but every minute of it was lovely.
It sure is cool to be married to your sweetheart.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Lots of updates on the critters
Boy, this is going to be long. Three and a half weeks is a long time on a farm. Lots has happened.
Here we are, middle of March, and we've already had days of putting sunscreen on and using AC in the car come afternoon. Still feels weird to this Yankee.
After rain and rain and rain (6 straight weekends of rain), we finally have gotten break and have been celebrating glorious SPRING! The wildflowers are going nuts after such a wet winter, and now insanely blue skies and warm sun. The front yard is getting scraggly, and I was going to mow, but after watching one of the horses having a treat and kids picking widlflowers, I decided our old-fashioned style of mowing suits me just fine right now. :-) So I am going to bring a horse out each morning and afternoon to work on the lawn.
Our lovely niece, from upstate New York, visited for three weeks. She is a horse girl (woman! she's 20 now), has been riding since she was 9 and is very gifted with horses. She wants to be a horse trainer. She did awesome things with the horses while she was here, gaining compliments not only from Stephen and me (who are impressed with just about anything) but also from people who actually know and work horses. She was great with the kids, and a few times the three of them made treats for the horses.
Feeding the horses home-made horse cookies:
For us, it has been so helpful to get to know the horses better. We have ridden them, spent a lot more time with them, learned how to saddle them, and just generally feel more comfortable around them. To the extent that one of them has an abcess under his tail that requires twice-daily spraying for three weeks, and I am feeling fairly confident about doing this (yes, standing behind a horse, lifting up his tail and squirting his buns!)
The Horse Whisperer (our niece) left us on Tuesday. We were all very sad to see her go and hope she will come back soon.
The roosters are huge and loud and generally boorish. They have a sex drive that is insane. The whole reproductive thing for chickens is a pretty hit-or-miss affair, so the roosters compensate by doing it A LOT. Unfortunately for the hens, we bought a straight run, meaning we have roughly 30 roosters and 30 hens. These are very bad odds for the hens. We need max 1 rooster per 15 hens. So the roosters need to go. I can't believe it, but I am actually seriously considering killing a few myself, just to get started. There are so many of them, and it is really hard for us to coordinate it with Stephen's work schedule.
You may remember that when we processed the last batch of cornish-rocks, Stephen left one behind because she had a cold. Well she got better and integrated pretty quickly with the other birds. But for some reason the boys find her irresistable. A few weeks ago Stephen discovered her horribly pecked and practically dead. We nursed her inside for a while, but it seems that no matter what she is going to be attacked by the roosters. She now lives a weird life outside under the car port in a dog cage, let out only when there are people around to fend off the roosters who keep jumping on this hen hotty and ripping her scabs off her neck. Farmer Boy has named her Queen Suzanne. If she were not the one he had claimed as his special pet, she would no longer be with us. She has a sweet friend who has been named Lady Robert. Lady Robert is a RI Red hen on the smallish side, who is quite tame. The Princess carries her around for long periods every day. Molly the dog also has taken a liking to Queen Suzanne, and considers it her personal mission to run off all the roosters that approach QS... unless Molly is distracted by something else. So we do not let QS loose unless there is a human around. Here are Molly and Queen Suzanne sharing a meal:
The black stuff on Suzanne's neck is pine tar. Poor baby, it's like she has a target on her neck. Even the pine tar doesn't keep them off her.
The hens have started laying! Yippee! Since they are free range, I am positive there are lots of eggs somewhere that we are missing. I won't be surprised to some day see a mama hen waddle out with a bunch of babies. We have 30 hens, have had eggs for about 7 days, and only 9 eggs so far. I made some really slapped together nest boxes that someone has laid in once. I need to make better ones, and once the roosters are gone, close the girls in at night and let them out after sun up so that they have to start using the nest boxes. More incentive. Right now these birds are totally free range, and most eggs we find are in the dog house and in an open bag of pine shavings! If they wanted to they could all fly away in the middle of the night, but for the fact that some weird trance comes over them between 6:00pm and 4:15am. Note that this starts before dark and ends before sun up. Pretty wacky.
Here's an egg we got recently, so tiny! Next to a store-bought egg for comparison:
You know how roosters are loud? They're really loud. Under your bedroom window. At 4:15am. In stereo. Thirty of 'em. Time for chicken soup.
Um, what other critters... cattle! We hired some cowboys (really) to come and round up our cattle for us, load some to take to auction, and teach us how to worm them. Being newbies and working with poorly managed pastures which we have not had the time or money to fix, these girls have definitely gotten worms. As we move into a greater understanding of organic management practices we'd like to move away from the wormers. The stuff we chose actually is acceptable under the USDA organic beef regulations but it is still a drug.
So we sold 6 bull calves and a cow with a broken leg. We now have 6 cows, a heifer calf and a bull. I am pretty sure one of the mamas is pregnant, but they are all in rough shape due to the worms and having REALLY big calves nursing. I watched a 15 month old calf nursing off one cow a few weeks ago. In managed herds the calves are weaned at 6 months. We have zero cross fencing on the range they use, so there is zero management. After we finish the goat fencing, the next project is a cattle corral so we can begin to manage these animals better.
Here is one of the calves last November, right after a good milking session. Look at all that cream on his face!
Wednesday the guys came back and tried to load the old bull who was sick and dying. They barely got him in the trailer and then he couldn't get up again. They won't take him at auction like that. So we had to make the hard decision to kill him. :-(
There sure are some hard edges to this real life we are learning to live.
We bought a new young bull who is just a beauty. He is younger than some of the calves we sold. His youth will help keep him close and allow us to work with him to keep him gentle.
So on to goats! We have made definite progress in our strivings toard goat ownership recently. The rain has done dastardly things to our plans. Since Stephen has to keep working at his off farm job, most major farm work has to happen on the weekend, and it has rained for 6 weekends in a row. We also picked a most frightful place to put one side of the fence. Well, at least from the perspective of what is under the soil.... rocks!! Very very hard to get t-posts into a bed of rocks and clay. Stephen has been banging these 5 foot t-posts in manually. Actually, they are longer than that out of the gorund... they are 5' when they are installed. I tried to do it, and couldn't even lift the post driver over my head, on a stool. But he prevailed and as of today we have almost all the posts in that need to go in, so the hardest part is done. Now we just need to attach the wire, which should be do-able this weekend. A few days ago we visited Snowy and Sylvester, the two goats we are buying. They sure are funny looking! LaManchas are pretty unusual in appearance. And sweet as can be!
Dogs: There seems to be some inexplicable attraction of the doghouse to our daughter. A few weeks ago I was searching everywhere for her and finally found her standing on the dog house, barefoot. Yesterday I was looking for her and asked Farmer Boy where she was. "In the dog house. " Silly me.
Luke, Fred and Molly have found their peace with one another. Molly came back into heat, but Fred is just too ancient and exhausted to do anything. He must be Alpha Male, because Molly shows no interest in Luke. Since Fred is not willing to coooperate with Molly, Molly just hops on Fred and gets out her frustration.
Hank the horse stepped on Molly's paw a few days ago. She bled pretty badly at first but it didn't break. She limps every once in a while and favors it, but she can still run with the boys.
While the Horse Whisperer and I were attending to Molly's paw, I saw something odd out the kitchen window and did a double take. Here's what I saw:
Yup, that's a rooster swimming in the pool. Big oops! I like to think it went something like this:
"Ooh, maybe there's something delicious up there." Flap flap flap... "WHOAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!" Splash! "Hey, what the... help! Get me out of here! Heyyyyyyy!!!"
He was cold and wet so we wrapped him up in a towel, and put him in the nice heated bathroom to dry off.
And Miss Kitty...
I didn't write about this because I didn't want to face it... our cat didn't come home. She didn't come home after she followed the kids and Stephen on a long walk to the other side of the property . That night there was a big rainstorm. Well, she didn't come home for a long time. I finally realized she was gone for good. Two weeks after we lost her, Stephen and the kids went for a walk up the road. They came to a neighbor's whom we haven't met. Somehow during the conversation S mentioned we'd lost a cat. "Is this it?" the guy asked... and there she was! She had gotten lost way up on the other side of our property, and his tom cat had found her and brought her home. The back of their land abutts ours at one place. So Snugglebug is home. :-)
Here she is at 8 weeks old:
And now:
I adore this cat!
If you've made it this far, you must be one weary traveler. If you were here I'd boil some water for a cup of spicy Good Earth tea, and we'd sit on the couch and drink tea and eat chocolate chip cookies (assuming my family has left some in the cookie jar). Since you're not, I'll just say "Cheers!" from here, and imagine you making yourself a cuppa. :-) Happy day to you!
Here we are, middle of March, and we've already had days of putting sunscreen on and using AC in the car come afternoon. Still feels weird to this Yankee.
After rain and rain and rain (6 straight weekends of rain), we finally have gotten break and have been celebrating glorious SPRING! The wildflowers are going nuts after such a wet winter, and now insanely blue skies and warm sun. The front yard is getting scraggly, and I was going to mow, but after watching one of the horses having a treat and kids picking widlflowers, I decided our old-fashioned style of mowing suits me just fine right now. :-) So I am going to bring a horse out each morning and afternoon to work on the lawn.
Our lovely niece, from upstate New York, visited for three weeks. She is a horse girl (woman! she's 20 now), has been riding since she was 9 and is very gifted with horses. She wants to be a horse trainer. She did awesome things with the horses while she was here, gaining compliments not only from Stephen and me (who are impressed with just about anything) but also from people who actually know and work horses. She was great with the kids, and a few times the three of them made treats for the horses.
Feeding the horses home-made horse cookies:
For us, it has been so helpful to get to know the horses better. We have ridden them, spent a lot more time with them, learned how to saddle them, and just generally feel more comfortable around them. To the extent that one of them has an abcess under his tail that requires twice-daily spraying for three weeks, and I am feeling fairly confident about doing this (yes, standing behind a horse, lifting up his tail and squirting his buns!)
The Horse Whisperer (our niece) left us on Tuesday. We were all very sad to see her go and hope she will come back soon.
The roosters are huge and loud and generally boorish. They have a sex drive that is insane. The whole reproductive thing for chickens is a pretty hit-or-miss affair, so the roosters compensate by doing it A LOT. Unfortunately for the hens, we bought a straight run, meaning we have roughly 30 roosters and 30 hens. These are very bad odds for the hens. We need max 1 rooster per 15 hens. So the roosters need to go. I can't believe it, but I am actually seriously considering killing a few myself, just to get started. There are so many of them, and it is really hard for us to coordinate it with Stephen's work schedule.
You may remember that when we processed the last batch of cornish-rocks, Stephen left one behind because she had a cold. Well she got better and integrated pretty quickly with the other birds. But for some reason the boys find her irresistable. A few weeks ago Stephen discovered her horribly pecked and practically dead. We nursed her inside for a while, but it seems that no matter what she is going to be attacked by the roosters. She now lives a weird life outside under the car port in a dog cage, let out only when there are people around to fend off the roosters who keep jumping on this hen hotty and ripping her scabs off her neck. Farmer Boy has named her Queen Suzanne. If she were not the one he had claimed as his special pet, she would no longer be with us. She has a sweet friend who has been named Lady Robert. Lady Robert is a RI Red hen on the smallish side, who is quite tame. The Princess carries her around for long periods every day. Molly the dog also has taken a liking to Queen Suzanne, and considers it her personal mission to run off all the roosters that approach QS... unless Molly is distracted by something else. So we do not let QS loose unless there is a human around. Here are Molly and Queen Suzanne sharing a meal:
The black stuff on Suzanne's neck is pine tar. Poor baby, it's like she has a target on her neck. Even the pine tar doesn't keep them off her.
The hens have started laying! Yippee! Since they are free range, I am positive there are lots of eggs somewhere that we are missing. I won't be surprised to some day see a mama hen waddle out with a bunch of babies. We have 30 hens, have had eggs for about 7 days, and only 9 eggs so far. I made some really slapped together nest boxes that someone has laid in once. I need to make better ones, and once the roosters are gone, close the girls in at night and let them out after sun up so that they have to start using the nest boxes. More incentive. Right now these birds are totally free range, and most eggs we find are in the dog house and in an open bag of pine shavings! If they wanted to they could all fly away in the middle of the night, but for the fact that some weird trance comes over them between 6:00pm and 4:15am. Note that this starts before dark and ends before sun up. Pretty wacky.
Here's an egg we got recently, so tiny! Next to a store-bought egg for comparison:
You know how roosters are loud? They're really loud. Under your bedroom window. At 4:15am. In stereo. Thirty of 'em. Time for chicken soup.
Um, what other critters... cattle! We hired some cowboys (really) to come and round up our cattle for us, load some to take to auction, and teach us how to worm them. Being newbies and working with poorly managed pastures which we have not had the time or money to fix, these girls have definitely gotten worms. As we move into a greater understanding of organic management practices we'd like to move away from the wormers. The stuff we chose actually is acceptable under the USDA organic beef regulations but it is still a drug.
So we sold 6 bull calves and a cow with a broken leg. We now have 6 cows, a heifer calf and a bull. I am pretty sure one of the mamas is pregnant, but they are all in rough shape due to the worms and having REALLY big calves nursing. I watched a 15 month old calf nursing off one cow a few weeks ago. In managed herds the calves are weaned at 6 months. We have zero cross fencing on the range they use, so there is zero management. After we finish the goat fencing, the next project is a cattle corral so we can begin to manage these animals better.
Here is one of the calves last November, right after a good milking session. Look at all that cream on his face!
Wednesday the guys came back and tried to load the old bull who was sick and dying. They barely got him in the trailer and then he couldn't get up again. They won't take him at auction like that. So we had to make the hard decision to kill him. :-(
There sure are some hard edges to this real life we are learning to live.
We bought a new young bull who is just a beauty. He is younger than some of the calves we sold. His youth will help keep him close and allow us to work with him to keep him gentle.
So on to goats! We have made definite progress in our strivings toard goat ownership recently. The rain has done dastardly things to our plans. Since Stephen has to keep working at his off farm job, most major farm work has to happen on the weekend, and it has rained for 6 weekends in a row. We also picked a most frightful place to put one side of the fence. Well, at least from the perspective of what is under the soil.... rocks!! Very very hard to get t-posts into a bed of rocks and clay. Stephen has been banging these 5 foot t-posts in manually. Actually, they are longer than that out of the gorund... they are 5' when they are installed. I tried to do it, and couldn't even lift the post driver over my head, on a stool. But he prevailed and as of today we have almost all the posts in that need to go in, so the hardest part is done. Now we just need to attach the wire, which should be do-able this weekend. A few days ago we visited Snowy and Sylvester, the two goats we are buying. They sure are funny looking! LaManchas are pretty unusual in appearance. And sweet as can be!
Dogs: There seems to be some inexplicable attraction of the doghouse to our daughter. A few weeks ago I was searching everywhere for her and finally found her standing on the dog house, barefoot. Yesterday I was looking for her and asked Farmer Boy where she was. "In the dog house. " Silly me.
Luke, Fred and Molly have found their peace with one another. Molly came back into heat, but Fred is just too ancient and exhausted to do anything. He must be Alpha Male, because Molly shows no interest in Luke. Since Fred is not willing to coooperate with Molly, Molly just hops on Fred and gets out her frustration.
Hank the horse stepped on Molly's paw a few days ago. She bled pretty badly at first but it didn't break. She limps every once in a while and favors it, but she can still run with the boys.
While the Horse Whisperer and I were attending to Molly's paw, I saw something odd out the kitchen window and did a double take. Here's what I saw:
Yup, that's a rooster swimming in the pool. Big oops! I like to think it went something like this:
"Ooh, maybe there's something delicious up there." Flap flap flap... "WHOAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!" Splash! "Hey, what the... help! Get me out of here! Heyyyyyyy!!!"
He was cold and wet so we wrapped him up in a towel, and put him in the nice heated bathroom to dry off.
And Miss Kitty...
I didn't write about this because I didn't want to face it... our cat didn't come home. She didn't come home after she followed the kids and Stephen on a long walk to the other side of the property . That night there was a big rainstorm. Well, she didn't come home for a long time. I finally realized she was gone for good. Two weeks after we lost her, Stephen and the kids went for a walk up the road. They came to a neighbor's whom we haven't met. Somehow during the conversation S mentioned we'd lost a cat. "Is this it?" the guy asked... and there she was! She had gotten lost way up on the other side of our property, and his tom cat had found her and brought her home. The back of their land abutts ours at one place. So Snugglebug is home. :-)
Here she is at 8 weeks old:
And now:
I adore this cat!
If you've made it this far, you must be one weary traveler. If you were here I'd boil some water for a cup of spicy Good Earth tea, and we'd sit on the couch and drink tea and eat chocolate chip cookies (assuming my family has left some in the cookie jar). Since you're not, I'll just say "Cheers!" from here, and imagine you making yourself a cuppa. :-) Happy day to you!
Monday, February 21, 2005
It's a nice day here in Texas; in the seventies, and we have our windows open.
About an hour ago, I was in the office, and I heard a strange noise out front. The kids are out with Stephen, so I knew it couldn't be them (the usual source of strange noises). I look out the dining room window and see:
Yes, that is a rooster eating dog food.
And where are the dogs?
Watching him.
Guess I need to buy a different brand of dog food.
Mr. Teen Roo apparently went off to the back and had this chat with his buddies:
"Guess what I did?"
"What?"
"I went to the front."
"The FRONT!?" Young hens start to look him up and down appreciatively.
"And I ate the dogs' food!"
{{gasps}}
"They didn't chase you?"
"Nah, I'm too much rooster for them. They were too scared to bother me. Farmer lady looked out the window too, and she made a funny cackling noise, then there were lots of clicks, but she was too amazed by me to shoo me away."
"What's it like?"
"The front?"
"No, the dog food!"
"Aw, man, you should taste it... it's smoooooth."
"Come on let's do it!"
"No, you, do it!"
"Well, let's go TOGETHER!"
And so they did...
About an hour ago, I was in the office, and I heard a strange noise out front. The kids are out with Stephen, so I knew it couldn't be them (the usual source of strange noises). I look out the dining room window and see:
Yes, that is a rooster eating dog food.
And where are the dogs?
Watching him.
Guess I need to buy a different brand of dog food.
Mr. Teen Roo apparently went off to the back and had this chat with his buddies:
"Guess what I did?"
"What?"
"I went to the front."
"The FRONT!?" Young hens start to look him up and down appreciatively.
"And I ate the dogs' food!"
{{gasps}}
"They didn't chase you?"
"Nah, I'm too much rooster for them. They were too scared to bother me. Farmer lady looked out the window too, and she made a funny cackling noise, then there were lots of clicks, but she was too amazed by me to shoo me away."
"What's it like?"
"The front?"
"No, the dog food!"
"Aw, man, you should taste it... it's smoooooth."
"Come on let's do it!"
"No, you, do it!"
"Well, let's go TOGETHER!"
And so they did...
Wednesday, February 09, 2005
Bad Attitudes
Seems there are a lot of grouchy mammals around here today. Okay, true confession: just the horses and me. I am irritable and unmotivated, and the horses are just plain mean.
After pondering it, I think there are two things going on: the weather and physical discomfort. Almost all the horses now have rain rot, a skin fungus that causes them to lose patches of hair and must be itchy. Shows up when it is really rainy, and it has been. Of course, with rain comes no sun, and no sun for a long time apparently makes not only mamas but also horses a bit touchy.
Physically for me I am, I guess, just having a bunch of normal getting older things happening, none of which are worthy of mention really, they are just aggravating and uncomfortable. And lack of sun has always proven a problem for me. In fact, moving to Texas greatly alleviated the winter depressions I suffered in New England.
So really I suppose I am just having a pity party. ;-) Bleh! Enough of that!
Back to the horses... it has become increasingly difficult to get them into their corrals for dinner. Bunny, the mean mare, goes in readily, then no one else wants to. Can hardly blame them. Despite the fact that she has her own corral, own dish, etc, she bites at anyone who comes near the outside of her corral, which means no one wants to go in the corrals on either side of her.
Quite frankly, she scares me, but I am trying to be firm with her and not let on. It is a weird little dance I play with the horses, especially given my lack of experience managing them and the fact that I have never ever been with a person who knows what they're doing, who has guided me in handling them.
Stephen loves working with them, and whenever it works out, he does the evening feeding. He is bolder than I, and is the one who first got Quervo the donkey in a halter and put the kids on him for a little ride. This past week he has gotten a halter on all the horses except Chester, the super shy elderly horse. I'm impressed! He really wants to learn how to ride, as do I, but he is much more of a learn-by-doing kind of guy. When it comes to 1500 lb mammals I lean more toward the learn-from-someone-who-has-a-clue-and-is-standing-right-there-with-me method.
Bunny isn't the only one biting. Everyone except Cherokee has been biting each other, the donkey only in self-defense, but biting nonetheless. Poor Cherokee just runs away if he can; he is clearly low man on the totem pole. He and Quervo have very sweet dispositions.
As far as major changes to the farm (of which we have many planned) I kind of feel like we are a videotape that is either paused or occasionally set to frame-by-frame slow motion. Oh, let's be honest. This applies to minor changes as well. In a word, NOTHING seems to be getting done. This despite the fact that we get up at 5:00am and seem to be going constantly. By the time the kids are going to bed, we are often so exhausted we fall asleep with them!
Rain certainly is causing much of our slow-down. It is nastily wet and muddy here. I tried to dig holes for fruit treees, but our clay soil is now a bog, with standing water on top of it. I have been gathering leaves and buying compost and humus to mix in with the soil we will plant them in if it ever stops raining. Our own compost is too new to use directly on plants yet.
The chickens are fine. They make us laugh. I just love seeing them run around; but it sure would be nice if they would, um, "use the restroom", BEFORE they set off for a picnic lunch in our front yard. It is kind of embarassing to walk out to speak to your neighbors and realize there is a big fat chicken poop on the front walk. :-P
I have still not figured out how to put pictures up here. Anyone have any advice? I am working on a Mac if that makes a difference.
After pondering it, I think there are two things going on: the weather and physical discomfort. Almost all the horses now have rain rot, a skin fungus that causes them to lose patches of hair and must be itchy. Shows up when it is really rainy, and it has been. Of course, with rain comes no sun, and no sun for a long time apparently makes not only mamas but also horses a bit touchy.
Physically for me I am, I guess, just having a bunch of normal getting older things happening, none of which are worthy of mention really, they are just aggravating and uncomfortable. And lack of sun has always proven a problem for me. In fact, moving to Texas greatly alleviated the winter depressions I suffered in New England.
So really I suppose I am just having a pity party. ;-) Bleh! Enough of that!
Back to the horses... it has become increasingly difficult to get them into their corrals for dinner. Bunny, the mean mare, goes in readily, then no one else wants to. Can hardly blame them. Despite the fact that she has her own corral, own dish, etc, she bites at anyone who comes near the outside of her corral, which means no one wants to go in the corrals on either side of her.
Quite frankly, she scares me, but I am trying to be firm with her and not let on. It is a weird little dance I play with the horses, especially given my lack of experience managing them and the fact that I have never ever been with a person who knows what they're doing, who has guided me in handling them.
Stephen loves working with them, and whenever it works out, he does the evening feeding. He is bolder than I, and is the one who first got Quervo the donkey in a halter and put the kids on him for a little ride. This past week he has gotten a halter on all the horses except Chester, the super shy elderly horse. I'm impressed! He really wants to learn how to ride, as do I, but he is much more of a learn-by-doing kind of guy. When it comes to 1500 lb mammals I lean more toward the learn-from-someone-who-has-a-clue-and-is-standing-right-there-with-me method.
Bunny isn't the only one biting. Everyone except Cherokee has been biting each other, the donkey only in self-defense, but biting nonetheless. Poor Cherokee just runs away if he can; he is clearly low man on the totem pole. He and Quervo have very sweet dispositions.
As far as major changes to the farm (of which we have many planned) I kind of feel like we are a videotape that is either paused or occasionally set to frame-by-frame slow motion. Oh, let's be honest. This applies to minor changes as well. In a word, NOTHING seems to be getting done. This despite the fact that we get up at 5:00am and seem to be going constantly. By the time the kids are going to bed, we are often so exhausted we fall asleep with them!
Rain certainly is causing much of our slow-down. It is nastily wet and muddy here. I tried to dig holes for fruit treees, but our clay soil is now a bog, with standing water on top of it. I have been gathering leaves and buying compost and humus to mix in with the soil we will plant them in if it ever stops raining. Our own compost is too new to use directly on plants yet.
The chickens are fine. They make us laugh. I just love seeing them run around; but it sure would be nice if they would, um, "use the restroom", BEFORE they set off for a picnic lunch in our front yard. It is kind of embarassing to walk out to speak to your neighbors and realize there is a big fat chicken poop on the front walk. :-P
I have still not figured out how to put pictures up here. Anyone have any advice? I am working on a Mac if that makes a difference.
Wednesday, February 02, 2005
I love watching birds
Not much going on with the farm these days. It is cold and wet here, not great weather for working outside. Of course, not as cold and wet as it is in New England, where we grew up. As one brother-in-law from RI put it "I live in an igloo."
The animals are faring well despite the cold and rain. We did have one chicken die, probably from internal injuries sustained from a horse. The horses don't really notice when they step on the chickens.
The chickens we have left are not big enough to eat or lay eggs yet, so we are just feeding, feeding, feeding them. I so enjoy having them around. They are totally free range and we find them in all sorts of places. Amazingly, as far as we can tell, without exception they all pile into the chicken house each night.
One night I blocked them in to help keep the rain and wind from coming through their door (which is just an opening), and in the morning counted them as they poured out like a poultry waterfall. I was reassured, as the number I came up with seems like more chickens than we ought to have, given the number who have died at the hands of various mammals, ourselves included. So they are apparently not running off and eloping or giving themselves over to provide fine dining for the coyotes. Good news for us!
We do have a lot of songbirds coming through in large flocks these days. Just beautiful. I'm sure I'll feel differently once our garden is bearing, but right now it is enchanting to see dozens of bluebirds happily sitting in a tree in our backyard. I had never seen a bluebird until I moved here, and WOW! They are SO blue, with orange bellies. We see birds here that we had not seen before in Texas.
Because we are inside so much these days, we've been making plans to rearrange the house somewhat. This is exciting for me, as we are converting the current office into a school room, which will make managing our bajillion school projects, papers and books much easier.
We've also been enjoying visits from beloved out of town family members, and are soon to celebrate Farmer Boy's eighth birthday. Hard to believe.
Life is busy, and life is good.
The animals are faring well despite the cold and rain. We did have one chicken die, probably from internal injuries sustained from a horse. The horses don't really notice when they step on the chickens.
The chickens we have left are not big enough to eat or lay eggs yet, so we are just feeding, feeding, feeding them. I so enjoy having them around. They are totally free range and we find them in all sorts of places. Amazingly, as far as we can tell, without exception they all pile into the chicken house each night.
One night I blocked them in to help keep the rain and wind from coming through their door (which is just an opening), and in the morning counted them as they poured out like a poultry waterfall. I was reassured, as the number I came up with seems like more chickens than we ought to have, given the number who have died at the hands of various mammals, ourselves included. So they are apparently not running off and eloping or giving themselves over to provide fine dining for the coyotes. Good news for us!
We do have a lot of songbirds coming through in large flocks these days. Just beautiful. I'm sure I'll feel differently once our garden is bearing, but right now it is enchanting to see dozens of bluebirds happily sitting in a tree in our backyard. I had never seen a bluebird until I moved here, and WOW! They are SO blue, with orange bellies. We see birds here that we had not seen before in Texas.
Because we are inside so much these days, we've been making plans to rearrange the house somewhat. This is exciting for me, as we are converting the current office into a school room, which will make managing our bajillion school projects, papers and books much easier.
We've also been enjoying visits from beloved out of town family members, and are soon to celebrate Farmer Boy's eighth birthday. Hard to believe.
Life is busy, and life is good.
Friday, January 21, 2005
Head Counting
Phew... we do keep busy here. Seems there's not much time for blogging.
Our chicken world has changed since I last wrote. All the white birds have been slaughtered except for one, who has been claimed as a pet by Farmer Boy. After a week of slowly integrating her, she now comfortably waddles through the masses of smaller chickens with the superiority of a know-it-all older sister. She had to go through a series of challenges by the teenage roosters who are busy establishing the pecking order, but by sheer bulk she has subdued them all.
A few weeks ago we spent an afternoon at the farm of our friends who, until recently, ran a commerical poultry farm. They have a state certified processing facility, and were kind enough to allow us to use it and teach us some tricks. I still have not done, or even seen, the killing, but I actually can eviscerate fairly quickly now.
Can you believe it? I can't. I have a lot of dead birds in my freezer. Big ones... up to 8.5 lbs! That's practically a turkey!
The other chickens continue to grow, and we awaken to genuine cock-a-doodle-doos every morning. We still have a few months until we get eggs.
As for dogs and chickens, to date 11 chickens have been killed by mammals other than us. The last we actually know of for sure as having been killed by a dog was on Christmas Eve.
If the courts can distinguish between murder and manslaughter, I suppose we can distinguish between canine-poultricide and equine-poultricide. One of the 11 deaths falls into the latter category, and was amusingly referred to by Stephen as "an unfortunate industrial accident".
Seems horses haven't read the books that say they shouldn't eat spoiled, poopy hay. Nor have they grasped that they should be appreciative of the fact that their grain ration is way up because it is winter and they are getting fed more than twice what they were in December. To them, food is food, and they don't hesitate to use their considerable mass to increase the size of the openings to places that harbor hidden treasures of food, like, say, the opening to the chicken house and its trove of nasty hay.
Hank the wonder horse, known around the farm for his stubbornness and extremely small personal space zone, crashed his way to the front of the chicken house, in the process knocking down our makeshift hardyplank door. It wasn't until several hours later, when Stephen went out to pick up after him, that he discovered the, er, chicken pancake.
The next day Hank knocked down the extension ladder and further damaged the door, necessitating a brand new and innovative door design hammered together as the sun set by none other than your fearless blog author. :-D It remains as our chicken house door, in all its makeshift, ugly glory.
And dogs... with Christmas came guests, freezing weather, two new dogs, and an end to canine-poultricide. Weird, eh?
I actually think this supports my theory that Molly was bored, and was just playing with the chickens. She *would* eat them, but I don't think that was her original plan, if dogs can be said to be of the planning sort.
Fred and Luke are settling in. They both very much like being here, although both were a little confused and mellow at first. Now they are annoyingly spastic, so to speak, at times, but we are managing.
Our current trial with Luke is that he got bitten by the "Let's bark at cows!" bug when his brother came to visit, and has had a terrible time restraining himself since. This is mildly annoying when it is our own cattle... it is very unneighborly when the cattle are across the street.
Fred just likes to bark. And I think he is going deaf. I have to get his attention physically and try to distract him away from whichever critter he's in the middle of haranguing. He is an ancient dog, and while well endowed with sweetness and a huge heart, very minimally endowed with brain cells. I don't think Fred is going to be with us for long, and I'd like his retirement here to be pleasant, but I simply can not have him tormenting the horses and cat. We are working on it.
So our chicken head count is going down, and our dog head count is going up. Still no goats because we still have not finished either the fencing or the repairs to the barn. We continue to be amazed by how much work there is to do, how much more time than we expect each job takes, and how little time we actually have available for farm work. We have other small matters eating up our time, like off-farm work, home schooling, and tending to the every day needs of all the critters (human and otherwise) who already live here.
I am working on planning our first gardens. I will be putting in some fruit trees tomorrow, and have picked the spot to put veggies and flowers for this year. I think I will ultimately want the garden space to be elsewhere, but with all the animals I have to find a spot that won't be trampled or eaten up. The space I have picked is the easiest to manage fencing-wise. I still have to put in some fencing, but it can just be metal t-posts and chicken wire... it's in place where it doesn't have to keep out a 2000 lb animal.
Our chicken world has changed since I last wrote. All the white birds have been slaughtered except for one, who has been claimed as a pet by Farmer Boy. After a week of slowly integrating her, she now comfortably waddles through the masses of smaller chickens with the superiority of a know-it-all older sister. She had to go through a series of challenges by the teenage roosters who are busy establishing the pecking order, but by sheer bulk she has subdued them all.
A few weeks ago we spent an afternoon at the farm of our friends who, until recently, ran a commerical poultry farm. They have a state certified processing facility, and were kind enough to allow us to use it and teach us some tricks. I still have not done, or even seen, the killing, but I actually can eviscerate fairly quickly now.
Can you believe it? I can't. I have a lot of dead birds in my freezer. Big ones... up to 8.5 lbs! That's practically a turkey!
The other chickens continue to grow, and we awaken to genuine cock-a-doodle-doos every morning. We still have a few months until we get eggs.
As for dogs and chickens, to date 11 chickens have been killed by mammals other than us. The last we actually know of for sure as having been killed by a dog was on Christmas Eve.
If the courts can distinguish between murder and manslaughter, I suppose we can distinguish between canine-poultricide and equine-poultricide. One of the 11 deaths falls into the latter category, and was amusingly referred to by Stephen as "an unfortunate industrial accident".
Seems horses haven't read the books that say they shouldn't eat spoiled, poopy hay. Nor have they grasped that they should be appreciative of the fact that their grain ration is way up because it is winter and they are getting fed more than twice what they were in December. To them, food is food, and they don't hesitate to use their considerable mass to increase the size of the openings to places that harbor hidden treasures of food, like, say, the opening to the chicken house and its trove of nasty hay.
Hank the wonder horse, known around the farm for his stubbornness and extremely small personal space zone, crashed his way to the front of the chicken house, in the process knocking down our makeshift hardyplank door. It wasn't until several hours later, when Stephen went out to pick up after him, that he discovered the, er, chicken pancake.
The next day Hank knocked down the extension ladder and further damaged the door, necessitating a brand new and innovative door design hammered together as the sun set by none other than your fearless blog author. :-D It remains as our chicken house door, in all its makeshift, ugly glory.
And dogs... with Christmas came guests, freezing weather, two new dogs, and an end to canine-poultricide. Weird, eh?
I actually think this supports my theory that Molly was bored, and was just playing with the chickens. She *would* eat them, but I don't think that was her original plan, if dogs can be said to be of the planning sort.
Fred and Luke are settling in. They both very much like being here, although both were a little confused and mellow at first. Now they are annoyingly spastic, so to speak, at times, but we are managing.
Our current trial with Luke is that he got bitten by the "Let's bark at cows!" bug when his brother came to visit, and has had a terrible time restraining himself since. This is mildly annoying when it is our own cattle... it is very unneighborly when the cattle are across the street.
Fred just likes to bark. And I think he is going deaf. I have to get his attention physically and try to distract him away from whichever critter he's in the middle of haranguing. He is an ancient dog, and while well endowed with sweetness and a huge heart, very minimally endowed with brain cells. I don't think Fred is going to be with us for long, and I'd like his retirement here to be pleasant, but I simply can not have him tormenting the horses and cat. We are working on it.
So our chicken head count is going down, and our dog head count is going up. Still no goats because we still have not finished either the fencing or the repairs to the barn. We continue to be amazed by how much work there is to do, how much more time than we expect each job takes, and how little time we actually have available for farm work. We have other small matters eating up our time, like off-farm work, home schooling, and tending to the every day needs of all the critters (human and otherwise) who already live here.
I am working on planning our first gardens. I will be putting in some fruit trees tomorrow, and have picked the spot to put veggies and flowers for this year. I think I will ultimately want the garden space to be elsewhere, but with all the animals I have to find a spot that won't be trampled or eaten up. The space I have picked is the easiest to manage fencing-wise. I still have to put in some fencing, but it can just be metal t-posts and chicken wire... it's in place where it doesn't have to keep out a 2000 lb animal.
Monday, January 17, 2005
Loving Your Enemies
Today, on this day set aside in the US to honor Martin Luther King Jr, I had the privilege to read, for the first time, the following sermon on love by the great preacher:
Loving Your Enemies
I hope you will take the time to read it. It isn't just theology, it is real. Do it and your life will be transformed. Mine has been.
Loving Your Enemies
I hope you will take the time to read it. It isn't just theology, it is real. Do it and your life will be transformed. Mine has been.
Monday, January 10, 2005
organic certification
So back when I was writing my thoughts on humane slaughter, I ran down a bunny trail about organic certification. The humane slaughter topic was all together enough for one post, so I clipped the organic certification bit for later posting. I read an article tonight that prompted me to pull it back up and have a go at being generally annoyed online.
What exactly is "organic certification" do you think? The USDA organic standards are actually lower than many small farms are keeping to, out of their own sense of what is right for the environment and for their families. But these farms can't afford the certification. The paper trail that is required to be kept is virtually impossible to maintain for a small operation. We are talking about people who spend 7 days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day, working out in their fields and with their animals. When do they have time to keep a complicated paper trail? They don't, so they have to hire someone, but they can't afford that, etc.
On top of that, many of the products that you buy in the grocery store that are labeled organic may technically be meeting the organic standards set by the USDA, but the corporations behind them are not necessarily practicing sustainable agriculture or environmental gentleness. Great, you used seaweed instead of synthetic fertilizers, but you are consuming huge amounts of fossil fuel running those big farm machines and trucking product all over the country. And just because you feed your cattle organic grain in the feedlot doesn't make being in the feedlot a great idea.
Have a look at this article on organic dairies in today's Chicago Tribune.
You might be surprised by the debates that go on in Washington about your food. Did you know, for example, that in February 2003, a modification was made to a Farm Aid bill at the last minute, allowing organic livestock farmers to feed their animals non-organic feed if the cost of organic was more than double the cost of conventional feed? And still label them organic!
Thankfully, this slipped-in modification was repealed a few months later. You can read more about it here.
Eliot Coleman, a leader in the grassroots organic movement, writes in his super cool book The New Organic Grower that really the only way to be sure of what you are eating is to know the name of the farmer who grew it.
Coleman has some thoughtful things to say about the effects of national certification on organics and the coopting of terminology.
Around here, we are partial to the phrase "sustainable agriculture". We think that does a pretty good job of summing up what we are trying to do. We want to be kind to our animals, kind to our soil, air and water, kind to our children and the many generations to come that will be left with the fallout from whatever we have done. We fervently hope that what we will leave them will be a healthier little 40 acres, and a rich heritage of living fully with God's creation.
What exactly is "organic certification" do you think? The USDA organic standards are actually lower than many small farms are keeping to, out of their own sense of what is right for the environment and for their families. But these farms can't afford the certification. The paper trail that is required to be kept is virtually impossible to maintain for a small operation. We are talking about people who spend 7 days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day, working out in their fields and with their animals. When do they have time to keep a complicated paper trail? They don't, so they have to hire someone, but they can't afford that, etc.
On top of that, many of the products that you buy in the grocery store that are labeled organic may technically be meeting the organic standards set by the USDA, but the corporations behind them are not necessarily practicing sustainable agriculture or environmental gentleness. Great, you used seaweed instead of synthetic fertilizers, but you are consuming huge amounts of fossil fuel running those big farm machines and trucking product all over the country. And just because you feed your cattle organic grain in the feedlot doesn't make being in the feedlot a great idea.
Have a look at this article on organic dairies in today's Chicago Tribune.
You might be surprised by the debates that go on in Washington about your food. Did you know, for example, that in February 2003, a modification was made to a Farm Aid bill at the last minute, allowing organic livestock farmers to feed their animals non-organic feed if the cost of organic was more than double the cost of conventional feed? And still label them organic!
Thankfully, this slipped-in modification was repealed a few months later. You can read more about it here.
Eliot Coleman, a leader in the grassroots organic movement, writes in his super cool book The New Organic Grower that really the only way to be sure of what you are eating is to know the name of the farmer who grew it.
Coleman has some thoughtful things to say about the effects of national certification on organics and the coopting of terminology.
Around here, we are partial to the phrase "sustainable agriculture". We think that does a pretty good job of summing up what we are trying to do. We want to be kind to our animals, kind to our soil, air and water, kind to our children and the many generations to come that will be left with the fallout from whatever we have done. We fervently hope that what we will leave them will be a healthier little 40 acres, and a rich heritage of living fully with God's creation.
Sunday, January 02, 2005
Stephen Brown on Chicken Management
"Man to the moon? Trivial. Keeping the chickens from pooping in their drinking water... now that would be one of the great accomplishments of all mankind."
Saturday, December 25, 2004
Christmas poem
Flocks feed by darkness with a noise of whispers,
In the dry grass of pastures,
And lull the solemn night with their weak bells.
The little towns upon the rocky hills
Look down as meek as children:
Because they have seen come this holy time.
God's glory, now, is kindled gentler than low candlelight
Under the refters of a barn:
Eternal Peace is sleeping in the hay,
And Wisdom's born in secret in a straw-roofed stable.
And O! Make holy music in the stars, you happy angels.
You shepherds, gather on the hill.
Look up, you timid flocks, where the three kings
Are coming through the wintry trees;
While we unnumbered children of the wicked centuries
Come after with our penances and prayers,
And lay them down in the sweet-smelling hay
Beside the wise men's golden jars.
Thomas Merton (1946)
In the dry grass of pastures,
And lull the solemn night with their weak bells.
The little towns upon the rocky hills
Look down as meek as children:
Because they have seen come this holy time.
God's glory, now, is kindled gentler than low candlelight
Under the refters of a barn:
Eternal Peace is sleeping in the hay,
And Wisdom's born in secret in a straw-roofed stable.
And O! Make holy music in the stars, you happy angels.
You shepherds, gather on the hill.
Look up, you timid flocks, where the three kings
Are coming through the wintry trees;
While we unnumbered children of the wicked centuries
Come after with our penances and prayers,
And lay them down in the sweet-smelling hay
Beside the wise men's golden jars.
Thomas Merton (1946)
Thursday, December 23, 2004
Merry Christmas from the Goats!
This wonderful goat Christmas card got me smiling! Can you identify any of the breeds? The four "ladies" that first sing are LaManchas, the breed we are starting with.
Goat folks love their babies and go to great lengths for them. :-)
Goat folks love their babies and go to great lengths for them. :-)
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Cccccooooollllllddddd
Well, cold for us. Down into the twenties over the next few days, with a twinkling of an idea of snow on Christmas. :-) Snow is just a twinkling of an idea here all the time, so for it to converge with Christmas... essentially impossible. Or???
I mean after all, it is impossible that we are here. Insane. Who'd have thought we seaside suburbs kids would end up tending livestock on a Texas farm?
I love it here. I really do. I have a very hard time getting my buns out the door to do morning chores (cold or not... I just am a slow mover in the morning). But once I get out I don't want to come back in. Cold or not.
Today I got quite a lot done in my three forays out into the bitterness. Wrapped outdoor pipes for the freeze, emptied hoses, moved chickens, put up heat lamps, insulated walls with hay, taped windows, cleaned up building scraps around the chicken shed, fed the cattle, tended a chicken with a cold in my tub hospital, did the usual outside chicken chores several times.
The horses are now supposed to be fed every day (we had been doing it three times a week), and are getting different rations, so I now have to corral them before feeding so they each eat the right things. I haven't actually had to do it yet; tomorrow their owners will be out and I will watch the process. I do pretty well handling the horses as long as I don't have children or dogs with me.
We are heading into the last days before Christmas. Tomorrow will be filled with baking and sheet washing as we anticipate the influx of beloved company.
I find myself overwhelmed with gratitude these days. On the verge of tears, even. I doubt I can convey what I feel... a sense of profound beauty, a tangible presence of God, a certainty that I am where I am meant to be right now. I don't know that I have ever felt this so deeply. The underpinning is the rock solid foundation that God is trustworthy. I of little faith did not ask for proof, per se, but it has been given to me over and over and over.
I mean after all, it is impossible that we are here. Insane. Who'd have thought we seaside suburbs kids would end up tending livestock on a Texas farm?
I love it here. I really do. I have a very hard time getting my buns out the door to do morning chores (cold or not... I just am a slow mover in the morning). But once I get out I don't want to come back in. Cold or not.
Today I got quite a lot done in my three forays out into the bitterness. Wrapped outdoor pipes for the freeze, emptied hoses, moved chickens, put up heat lamps, insulated walls with hay, taped windows, cleaned up building scraps around the chicken shed, fed the cattle, tended a chicken with a cold in my tub hospital, did the usual outside chicken chores several times.
The horses are now supposed to be fed every day (we had been doing it three times a week), and are getting different rations, so I now have to corral them before feeding so they each eat the right things. I haven't actually had to do it yet; tomorrow their owners will be out and I will watch the process. I do pretty well handling the horses as long as I don't have children or dogs with me.
We are heading into the last days before Christmas. Tomorrow will be filled with baking and sheet washing as we anticipate the influx of beloved company.
I find myself overwhelmed with gratitude these days. On the verge of tears, even. I doubt I can convey what I feel... a sense of profound beauty, a tangible presence of God, a certainty that I am where I am meant to be right now. I don't know that I have ever felt this so deeply. The underpinning is the rock solid foundation that God is trustworthy. I of little faith did not ask for proof, per se, but it has been given to me over and over and over.
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Dogs, dogs and more dogs... and goats!
If there were a Chickenholics Anonymous, our dog would stand up and say:
"My name is Molly, and I have a problem. I like to chase chickens and kill them. My owners abhor this. I know they do, and I hate to make them upset, but I just can't seem to help myself."
She has now killed three.
Stephen has killed two.
I have saved one.
We need the odds stacked better.
Oddly enough, it seems like we are stacking them against ourselves shortly, by accepting delivery of two more dogs who have never lived with chickens.
Elderly Fred, my parents' dog, is coming at Christmas to live out his golden years on the farm. He is a tremendously sweet, thoroughly daft, black lab and something, maybe chow. A mutt stray who showed up at their house 10 years ago and fell in love with my dog Lucy. The two of them lived together (they were miserable when apart), going back and forth between our house and my parents' until last December, when Lucy died at almost 14. Lucy is buried up in the big pines. It took Fred quite a while to get over her death. He wouldn't eat for days. He really never has gotten back to his old self, actually.
Luke will be coming after New Years. He is a beautiful Australian Shepherd whose family had to move to an apartment. He is miserable there and loves his visits here. He has a very strong natural herding instinct with the cattle, and is very responsive to commands. He has received extensive obedience training.
You may be thinking, "She says FRED is daft? They have a problem with the dog and chickens and they are getting MORE dogs?"
Well, it might not be the perfect timing, but I don't exactly control the universe. These two dogs need homes now, and we think this would be a good place for them. In addition, we ARE going to fence the dogs out of the chickens. Which really means fencing the chickens in, but we are working on ideas for doing that portably so that the chickens can continue to range in fresh grass daily.
Stephen and I are going to spend the week after Christmas fencing (hooray!), and renovating the area of the barn that will be for the goats.
Goats!! Yes, goats! The long awaited goats are hopefully coming to their new home in January. I've made arrangements to purchase two purebred LaMancha does. One cycled this month so their current owner brought them to breed at another farm with a LaMancha buck. Rosie did breed, but tragically, died suddenly the next day from unrelated problems. Her sister, Snowy, is staying there until she cycles in the hopes that she'll breed this year. If she gets pregnant, she will kid in May. So we will have milk in June!
Since Snowy will no longer have the companionship of her sister, I have decided to purchase the wether ("fixed" male) that Snowy and Rosie grew up with. Sylvester will obviously not give milk, but he will serve an important purpose... keeping Snowy happy. Goats are very social and are miserable when alone.
I actually think this is a big part of the problem for Molly. Imagine... you grow up on a farm with your best buddy. He gets you pregnant. You have a nice litter of puppies. They get big enough and one by one they get taken away from you. Then your owners move, taking your best buddy, and leave you with people you don't know and just one of your pups. Two weeks later your pup is hit by a car and dies.
I think Molly is lonely, and I think she is bored. She is still pretty young and very playful. I suspect she is herding the chickens when we are away, a natural instinct she has whenever she sees anything run. She nips at them, just as she would at a cow's leg to herd it, and actually breaks skin. Then she either eats it because it is too tasty to resist, or plays with it until it is dead. Two of the chickens she killed have been dismembered. The one I found today was whole, and had been dead for quite a while, so perhaps she did her best to restrain herself once the deed was done? I don't know. It really is an awful sight, these poor birds.
But I don't cry about it any more. My feelings like that have turned to people. I have been thinking so much about the huge number of people so much less fortunate than we are, in such dire circumstances. Well, that is food for another post, but it has been weighing heavily on my mind.
"My name is Molly, and I have a problem. I like to chase chickens and kill them. My owners abhor this. I know they do, and I hate to make them upset, but I just can't seem to help myself."
She has now killed three.
Stephen has killed two.
I have saved one.
We need the odds stacked better.
Oddly enough, it seems like we are stacking them against ourselves shortly, by accepting delivery of two more dogs who have never lived with chickens.
Elderly Fred, my parents' dog, is coming at Christmas to live out his golden years on the farm. He is a tremendously sweet, thoroughly daft, black lab and something, maybe chow. A mutt stray who showed up at their house 10 years ago and fell in love with my dog Lucy. The two of them lived together (they were miserable when apart), going back and forth between our house and my parents' until last December, when Lucy died at almost 14. Lucy is buried up in the big pines. It took Fred quite a while to get over her death. He wouldn't eat for days. He really never has gotten back to his old self, actually.
Luke will be coming after New Years. He is a beautiful Australian Shepherd whose family had to move to an apartment. He is miserable there and loves his visits here. He has a very strong natural herding instinct with the cattle, and is very responsive to commands. He has received extensive obedience training.
You may be thinking, "She says FRED is daft? They have a problem with the dog and chickens and they are getting MORE dogs?"
Well, it might not be the perfect timing, but I don't exactly control the universe. These two dogs need homes now, and we think this would be a good place for them. In addition, we ARE going to fence the dogs out of the chickens. Which really means fencing the chickens in, but we are working on ideas for doing that portably so that the chickens can continue to range in fresh grass daily.
Stephen and I are going to spend the week after Christmas fencing (hooray!), and renovating the area of the barn that will be for the goats.
Goats!! Yes, goats! The long awaited goats are hopefully coming to their new home in January. I've made arrangements to purchase two purebred LaMancha does. One cycled this month so their current owner brought them to breed at another farm with a LaMancha buck. Rosie did breed, but tragically, died suddenly the next day from unrelated problems. Her sister, Snowy, is staying there until she cycles in the hopes that she'll breed this year. If she gets pregnant, she will kid in May. So we will have milk in June!
Since Snowy will no longer have the companionship of her sister, I have decided to purchase the wether ("fixed" male) that Snowy and Rosie grew up with. Sylvester will obviously not give milk, but he will serve an important purpose... keeping Snowy happy. Goats are very social and are miserable when alone.
I actually think this is a big part of the problem for Molly. Imagine... you grow up on a farm with your best buddy. He gets you pregnant. You have a nice litter of puppies. They get big enough and one by one they get taken away from you. Then your owners move, taking your best buddy, and leave you with people you don't know and just one of your pups. Two weeks later your pup is hit by a car and dies.
I think Molly is lonely, and I think she is bored. She is still pretty young and very playful. I suspect she is herding the chickens when we are away, a natural instinct she has whenever she sees anything run. She nips at them, just as she would at a cow's leg to herd it, and actually breaks skin. Then she either eats it because it is too tasty to resist, or plays with it until it is dead. Two of the chickens she killed have been dismembered. The one I found today was whole, and had been dead for quite a while, so perhaps she did her best to restrain herself once the deed was done? I don't know. It really is an awful sight, these poor birds.
But I don't cry about it any more. My feelings like that have turned to people. I have been thinking so much about the huge number of people so much less fortunate than we are, in such dire circumstances. Well, that is food for another post, but it has been weighing heavily on my mind.
Friday, December 17, 2004
Our chicken babies aren't babies any more
The chickens are all growing, including Trill who has reintegrated with her playmates. She is afraid to come out of the chicken house/shed, due to the dog, but the other chickens seem to have accepted her. She is significantly smaller than the rest, and her hop makes her stand out, but so far it looks like she is going to be okay. Of course in the chicken world things can change very fast.
We had a crazy freeze. Dropped from the 50's or so to the teens, and back up to the low 40's in about a 15 hour period. I did my best to protect the chickens, and everyone survived. Thankfully they are all pretty big and well-feathered, and have the advantage of each other's body heat.
The most frustrating thing about the chickens these days is not the chickens, it's the horses. Since moving the trailer into the back, the horses have become much more interested in our comings and goings. It took several attempts before we found a horse-proof location for the fat-boys' feeder (under the axle of the trailer). We've kept the other chickens' food in the shed for just this reason.
Nevertheless, come sundown each day I was confronted with trying to catch 22 chickens assisted by Farmer Boy, while Molly randomly barked at 5 horses and a donkey whose noses were in my... well, they were VERY close. Add to that The Princess shouting at Molly to stop barking, and we had a recipe for disaster. A few of the horses are not very even tempered, and even the calm ones can get spooked. A horse is not light, exactly. They scare EACH OTHER when they kick, imagine how I feel with my precious children exposed!
One evening, the boy left the gate open and the horses got on the lawn. Stephen managed to lure most of them back with some horse feed, but it took so long the sun set. It wasn't until morning that he realized he hadn't closed the barn. 150 lbs of horse feed had been eaten and scattered throughout the barn.
The only thing we can absolutely count on is that one animal or another is going to be somewhere or eat something that he or she oughtn't. It's merely a matter of who and where. And when. Now is usually the most reliable choice.
So I moved the trailer back into the yard, but not really the part we use as a yard. It is within the same fenced apart area, but away from the house in some bushes... an area that may some day be a garden anyway. We no longer have to catch the birds because we can lure them with their food. With the horses around this was not an option. It is a much more civilized way to manage chickens! You'd be surprised how difficult it can be to catch a waddling obese chicken.
The smaller birds are now set up to have free access day and night to the outdoors. I love to look in the back yard as the sun rises on birds happily pecking in my grass. They are a beautiful sight. They almost all go in at night on their own. Managing them has become so easy.
We had a crazy freeze. Dropped from the 50's or so to the teens, and back up to the low 40's in about a 15 hour period. I did my best to protect the chickens, and everyone survived. Thankfully they are all pretty big and well-feathered, and have the advantage of each other's body heat.
The most frustrating thing about the chickens these days is not the chickens, it's the horses. Since moving the trailer into the back, the horses have become much more interested in our comings and goings. It took several attempts before we found a horse-proof location for the fat-boys' feeder (under the axle of the trailer). We've kept the other chickens' food in the shed for just this reason.
Nevertheless, come sundown each day I was confronted with trying to catch 22 chickens assisted by Farmer Boy, while Molly randomly barked at 5 horses and a donkey whose noses were in my... well, they were VERY close. Add to that The Princess shouting at Molly to stop barking, and we had a recipe for disaster. A few of the horses are not very even tempered, and even the calm ones can get spooked. A horse is not light, exactly. They scare EACH OTHER when they kick, imagine how I feel with my precious children exposed!
One evening, the boy left the gate open and the horses got on the lawn. Stephen managed to lure most of them back with some horse feed, but it took so long the sun set. It wasn't until morning that he realized he hadn't closed the barn. 150 lbs of horse feed had been eaten and scattered throughout the barn.
The only thing we can absolutely count on is that one animal or another is going to be somewhere or eat something that he or she oughtn't. It's merely a matter of who and where. And when. Now is usually the most reliable choice.
So I moved the trailer back into the yard, but not really the part we use as a yard. It is within the same fenced apart area, but away from the house in some bushes... an area that may some day be a garden anyway. We no longer have to catch the birds because we can lure them with their food. With the horses around this was not an option. It is a much more civilized way to manage chickens! You'd be surprised how difficult it can be to catch a waddling obese chicken.
The smaller birds are now set up to have free access day and night to the outdoors. I love to look in the back yard as the sun rises on birds happily pecking in my grass. They are a beautiful sight. They almost all go in at night on their own. Managing them has become so easy.
Sunday, December 12, 2004
Humane Slaughter and Factory Farming
We ate the chicken. It was delicious. Farmer Boy said it was the best chicken he's ever had. At which Stephen said, "So I take it you've changed your mind about becoming a vegetarian?" Apparently the sight of the chicken's death had temporarily had him considering becoming a vegetarian again (he was until he was almost four).
So, as promised, my thoughts on raising animals for slaughter...
Let me start by saying I haven't eaten lamb since I was seven. I stopped then because I couldn't bear the idea of such a sweet little creature being sacrificed for my dinner.
I became a vegetarian when I was 20 and remained one for 11 years. When I did start eating meat again it was for health reasons, and was a rather agonizing decision that involved a lot of prayer.
I have always loved animals, and I find myself talking at great length with our animals and calling them "honey" and "sweetie". Yes, even the chickens.
So killing them for dinner?
When I did start eating meat again, I made a promise to myself that I would never forget that it was a real animal that I was eating, and that I would remember to be thankful for the life of the animal. I bought whole chickens to help myself grasp this. Despite the fact that it is missing a significant number of parts that make it look like a live chicken, a whole chicken at the grocery store is a lot more obviously an animal than a styrofoam package of boneless breasts.
So number one: I do know I am eating an animal.
Number two: While it appears that animals were not eaten before Noah's time, after that they have been. I also know that my body (and mind) function so much better now that I have meat in my diet. I know that God provides for our physical needs, and I believe that animals are part of this. I suspect heaven will be like the Garden of Eden, no one eating each other. But what do I know? I am a romantic. I imagine all creatures living in harmony. Here, we simply aren't. And when all is said and done, I will choose to eat meat and be a more coherent mother to my children than abstain and be in a fog all day like I used to be.
And number three, to which I have only recently come: If you eat meat, you should not eat factory meat. From a human perspective it far less helathy for consumption (high rate of contamination, lots of medications given due to crowded unsanitary conditions causing unnatural rates of disease, etc). From a humane perspective, well it just isn't. Plain and simple, factory farming is cruel. There is a complete disregard for the welfare of the animals... the only value considered is the bottom line. If you don't believe me, google "factory farming" and prepare to be horrified. It just might turn you into a vegetarian.
You have probably seen The Meatrix. If not, take 10 minutes and learn some new things... it is well worth the time. It is pretty tame, no actual photos; it's a cartoon.
So my personal goals, as a farmer raising animals for slaughter, are:
1) to provide the healthiest and happiest life an animal could hope for, in a farm setting, which to me includes lots of sunshine, good food, safety, no junk, and us genuinely loving being with them and demonstrating that to them
2) to practice the most humane methods of slaughter we can find
Okay, so that's me. But I live on a farm, we do raise animals for our own meat. We know what they eat, where they live, if they've been sick, who's tops in the pecking order, etc. What about you? Do you eat meat? Live in the city? Want to eat humanely raised meat?
I have ideas for you! :-) For starters, you can buy from us! ;-) Well, eventually. But really, support your local farmer. This is far more important than I ever grasped, not just for farmers, but for the future of the world as we know it. Look for a farmer's market in your area, or a consumer supported agriculture (CSA) farm. If you have neither, ask at your local health food store about the farms that they buy from. Check out this website that has lots of links to help you find local food:
Sustainable Table's Shopping Guide
I challenge you: the next time you walk into a grocery store, look around and think about this: Someone, somewhere had to grow everything in front of you. Who did it, and where? Kinda freaky, eh?
So, as promised, my thoughts on raising animals for slaughter...
Let me start by saying I haven't eaten lamb since I was seven. I stopped then because I couldn't bear the idea of such a sweet little creature being sacrificed for my dinner.
I became a vegetarian when I was 20 and remained one for 11 years. When I did start eating meat again it was for health reasons, and was a rather agonizing decision that involved a lot of prayer.
I have always loved animals, and I find myself talking at great length with our animals and calling them "honey" and "sweetie". Yes, even the chickens.
So killing them for dinner?
When I did start eating meat again, I made a promise to myself that I would never forget that it was a real animal that I was eating, and that I would remember to be thankful for the life of the animal. I bought whole chickens to help myself grasp this. Despite the fact that it is missing a significant number of parts that make it look like a live chicken, a whole chicken at the grocery store is a lot more obviously an animal than a styrofoam package of boneless breasts.
So number one: I do know I am eating an animal.
Number two: While it appears that animals were not eaten before Noah's time, after that they have been. I also know that my body (and mind) function so much better now that I have meat in my diet. I know that God provides for our physical needs, and I believe that animals are part of this. I suspect heaven will be like the Garden of Eden, no one eating each other. But what do I know? I am a romantic. I imagine all creatures living in harmony. Here, we simply aren't. And when all is said and done, I will choose to eat meat and be a more coherent mother to my children than abstain and be in a fog all day like I used to be.
And number three, to which I have only recently come: If you eat meat, you should not eat factory meat. From a human perspective it far less helathy for consumption (high rate of contamination, lots of medications given due to crowded unsanitary conditions causing unnatural rates of disease, etc). From a humane perspective, well it just isn't. Plain and simple, factory farming is cruel. There is a complete disregard for the welfare of the animals... the only value considered is the bottom line. If you don't believe me, google "factory farming" and prepare to be horrified. It just might turn you into a vegetarian.
You have probably seen The Meatrix. If not, take 10 minutes and learn some new things... it is well worth the time. It is pretty tame, no actual photos; it's a cartoon.
So my personal goals, as a farmer raising animals for slaughter, are:
1) to provide the healthiest and happiest life an animal could hope for, in a farm setting, which to me includes lots of sunshine, good food, safety, no junk, and us genuinely loving being with them and demonstrating that to them
2) to practice the most humane methods of slaughter we can find
Okay, so that's me. But I live on a farm, we do raise animals for our own meat. We know what they eat, where they live, if they've been sick, who's tops in the pecking order, etc. What about you? Do you eat meat? Live in the city? Want to eat humanely raised meat?
I have ideas for you! :-) For starters, you can buy from us! ;-) Well, eventually. But really, support your local farmer. This is far more important than I ever grasped, not just for farmers, but for the future of the world as we know it. Look for a farmer's market in your area, or a consumer supported agriculture (CSA) farm. If you have neither, ask at your local health food store about the farms that they buy from. Check out this website that has lots of links to help you find local food:
Sustainable Table's Shopping Guide
I challenge you: the next time you walk into a grocery store, look around and think about this: Someone, somewhere had to grow everything in front of you. Who did it, and where? Kinda freaky, eh?
Saturday, December 11, 2004
The deed is done
And completely without my presence.
Stephen came in with a bird that looked like it was from the grocery store. Not that it WAS completely... he spent the next hour "eviscerating" it... gutting it, basically.
Farmer Boy said it was awful and he doesn't want to watch again.
The Princess said she would watch it again.
Oy.
A friend of Stephen's showed up unexpectedly, which granted a stay of execution for the remaining three birds slated for the chopping block. So I have yet to see the deed done.
I have, however, cried a lot today. Working through this emotionally is a bit harder than intellectually, evidently. Thankfully, my family is wonderful and not expecting any more of me than I can handle.
Farmer Boy and I discussed it later. We both agreed that we are good at caring for the animals, but not so good at the killing part. After talking about how different people are made in different ways and able to do different things, he said, "I think I would be good at being a vet, but you're too tender."
I suppose the fact that I cried and cried when Trill was attacked was an indication to him. ;-) My natural ability for empathy is perhaps being pushed a little hard here in the life-and-death world of farm animals.
The dead bird is currently cooking in my oven for dinner. Maybe I am getting a harder heart.
Stephen came in with a bird that looked like it was from the grocery store. Not that it WAS completely... he spent the next hour "eviscerating" it... gutting it, basically.
Farmer Boy said it was awful and he doesn't want to watch again.
The Princess said she would watch it again.
Oy.
A friend of Stephen's showed up unexpectedly, which granted a stay of execution for the remaining three birds slated for the chopping block. So I have yet to see the deed done.
I have, however, cried a lot today. Working through this emotionally is a bit harder than intellectually, evidently. Thankfully, my family is wonderful and not expecting any more of me than I can handle.
Farmer Boy and I discussed it later. We both agreed that we are good at caring for the animals, but not so good at the killing part. After talking about how different people are made in different ways and able to do different things, he said, "I think I would be good at being a vet, but you're too tender."
I suppose the fact that I cried and cried when Trill was attacked was an indication to him. ;-) My natural ability for empathy is perhaps being pushed a little hard here in the life-and-death world of farm animals.
The dead bird is currently cooking in my oven for dinner. Maybe I am getting a harder heart.
The Moment of Truth
The moment of truth is at hand. Stephen is about to kill four of our chickens. I have spent the last week or so thinking it all through, and intellectually have come to resolution on it. Obviously emotionally I still have a steep mountain ahead of me, as I am sitting here crying.
My children on the other hand were both eager to go out and participate. Do I feel like a schmuck or what? When the Princess said she wanted to go, I wanted to make sure she understood what was happening.
"Do you know what Papa is going to do?", I asked.
"Yes, kill them, maybe with a hammer?", the Princess answered.
"Well, a knife," I said.
"And then we will eat them," Papa said.
"But not the feathers," she said.
She gets it.
Last night the boy and I had to pick out some for today. It was not hard picking the biggest and healthiest looking ones, but it was hard putting them in their separate housing for the night. I talked to one as I went, thanking it for helping sustain our lives, and wishing I had provided a better life for it here. When I told Stephen, he pointed out that our chickens *have* had a better life than most chickens, and that is true. But I want to make it better still.
My kids are definitely more cut out, naturally, for farm life than I am. I think I would be good at running some kind of small animal sanctuary. Taking care of Trill (yes, after everyone agreed our rescued bird is now my pet, I felt free to name her), I am reminded that I am good at these nurturing kinds of things. But the chaos of a farm and lots of big animals and predators and slaughtering... ugh. Once again, God is getting a chance to be glorified because the only way I am going to manage this is in His strength, not mine.
Farmer Boy told me last night:
"I think I will have to quit school soon."
"Why?" I aked.
"Because there is so much work to do on the farm."
Of course I negated that idea (quitting) post haste. But really, I don't know what I would do without him. He is a genuine help. He can control the horses better than I can, he is not afraid to catch a big rooster, he is strong and brave about slaughtering the chickens. He is seven.
I am a wuss.
I will post what I've written about the intellectual part later today... and let you know how we fared with the actual slaughter.
{{{deep breath}}}
Out I go.
My children on the other hand were both eager to go out and participate. Do I feel like a schmuck or what? When the Princess said she wanted to go, I wanted to make sure she understood what was happening.
"Do you know what Papa is going to do?", I asked.
"Yes, kill them, maybe with a hammer?", the Princess answered.
"Well, a knife," I said.
"And then we will eat them," Papa said.
"But not the feathers," she said.
She gets it.
Last night the boy and I had to pick out some for today. It was not hard picking the biggest and healthiest looking ones, but it was hard putting them in their separate housing for the night. I talked to one as I went, thanking it for helping sustain our lives, and wishing I had provided a better life for it here. When I told Stephen, he pointed out that our chickens *have* had a better life than most chickens, and that is true. But I want to make it better still.
My kids are definitely more cut out, naturally, for farm life than I am. I think I would be good at running some kind of small animal sanctuary. Taking care of Trill (yes, after everyone agreed our rescued bird is now my pet, I felt free to name her), I am reminded that I am good at these nurturing kinds of things. But the chaos of a farm and lots of big animals and predators and slaughtering... ugh. Once again, God is getting a chance to be glorified because the only way I am going to manage this is in His strength, not mine.
Farmer Boy told me last night:
"I think I will have to quit school soon."
"Why?" I aked.
"Because there is so much work to do on the farm."
Of course I negated that idea (quitting) post haste. But really, I don't know what I would do without him. He is a genuine help. He can control the horses better than I can, he is not afraid to catch a big rooster, he is strong and brave about slaughtering the chickens. He is seven.
I am a wuss.
I will post what I've written about the intellectual part later today... and let you know how we fared with the actual slaughter.
{{{deep breath}}}
Out I go.
Monday, December 06, 2004
Chickens, gardens and fences
The white hen that Stephen brought in on Saturday died Sunday morning. She was looking awful when I got up, and wouldn't take any water. I knew then that she would not make it. An hour or so later, as I was coming in from checking the outside chickens, I heard mad flapping... she was in the process of dying, poor thing. The final moments were mercifully short, then Stephen buried her, well away from the house and garden areas, with rocks on top to discourage any critters from digging her up. In the afternoon he burned a pile of brush and included the boxes she had been in. We used the opportunity to clear some land for the gardens.
In the late afternoon I decided some of the woody weeds looked just the right diameter for roosts, so I nailed together some makeshift roosts for the shed. It made me so happy to look in later and see hens up there!
Today I moved and cleaned out the trailer our lost hen and the other big birds have been in. They all seem so much happier to be able to be out all day. I don't blame them! Some of the roosters are getting quite the bright red combs. It makes me happy to see them pecking around in the grass. I want to make their lives with us enjoyable and fulfilling. For a chicken, that means food, clean water, a clean place to sleep, sunshine and protection from predators. As simple as that seems, it can be tough to provide all of those things. They sure poop a lot!
Amazingly enough, I can start planting in about a month, so I am feeling an increasing urgency to get the soil ready. I have picked where I will put in the cut flower garden and the vegetable garden. Now I need fencing. Our endless refrain.
I am hoping the big birds will help till up my vegetable garden, and the little birds my flower garden. I am dreaming up ways to move them slowly through the areas we need tilled. This will involve more fence. I want to do it for nothing (using what we have here), but moveable sturdy fencing is not simple. That's why it costs A LOT if you buy it.
Fencing, fencing, fencing. What would I do if I won the lottery? Pay someone to put in all the fences I want, and renovate the barns!
And get a sheep to mow the lawn; a goat (or 100) to eat the browse, milk and generally make me happy; and a pig to REALLY till the ground (that's what their snouts are made for! Honest!). Oh, and a "swift and strong pony" for Farmer Boy. :-) Never heard of a swift pony? That's okay. He wants one for his super hero deeds, so I am sure that all that superness will rub off on the pony and "swift-ify" it. :-) It's tops on his wish list today.
Our little injured RI Red hen is still alive, and very alert. Last night (Sun) she flew out of the box. It was very hard for her, and painful, I think. We got her a bigger box so she has more places to hop and fall (poor baby). I caught her looking intently at me during dinner. I think she is lonely. :-( It is supposed to be nice tomorrow so we may take her outside to sit in the grass and sunshine for a while. I'll confess I am feeling anxious about her. I have become quite attached, and I fear that her future is not bright. So much of the muscle on her leg is exposed. I fear that her whole leg is going to just die off. I am definitely in danger... I am thinking of naming her. We have a rule on the farm: no naming anything you might end up eating. I do not want to eat her. I just hope she is really a she, as all evidence suggests, and that she will be a happy little egg layer.
Stephen tells me I should not keep you (and him!) in suspense about my thoughts on slaughtering. I think he pesters because the time is at hand. Alas, you will have to remain in suspense, because this is already long and it is already late. :-)
In the late afternoon I decided some of the woody weeds looked just the right diameter for roosts, so I nailed together some makeshift roosts for the shed. It made me so happy to look in later and see hens up there!
Today I moved and cleaned out the trailer our lost hen and the other big birds have been in. They all seem so much happier to be able to be out all day. I don't blame them! Some of the roosters are getting quite the bright red combs. It makes me happy to see them pecking around in the grass. I want to make their lives with us enjoyable and fulfilling. For a chicken, that means food, clean water, a clean place to sleep, sunshine and protection from predators. As simple as that seems, it can be tough to provide all of those things. They sure poop a lot!
Amazingly enough, I can start planting in about a month, so I am feeling an increasing urgency to get the soil ready. I have picked where I will put in the cut flower garden and the vegetable garden. Now I need fencing. Our endless refrain.
I am hoping the big birds will help till up my vegetable garden, and the little birds my flower garden. I am dreaming up ways to move them slowly through the areas we need tilled. This will involve more fence. I want to do it for nothing (using what we have here), but moveable sturdy fencing is not simple. That's why it costs A LOT if you buy it.
Fencing, fencing, fencing. What would I do if I won the lottery? Pay someone to put in all the fences I want, and renovate the barns!
And get a sheep to mow the lawn; a goat (or 100) to eat the browse, milk and generally make me happy; and a pig to REALLY till the ground (that's what their snouts are made for! Honest!). Oh, and a "swift and strong pony" for Farmer Boy. :-) Never heard of a swift pony? That's okay. He wants one for his super hero deeds, so I am sure that all that superness will rub off on the pony and "swift-ify" it. :-) It's tops on his wish list today.
Our little injured RI Red hen is still alive, and very alert. Last night (Sun) she flew out of the box. It was very hard for her, and painful, I think. We got her a bigger box so she has more places to hop and fall (poor baby). I caught her looking intently at me during dinner. I think she is lonely. :-( It is supposed to be nice tomorrow so we may take her outside to sit in the grass and sunshine for a while. I'll confess I am feeling anxious about her. I have become quite attached, and I fear that her future is not bright. So much of the muscle on her leg is exposed. I fear that her whole leg is going to just die off. I am definitely in danger... I am thinking of naming her. We have a rule on the farm: no naming anything you might end up eating. I do not want to eat her. I just hope she is really a she, as all evidence suggests, and that she will be a happy little egg layer.
Stephen tells me I should not keep you (and him!) in suspense about my thoughts on slaughtering. I think he pesters because the time is at hand.
Sunday, December 05, 2004
Midnight chicken drama
Oy! I had barely had enough time to post that picture when the drama started up again. I heard a chicken distress call and thought it was one of our invalids, but realized it was coming from the back yard. Turned on the light and both Molly (dog) and Snugglebug (cat) were playing with another RI Red. He was not hurt thankfully (by the call, I'm pretty sure this one is a he).
With the dog and cat distracted by the door opening, he went under the back steps, under which grows poison ivy... one of only two spots I've found on the entire 40 acres. We put the dog and cat in the laundry room and I coaxed the bird out and put him back in the shed along with about 10 others who had decided to sleep outside. As I was out there it started to rain.
In case you are wondering, chickens have a brain the size of a pea, and it works about that well. Once it is dark, you can do just about anything to them. They peeped a bit at me and stretched when I picked them up, but no alarm calls. I had to force them to move inside the shed, because they would sit down right inside the opening, and wouldn't move in. It is actually a common problem for chickens to smother because they pile up on each other in the dark.
Of course I noticed my right hand brushing poison ivy while I was actually touching it. I have bathed my hand in diluted bleach (I know, I know, but for Pete's sake, my RIGHT hand... I do not have time for poison ivy!). Now I'll probably end up being pregnant... the last time I used bleach like this was 8 years ago and shortly thereafter found out I was pregnant with Farmer Boy. I do of course understand that it was not cause and effect! :-) But being a first time pregnant person I naturally freaked out about the fact that I had soaked my poison ivy exposed legs in bleach not knowing I was pregnant.
I suppose I ought to get some sleep. Chickens and dogs don't seem to have a sense of civilized hours for drama.
With the dog and cat distracted by the door opening, he went under the back steps, under which grows poison ivy... one of only two spots I've found on the entire 40 acres. We put the dog and cat in the laundry room and I coaxed the bird out and put him back in the shed along with about 10 others who had decided to sleep outside. As I was out there it started to rain.
In case you are wondering, chickens have a brain the size of a pea, and it works about that well. Once it is dark, you can do just about anything to them. They peeped a bit at me and stretched when I picked them up, but no alarm calls. I had to force them to move inside the shed, because they would sit down right inside the opening, and wouldn't move in. It is actually a common problem for chickens to smother because they pile up on each other in the dark.
Of course I noticed my right hand brushing poison ivy while I was actually touching it. I have bathed my hand in diluted bleach (I know, I know, but for Pete's sake, my RIGHT hand... I do not have time for poison ivy!). Now I'll probably end up being pregnant... the last time I used bleach like this was 8 years ago and shortly thereafter found out I was pregnant with Farmer Boy. I do of course understand that it was not cause and effect! :-) But being a first time pregnant person I naturally freaked out about the fact that I had soaked my poison ivy exposed legs in bleach not knowing I was pregnant.
I suppose I ought to get some sleep. Chickens and dogs don't seem to have a sense of civilized hours for drama.
Saturday, December 04, 2004
New picture
In honor of the birds who are getting so much air time, I have changed the photo. You'll note that the fat boys (and girls) are doing what they love best... eating and drinking!
Chicken hospital
Seems I've taken up chicken nursing. Just walked out to the laundry room and saw that Stephen had brought another chicken in for care. She is a hen (one of the "fat boys") who is going to need some extra garlic and cayenne. She seems to have a cold. Chickens get respiratory illnesses easily in wet conditions, and we've had lots of "wet" here. Several of the Cornish Rocks are sneezing, but she seems weak as well as snuffly.
Today we are going to try to figure out different living quarters for them as the trailer has gotten too small to comfortable hold them, poor things. Hard to believe that 100 chicks had oodles of room in there, but 24 six week old birds are cramped.
The bird caught by the dog is improving. She is still having trouble with her leg, but is alert and eating and drinking very well. She has come to really trust me and lets me stroke her. I think she will have to be in for quite a while, at least until the ripped area is scabbed over. Even then, I worry that the other birds will peck at her, so we will have to play this by ear.
Today we are going to try to figure out different living quarters for them as the trailer has gotten too small to comfortable hold them, poor things. Hard to believe that 100 chicks had oodles of room in there, but 24 six week old birds are cramped.
The bird caught by the dog is improving. She is still having trouble with her leg, but is alert and eating and drinking very well. She has come to really trust me and lets me stroke her. I think she will have to be in for quite a while, at least until the ripped area is scabbed over. Even then, I worry that the other birds will peck at her, so we will have to play this by ear.
Friday, December 03, 2004
Update on injured chicken
Our hurt bird made it through the night. I got her (him?) to drink a bit of water last night, which definitely increased her alertness. She wouldn't eat. I tried to clean her up with mild soap and water, but the best time for doing that had long passed. I swabbed some homeopathic calendula on the wounds, because it was what I had. I really wish I had some comfrey leaves right now to make a poultice. I will definitely be growing comfrey; it is an amazing healer.
This morning she drank a LOT of water, but still refused food. I put a touch of blackstrap molasses in the water and she guzzled more, even peeped. Then she moved around the box a little, so I offered her some food and she ate it all! Hooray!
Her side is clearly bothering her. She has a hard time putting weight on the affected leg. I suspect she will never grow feathers on her left side because I think I am looking at muscle, not skin.
Saving her to what I end, I wonder. If she is a hen, she may be able to live a relatively normal life, although she will likely be at the bottom of the pecking order, and will have reduced ability to escape predators. I don't think she'll be able to fly. If she is a he... wow, I don't know. I think it might be hard to do all the things roosters do with the kind of restrictions this bird will likely have. Time will tell.
I have learned a great deal about alternative emergency animal care in the past 15 hours. I will do some things differently next time, like cleaning up the wound immediately. I also now have a better idea of what I'd like to have on hand for emergency first aid for our animals.
I have also begun to actively process, emotionally, the raising-animals-to-eat thing. I have a lot of thoughts on this, so I will save it for another post.
This morning she drank a LOT of water, but still refused food. I put a touch of blackstrap molasses in the water and she guzzled more, even peeped. Then she moved around the box a little, so I offered her some food and she ate it all! Hooray!
Her side is clearly bothering her. She has a hard time putting weight on the affected leg. I suspect she will never grow feathers on her left side because I think I am looking at muscle, not skin.
Saving her to what I end, I wonder. If she is a hen, she may be able to live a relatively normal life, although she will likely be at the bottom of the pecking order, and will have reduced ability to escape predators. I don't think she'll be able to fly. If she is a he... wow, I don't know. I think it might be hard to do all the things roosters do with the kind of restrictions this bird will likely have. Time will tell.
I have learned a great deal about alternative emergency animal care in the past 15 hours. I will do some things differently next time, like cleaning up the wound immediately. I also now have a better idea of what I'd like to have on hand for emergency first aid for our animals.
I have also begun to actively process, emotionally, the raising-animals-to-eat thing. I have a lot of thoughts on this, so I will save it for another post.
Thursday, December 02, 2004
Drama with chickens
Molly, our dog, is a herding dog. Australian Shepherd, maybe with some Blue Heeler (also called Australian Cattle Dogs). Very intelligent breeds, very strong herding instinct. Molly, not so much instinct, but she's getting there. She is very protective of me, in particular, and is excellent at herding everything away from me. This is not necessarily the direction I am hoping for of course.
We have begun letting the chickens out to range around. They are old enough and sturdy enough now, and hopefully big enough that the chicken hawks will ignore them (wishful thinking). Their presence in the yard has been a source of endless temptation for Molly. In addition to the now easy access to warm bodies that she can chase, there is the lure of the chicken feed, which apparently is delicious... the dog, cat, horses and donkey, as well as the chickens, find it quite delectable.
So Hank the horse dumped the feeder when it was on the ground out of the chicken house. And Molly dumped it when it was in. Stephen rigged up a tiny door, big enough for chickens to come and go, and small enough for Molly to be prevented from going in. This works for keeping Molly out, but oddly, the chickens seem less interested in coming out (at least today).
About 20 of them were out this afternoon, however. We were getting ready to go into Austin for our monthly food coop pick-up and trip to Whole Foods and Costco. We had let "the fat boys" (the Cornish-Rock broilers) out in the front, so rounded them all back up by hand as their "house" does not have a door (it's a trailer).
We checked on the other birds back in the shed, filled water and feeder, and saw there were a few birds out, so I left the door open figuring they would go in when it got dark. We loaded up our coolers to go, but as I got in the truck to drive off, Farmer Boy shouted "Mama! Molly has a black bird!"
Sure enough, across the yard was Molly with a dark bird in her mouth. I shouted her name and started running toward her and she dropped it, then dropped on her back with that guilty look on her face. The poor bird (a RI Red it turns out) looked like someone had decided to get some boneless breast without killing her. I burst out crying.
What to do? I was just going to make my first appointment if I'd left when I was getting in the truck. The bird was alive, but should it be? Should I put it out of its misery? I really had no idea what to do, but I had to do something.
After conveying my displeasure to Molly (if anyone knows how to train a farm dog... HELP!) I ran into the house, crying, found a box, filled it with pine shavings, cried some more, got some gloves, said a bad word, cried and ran back to the bird. Farmer Boy had come out of the truck and was standing over the bird keeping Molly away from her.
I put her in the box and carried it into our bathroom, putting her in our chicken hospital (our non-functioning tub). I gave her a little food and water, and hoped for the best. Yes, I did say a prayer for her. She is one of God's creatures after all.
Then I cried some more.
But there was no time for being emotional, so I cried as I ran to the back yard to figure out what on earth to do with the other chickens. We gathered up the ones we saw and put them in the shed, and just as we were about to leave discovered a big lump of them all settled down for a nap in a toasty patch of sunshine, on the other side of the fence. There were too many of them to catch, so again, praying for the best, we left.
And when we returned 6 hours later, the injured bird was still alive, and there were only 5 birds still outside. No sign of carnage, so I am assuming the others did as I'd hoped and hopped up the ramp back into the shed at dusk. We popped the remaining birds in and closed them up for the night.
Now I am off to research healing this bird...
We have begun letting the chickens out to range around. They are old enough and sturdy enough now, and hopefully big enough that the chicken hawks will ignore them (wishful thinking). Their presence in the yard has been a source of endless temptation for Molly. In addition to the now easy access to warm bodies that she can chase, there is the lure of the chicken feed, which apparently is delicious... the dog, cat, horses and donkey, as well as the chickens, find it quite delectable.
So Hank the horse dumped the feeder when it was on the ground out of the chicken house. And Molly dumped it when it was in. Stephen rigged up a tiny door, big enough for chickens to come and go, and small enough for Molly to be prevented from going in. This works for keeping Molly out, but oddly, the chickens seem less interested in coming out (at least today).
About 20 of them were out this afternoon, however. We were getting ready to go into Austin for our monthly food coop pick-up and trip to Whole Foods and Costco. We had let "the fat boys" (the Cornish-Rock broilers) out in the front, so rounded them all back up by hand as their "house" does not have a door (it's a trailer).
We checked on the other birds back in the shed, filled water and feeder, and saw there were a few birds out, so I left the door open figuring they would go in when it got dark. We loaded up our coolers to go, but as I got in the truck to drive off, Farmer Boy shouted "Mama! Molly has a black bird!"
Sure enough, across the yard was Molly with a dark bird in her mouth. I shouted her name and started running toward her and she dropped it, then dropped on her back with that guilty look on her face. The poor bird (a RI Red it turns out) looked like someone had decided to get some boneless breast without killing her. I burst out crying.
What to do? I was just going to make my first appointment if I'd left when I was getting in the truck. The bird was alive, but should it be? Should I put it out of its misery? I really had no idea what to do, but I had to do something.
After conveying my displeasure to Molly (if anyone knows how to train a farm dog... HELP!) I ran into the house, crying, found a box, filled it with pine shavings, cried some more, got some gloves, said a bad word, cried and ran back to the bird. Farmer Boy had come out of the truck and was standing over the bird keeping Molly away from her.
I put her in the box and carried it into our bathroom, putting her in our chicken hospital (our non-functioning tub). I gave her a little food and water, and hoped for the best. Yes, I did say a prayer for her. She is one of God's creatures after all.
Then I cried some more.
But there was no time for being emotional, so I cried as I ran to the back yard to figure out what on earth to do with the other chickens. We gathered up the ones we saw and put them in the shed, and just as we were about to leave discovered a big lump of them all settled down for a nap in a toasty patch of sunshine, on the other side of the fence. There were too many of them to catch, so again, praying for the best, we left.
And when we returned 6 hours later, the injured bird was still alive, and there were only 5 birds still outside. No sign of carnage, so I am assuming the others did as I'd hoped and hopped up the ramp back into the shed at dusk. We popped the remaining birds in and closed them up for the night.
Now I am off to research healing this bird...
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Storms and weeds
We have been having an ongoing battle with the weather here. We received so much rain last week that the Colorado River flooded. We are far enough away that the flooding did not affect us, but we had to miss our weekly homeschool park day as the town park was completely submerged. If we had been sitting where we parents usually do to chat, our heads would have been under water.
Around the farm the impact has been felt. I found myself out under the carport several days, building berms and digging ditches as the water rose. No water in the house, but a lot under the carport. We clearly have some landscaping to do to fix this issue. Gutters will help too.
The shed was not finished (still isn't). The tar paper tore off in places, and a lot of rain made it into the building. Amazingly, not one chicken has been lost since those first two chicks the first days. All the rain made it impossible for Stephen to finish when planned because it was either raining or everything was too wet to shingle. And just when it finally dried enough, he hurt his back.
Did I mention Snafu Farm as a name?
The wood all throughout the house swelled. Drawers stuck, doors stuck.
The cat was irritated by the rain, the dog didn't really care except when her dog house flooded and the little raised area in front of the house was soaked. We let her in, even though she doesn't really like to be in the house. The cattle didn't care either, because they had just gotten a nice big round bale of top quality hay. They just stood with their backs to the rain and ate.
At the tail end of the storms, as the cold front pushed it all out like a steam engine, we had vicious winds. Texas weather is rarely gentle. The winds brought down a good number of dead tree limbs, which turned out to be handy. With the cold weather we started using our fireplace regularly so had a great supply of firewood in the front yard. It's all gone now... we have to go back into the woods to get more.
I keep marvelling at how much abundance there is here already. We have our own cedar, which is a fabulous wood for pest repelling and an excellent choice to use instead of pressure treated lumber becuase it is slow to rot. We will use a lot of the downed cedar for fence posts since they'll be in direct contact with the ground. We'll also cut them for Christmas trees and wreaths. We have copious amounts of mesquite, good for smoking. Both mesquite and cedar are considered pest trees... weeds of sorts. Amazing what blessings weeds can bring.
When I was pregnant and almost due the second time, I kept a miserable rash at bay by daily eating dandelion leaves at lunch in my salad. They are a very effective liver detoxifier. Plantain, another common lawn weed, is a remarkable bug bite easer and has other healing properties. Jewelweed, which grows where poison ivy grows, is a natural antidote to poison ivy rashes.
As I write this, I am thinking about other storms and weeds in my life. The storms in the last weeks crashed through our lives, making us stop and settle in close to each other, they cleaned up the dead limbs and filled our ponds and soil with life giving water. The common weeds that so many consider a nuisance can bring healing and beauty (and tasty bacon!).
The emotional storms that crash through my life are inconvenient just as the weather we have had, but I do see that they clear out and make fresh, when I ride them out in my Father's hand. I pray that He will help me to see what I see as weeds, in a new light, and find their beauty and usefulness, even if it is to pluck them and use them to heal.
Around the farm the impact has been felt. I found myself out under the carport several days, building berms and digging ditches as the water rose. No water in the house, but a lot under the carport. We clearly have some landscaping to do to fix this issue. Gutters will help too.
The shed was not finished (still isn't). The tar paper tore off in places, and a lot of rain made it into the building. Amazingly, not one chicken has been lost since those first two chicks the first days. All the rain made it impossible for Stephen to finish when planned because it was either raining or everything was too wet to shingle. And just when it finally dried enough, he hurt his back.
Did I mention Snafu Farm as a name?
The wood all throughout the house swelled. Drawers stuck, doors stuck.
The cat was irritated by the rain, the dog didn't really care except when her dog house flooded and the little raised area in front of the house was soaked. We let her in, even though she doesn't really like to be in the house. The cattle didn't care either, because they had just gotten a nice big round bale of top quality hay. They just stood with their backs to the rain and ate.
At the tail end of the storms, as the cold front pushed it all out like a steam engine, we had vicious winds. Texas weather is rarely gentle. The winds brought down a good number of dead tree limbs, which turned out to be handy. With the cold weather we started using our fireplace regularly so had a great supply of firewood in the front yard. It's all gone now... we have to go back into the woods to get more.
I keep marvelling at how much abundance there is here already. We have our own cedar, which is a fabulous wood for pest repelling and an excellent choice to use instead of pressure treated lumber becuase it is slow to rot. We will use a lot of the downed cedar for fence posts since they'll be in direct contact with the ground. We'll also cut them for Christmas trees and wreaths. We have copious amounts of mesquite, good for smoking. Both mesquite and cedar are considered pest trees... weeds of sorts. Amazing what blessings weeds can bring.
When I was pregnant and almost due the second time, I kept a miserable rash at bay by daily eating dandelion leaves at lunch in my salad. They are a very effective liver detoxifier. Plantain, another common lawn weed, is a remarkable bug bite easer and has other healing properties. Jewelweed, which grows where poison ivy grows, is a natural antidote to poison ivy rashes.
As I write this, I am thinking about other storms and weeds in my life. The storms in the last weeks crashed through our lives, making us stop and settle in close to each other, they cleaned up the dead limbs and filled our ponds and soil with life giving water. The common weeds that so many consider a nuisance can bring healing and beauty (and tasty bacon!).
The emotional storms that crash through my life are inconvenient just as the weather we have had, but I do see that they clear out and make fresh, when I ride them out in my Father's hand. I pray that He will help me to see what I see as weeds, in a new light, and find their beauty and usefulness, even if it is to pluck them and use them to heal.
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