Walk the Walk

I had been carefully writing this entry in my head all day (Sunday) while I went about my life and of course when I get the time to sit down and write it, I forget how I had written it.  The way I had written it was very graceful. oh well, I guess I will just jump right into it.

My family is big on self sufficiency (we talk the talk) and as part of that project we obtained our chickens.  As a refresher, last year we had a lot of trouble with them, we had a NH that cannibalized and we butchered her and consumed her. We did it all at home, just D and me and it was not as hard as we had thought but still not our favorite task.  My point of this entry though is that this year we are going to reduce our numbers again by ½. I know it sounds terrible because we named some of them and yes we loved them and cared for them for 2 years. I have already placed an order for 6 new chickens and I have already made the ‘call’ to a local processing plant.

I admit being slightly nervous about this and our flock will be significantly reduced until April when the new chicks come and they wont lay for 6 months after that, which will slow down the egg business here quite a bit.  We are doing it now because I only have a few to go and they have another “farm” processing a larger quantity at the same time. This saves us a bundle and well its just the right time.

I also admit being slightly sad about it but I have to remind myself that they will be feeding my family after 2 years of running around in my back yard, being carried around and getting to eat all the wonderful scraps from my garden as well as uneaten foods from the table. That they in fact have had 100 times better of a life than a chicken at a large processing plant, who for their short lives do not even get to see the sun, eat only bagged feed that has been carefully selected to maximize their growth. No, I shouldn’t feel badly at all. I should feel thankful. A life is a life though and so I am a struggling with this a little.

Thank you chickens for the last 2 years.

And Now for something completely different – Video Blog #1

I have been basically sitting on my hind end all day feeling sorry for myself that my vacation is over. I hate that I have to wait another 6 months or so until I get to do the things that I love to do… you know, sleeping in etc. SO in protest of Monday, I have done nothing all day long. Then I decided that I wanted to blog. I love blogging but sometimes I just have trouble with content.

I headed outside with my camera and hoped for inspiration. Then, suddenly, it came to me! A video blog! Well, I guess I thought that maybe trying something different around here would be kind of fun? I dont know how many people are really reading me anyway so I am not shy or embarrassed about having my voice heard. Its actually what I do for a living! lol  So I thought I would start off with a tour of the chicken area. In this tour you get to meet all the girls (and the rooster) plus you meet Frankenstein and Noah. Django could not be reached for comment (he is napping).

There are 10, but they are 10-20 seconds each. The first video, the one that showed the front of the chicken yard was corrupt so we start off with “this is the rest of the chicken yard” lol sorry.

The New pen

The old pen

Inside the coop

 

 

 

 

 

So that our backyard chicken habitat and 2 of 3 Great Danes. Feel free to post comments or whatever if you think that this post sucks or if you loved it :)

 

L

On the 14th Day She Made Botulism

Oh the insanity that is my life... I am sorry I have not been keeping up with my blog very well but I promise that I will get back to posting weekly if not more than that starting now. I feel like I will have more to post now that things are happening on our little makeshift homestead.

First, we have been working hard on the seedlings that were started already. They will be ready to transplant as soon as the weather becomes more steady. Unfortunately I failed at tomato again. They died. All of them began to die at the same time and then those that didnt die got leggy.

Secondly, the chicken status is this: we hatched 12 of 14 eggs (not bad eh?)And of those chickens, we kept 6. I had a friend take the other 6 straight run. She wound up with 2 roo’s and I had 3. They have been in the grower pen attached to the big girls pen now for a month or so. They are 12 weeks give or take at this point and growing up to be pretty fine looking kids. I rehomed 2 of the baby roo’s and I still have one (if anyone is interested in a rooster let me know lol) that I am trying to find a home for. I needed a rooster to breed to next winter though and It really just creeped me out to no end that Ted would be boffing his kids so… I went online and found a lovely little baby Black Jersey Giant chick who was 2 weeks younger than my chicks. While picking him up (he is named Mike or Mikey) I got to talking to the two nice gentlemen that raised him. Turns out, they had recently lost their barred rock rooster! (do you see where this is going now?) What a coincidence! I HAVE a barred rock rooster! So Ted is living on a farm up in Northern New Hampshire with his own little group of pure bred barred rock hens where he will flourish and continue to do what he loves, make babies.

Yesterday I cut the divider between the grower pen and the coop and the little chickens (who are not little anymore) have free reign into the main coop although they only sneak out there to get a treat or eat the big girls food and then when the big girls come in (probably pissed their food is getting eaten) the “little” chickens scurry back into their own section of coop. It’s rather humorous. Eventually, I am hoping they will get braver and go out with the big girls and play in the dirt and leaves. Mike seems the bravest despite his younger age. He also recently became as big as the chickens that are 2 weeks older so I assume this is the point where he turns into a giant. I think he wont fit in the space between the two coops soon!

Image via Wikipedia

Third... I have been trying to pickle eggs. If any of you have a good recipe for pickled eggs, please share it with me. I like them, husband likes them and we hope to pickle other things too. My first batch of pickled eggs I used a recipe i printed off the internet. I carefully halved and followed the instructions and canned 6 eggs. Unfortunately my first attempt yielded botulism. Nobody was hurt in the making of the botulism fortunately and I set out and tried again. This time they are ALL covered with the pickling solution. (yeah I know.)

I want to learn how to pickle cabbage and cucumbers too so share the recipes if you have them. And. You. Have. To. Be. Very. SPecific. :)

Lastly, In just a months time, we will be adding to our little family with a new baby great dane. He has a name too! His name is Noah. His formal name is Sterling's Steel Rain (Chris Cornell tune) and he will be shown in obedience by yours truly, which is something I have always wanted to do!

Super Mega Attack Frankenchickens!

I am very excited. This weekend we will be starting our seeds for the super mega s-wood south garden! Dave is going to put together some grow lights and we are going to be getting them all going! Also notable improvement for the weekend will be that we are going to create (when I say “we” I really mean “he”) a growing pen inside the chicken coop and move the baby chickens out there.

Speaking of the hateful little beasties, I mean chickens, it appears that out of the 6 I kept, 3 of them are hens. Now I am not chicken expert and I can’t possibly really know until they start choking out their first crows, but there are 3 distinctly different chickens in that pen. Larger combs, redder combs, their eyes are even bigger. Oh and they are mean. That’s not different then the other 3. I don’t know what is going on with these chickens but they are NOT nice. No matter how much we handle them, feed them, coo at them. They peck you and run away! I don’t understand it at all. The babies I got from the hatchery last year were so sweet as pie at this stage… They hate me! I keep wondering if in breeding them I created some sort of Frankenstein chicken or something that is going to turn on me and try to murder our family while we sleep!

I will be sure to update you and post pictures of our indoor gardening this weekend. You guys have no idea HOW excited I am for the spring to finally get here. I know it will take longer on the mountain so we will probably not have access to shmoopywood until may, but there is so much we want to do up there this year to make it more comfortable!

The one where she admits its not that easy :)

As I sat at my desk yesterday, I hear the familiar "bing" of new email received. It was about 4, and my day was over at 4:30. It was from hubby telling me about a chicken rescue. My heart just sank because I found myself back in the same spot I had been in many times over the last few weeks. I was once again faced with losing a chicken.

Let me back track a bit so you can understand. Our flock was solid at 12 hens and a Rooster. We spent the summer learning how to care for them. They were easy really. We use the deep litter method so the whole thing takes about 10 minutes a day to feed and water the girls and maybe an additional 20 minutes maintenance per week. They were free-ranging too so it was fairly inexpensive as they were not eating as much as their feed as they would be if they were confined. All of those bugs and fresh greens were filling their crops with vitamins and they were producing a solid 8 to 9 gorgeous orange yolked eggs per day. How perfect!

Perfect.

As you read earlier in the post regarding lessons learned, I added to my flock, and with that addition, we also added mites. Although more difficult, it was an experience I was bound to have so I trudged on enthusiastically and we rid ourselves of the problem. Then I added 2 Cochin. This time however, I properly quarantined them for 4 weeks, nursed one Cochin through a respiratory thing and then added them to the flock. 3 days after a "by the book" introduction, I came home from work to find one dead Cochin and another seriously picked Cochin. We removed her and nursed her back to live, but I re-homed her. I was done and had learned my lesson about adding new chickens to my already perfect flock.

Bad weather came, and with it, terribly low temps and much snow. The girls felt the snow was WHITE DEATH so we just stopped opening the pop door. They weren't going out there anyway and they were cold. I noticed that some of the black star's were getting thin on the feathers. I actually considered it a molt and went on with my life. A week later I noticed one of the black stars was bleeding. Upon closer examination I noticed that I had 6 bald hens and some of them were bleeding. One hen (Cotton's sister) was badly pecked with a HOLE in her back about 4 inches in diameter. I was horrified. I spent HOURS researching picking, minimizing their light (shut off the coop timer and let nature take its course), adding salt and vitamins, blue kote, pine tar and all the other remedies known to man. I cried and was fairly distraught. Found the picker and as you read, put her in our pot. We opened the pop door and shoveled the snow, the girls were out in the yard. Problem solved. The hens began to heal, even Cotton's sister was healing well.

I then noticed cotton's sister was limping. She had developed Bumble Foot. This being treated and the chicken starting to behave more normal... we were on to face the rest of the winter. What else could happen at this point? Had we not already dealt with just about every ailment that was common to flocks?

Monday of this week I was talking to harry and he had mentioned this awesome "hawk" that he saw flying in the yard. In fact, Django was barking at it. I warned him that the chickens were in danger and he told me that it was too cold, none of the chickens were out in the yard. Later, I got a call from Harry, who never calls me at work. You know where this is going. Cotton was gone and a hawk (or falcon) was well fed.

I was very sad again and now faced with having to shut the pop door again. Our pen is in the woods but without the leaves, they are exposed and now they are dinner. Now that we were down 3 hens, I assumed that the picking may not restart, the main picker is gone and they had more room to move around in there (they already had enough room but you know its just the train of thought I had).

This brings me back to where we started, the "bling" of the email received letting me know that once again, we had a chicken emergency. Cotton's sister was picked again, not knowing what else to do, Tarynn and Harry grabbed her and brought her in the house.

She has been cleaned, dusted with wonder dust and given water and food. Hopefully she will pull through again. She has had many ailments this winter and I am not that optimistic that she will make it but hopeful. I feel like she is very compromised with all she has been through. Harry and I will be putting a top on the pen and letting them out again into the yard.
We have learned so much... we are down many chickens. Our flock is now down to 8 with a Roo. I am sad for my losses I am discouraged in a way but not completely.

Yesterday I got an incubator (we didn't have time to build one, we want to start chicks right away). Sometime in the next few weeks I will completely document the process of incubating and hopefully hatching our own eggs and adding to our flock.

Thanks for always sticking by us :)

Happy New Year

Image via Wikipedia

I have to thank those of you who have hung on and kept shmoopywood on your blogroll, reading list whatever you have kept us on. We have been on a brief hiatus. I have had to deal with some personal issues, not the least of which was losing my father. We are back though and I promise to start updating more regularly!

There are a lot of things planned for 2010, we have already started discussions about the garden. We learned a TON last year. We really did make it very hard for ourselves. We created our first garden ever, made it organic and used heirloom seeds! No wonder our yield was less than desirable! Good news is that I have learned a lot about placement within our own space, companion planting, and natural pesticides (I hate slugs). Also we had a rainy May/June which delayed our progress. We actually had peppers growing in November! Remember we live in the Northeast and November is quite late! In fact, this reminds me of a funny little story. Beginning of November, I was out tending the chickens (god I love saying tending the chickens) and my son was outside on the deck. As I was walking back to the house I noted a line of peppers glistening red and shiny. They were picked up at a Chicken Swap back on Memorial day weekend and they JUST ripened. Being of Italian descent I am not afraid of peppers, I reached down, plucked one off and popped it into my mouth and begun chewing. Lets just say, for an hour after, I was eating bread and ice water and crying. I finally found the little plant guide thingy and it said (of course) Birds Eye chili. Previously a member of the Guinness Book my friends… as the hottest pepper. It was dethroned due to hotter varieties being located but still… I ALMOST DIED lol.

We have had some trouble with our chickens, we had a VERY aggressive NH red hen who was just gorgeous but as soon as the weather started she began to eat her coop-mates. It was horrible. The rest of the birds are still recovering. I have 6 hens that have no feathers on their tails and 2 hens that have now healing HUGE open holes into their bodies. It was horrifying because as you know, once a chicken breaks the skin of another chicken, it’s a free for all. They instinctively peck at each other. I have a VERY small set up and not able to separate them. We found the culprit and removed her… It was SO hard for me to do. I caught, cleaned, treated and released all 8 of my remaining hens and my rooster was even pecked to bleed. I cried while cleaning them. I prayed they would make it and I even questioned my ability to keep hens. I added salt to their water for 1 day and then again 3 days later according to a picking remedy I saw. I sprayed them with Blue Kote, and slathered the hens who were featherless but not bleeding with pine tar. We talked about it and then we did something that some of you will cringe and other will just nod. We prepared her for the pot. It was hard, but it was a VALUABLE lesson. We learned how to raise, kill and dress our own food that day. Delilah taught us a VERY valuable lesson and we will forever be thankful to her for this.

We certainly have had our ups and downs over the last 3 months. I am sorry for being absent, sometimes life just takes over and you start doing things automatically, living through the bad. Blogging got left behind for that short time, so for that I apologize. We are hoping 2010 will be much smoother and full of lessons for us.

So stay tuned for more fun little tid-bits of misadventure while we gear up to build an incubator and incubate our own chickens, start our seeds, and other wild adventures!

Here Comes The Sunshine!

Sometimes I just start writing without knowing where it goes. Others I compose the whole entire blog entry in my head in the middle of the night and upon waking I rush to the computer to document it before I forget what I wanted to tell you guys. Then there are those times that I know I want to communicate with the world but I just don't know what to say so I just say "hey world, this is what we did today"

SO guess what kind of blog-day today is?

Today Harry and I decided to skip being responsible, stop worrying and do what we want to do. So we woke up whenever we wanted, which incidentally turned out to be whenever Django wanted the king size bed, we fed the critters and headed out with our fishing poles! Lately sunny days are few and far between so we were quite eager to enjoy this one to its fullest! Since I am the worm fisherwoman champion of the world, I caught 4 fish with NONE of them being keepers. Harry was not screwing around with the little guys and targeting the big bass... so he didnt get anything this time. What we did get, was slightly harassed by deer flies, alot of sunshine, good conversation, a nice short walk in the wilderness and I got to see a GORGEOUS heron.
It was a great day!!

I did not have my good lens, I actually left it at Swood (sigh) but I got some pictures of my Harry, isn't he the greatest? and the view of the pond we fished.




Also, you know, we are learning about this chicken thing as we go along right? well we have 3 laying hens right now, 2 of them have been laying a bit so their eggs are a bit larger than the 3rd who just started but all are delicious. I had heard about the "fart egg" that happens from time to time. A "fart egg" is a tiny little egg that a hen will lay. What i had never heard of are the oh-my-goodness-it-is-an-ostrich-egg-that-had-to-hurt-make-sure-she-didn't-blow-an-o-ring eggs. Nobody mentions those.
except us, we actually take pictures of them.

Check out our otherwise normal medium-large eggs, next to the above mentioned h-my-goodness-it-is-an-ostrich-egg-that-had-to-hurt-make-sure-she-didn't-blow-an-o-ring egg.

We have to store it in a Tupperware container in the refrigerator because it doesn't fit in the egg carton. IT DOESN'T FIT IN THE EGG CARTON!
I will let you know what i find inside! Maybe 2 yolks, maybe more!

Model Spotlight: Pearl

Not long ago Dave and I decided we wanted to get a jump on egg production so we purchased 2 started pullets from MM. They came to us via this story (dude in my life, there is always a story). About a week after they came to live with us, they began to lay their cute tiny little eggs! Well now a month has passed and their eggs are larger. They are actually egg machines these two as they are laying pretty much daily. We were so excited about them and they came to us so healthy and vibrant, we actually got 2 more started pullets from MM who just started to lay yesterday.

One of the started black star sex link pullets from our first batch actually doesnt look like the other 3. I OFTEN wonder if she is an australorp who has lost her way and ended up in the black star pen. They all have black and gold feathers and she is all black and rather opalescent. I really like her, she came into the flock and just immediately started ruling the roost. Within 24 hours she was roosting in the best spot (next to uncle ted) and determining the order that the other chickens can enter the coop at night. Pretty hysterical! In the 6 weeks or so that she has been with us, her comb has grown quite a bit and then kind of flopped over.

(She has a comb over and she is very sensitive about it so try not to stare)

So without further blathering, I will now introduce you to our one and only Pearl (aka Lucy-you-have-alot-of-splaining-to-do)

(doesnt she look like an australorp rather than a black star?)


Also, since I KNOW you have been dying to see a picture of Pearl's house, like the paparazzi I hid in the bushes and snuck a picture of where she lives:


And here is Ninja chicken and the other black star sex link (who looks nothing like Pearl) named Margie.

And lastly, our best farm helper Django who is very busy in this picture holding down the couch to make sure it does not get away. What a good helper!

That's it for us today. :)