Chickie! Chickie!

About three weeks ago, Laura, our black Australorp, went broody.  In the past, since we didn't have a rooster, we would do what we could to break the broody hen and would take the eggs from under her daily.  But since we now have a rooster, we decided to let her give it a go.  Having absolutely no experience with hatching eggs, we didn't know how often she could be off the nest and for how long.  Often we would see her running around the yard with the flock, but she was always back on the eggs at bedtime.  After about 10 days, Vanilli assumed the role of broody hen, and I'm thinking she did so during one of Laura's romps around the yard.  For a few days, they seemed to be taking turns.  Eventually, Vanilli took over for good and was pretty steadfast, an improvement over Laura's flightiness. 

Today, Nate threw some scratch out and Vanilli came flying out of the nest box and the coop.  Behind her, just as cute as could be, came a chick!  He said he just looked at that chick, and said, "Where did you come from?"  It was following Vanilli all over the yard, and then he gathered them both up and put them back in the nest box.  He did find a dead chick, and later in the evening, once I got home from work, we found an egg that looked like the chick was trying to get out, but didn't make it.  Vanilli is still sitting on about 9 eggs, and the little chick was nestled under her when I closed up the coop this evening.  I sure hope we get more!  This will be our first time raising a chick naturally with a mother hen and not under a brooding lamp.  

Here is our new cutie! 

And a trip around the yard with Mama Vanilli!

Happy homesteading,

Candace
        

Watermelon for Dummies and Blog Award

What do you do when you can never tell when a watermelon is ripe?  Grow Golden Midget.  It turns yellow when its ripe.  Don't believe me?  Check this out!

Now folks, this is my kind of watermelon. 



About a week or so again, Carolyn at Krazo Acres Farm honored me with the award above.  I am deeply touched that she would include me on her list.  Part of the deal is that I have to tell you seven things about me that you may not know and then pay this award forward to ten more blogs. 

1.  I hate peas.

2.  I don't like dogs.

3.  My favorite bands are The Smiths, The Cure, and I wouldn't be an 80s girl without loving Duran Duran. 

4.  My favorite book is "Gone With the Wind" by Margaret Mitchell.

5.  I have read the LHOTP series more times than I can count.

6.  I'm addicted to ice cream.

7.  One of my favorite meals is a hamburger and onion rings. 

I have a dilemma when it comes to choosing ten blogs to highlight.  You see, I hate to say it, but I have not ventured into the blog world lately.  I stay so busy that I tend to read the same blogs without expanding my horizons.  I need your help.  Please, please, please comment and give me some good blogs to consider and I'll hold off naming my ten choices.  I hate to cop out on this, but I really need some help.  Of course, all of the blogs on my blog roll are great, but I need some new blood, and most of them have strong readerships.  Not that having a low readership is a requirement for getting this award, but I know there are some blogs out there that are just starting out that are worthy of some attention.  Please feel free to toot your own horn if you're a reader with a blog.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Happy homesteading,

Candace     

Welcome

First and foremost, I wanted to take a moment to welcome the new members who have joined my blog recently.

Sometimes I contemplate ending my blog because there just doesn't seem to be enough time in the day to do everything I would like, and writing posts fall to the bottom of the list of priorities more than anything else.  Well, maybe not more than anything else.  I mean cleaning my bathroom would hit rock bottom every time and only when I get the heeby jeebies do I actually clean it.  Seriously, the mosquito-infested creek bed at the back of my yard seems cleaner than my bathroom sometimes.  But I digress.  I think the heat, lack of rain, and the end of the week are getting to me.  I contemplate ending my blog.  Then, I pull it up and see new followers and I think there must be something I'm writing, however infrequently, that is resonating.  Seeing new followers gives me the energy to keep writing.  So, I would love to hear from you why you keep coming back.  With all of the great blogs out there, what about my blog resonates with you? 

Now, realizing I can't do it all, I am discontinuing my Harvest Tally.  A few weeks ago the battery on my scale ran out of juice and it was probably a week before I got to the store for a new one.  Not weighing everything that came through the door or never even made it to the door because I ate it was liberating.  I would like to try to keep up my preservation tally just because I don't can everyday and it will serve as an inventory for us to see how much of something we eat during the year.  To sum it up, we are getting about 5 eggs a day from 6 layers, and a good amount of veggies, enough to eat on during the week and some left over to preserve in various ways.  I'm happy about that and seeing the food on my plate each evening that I grew myself is proof enough I'm doing something right.  I don't need pounds and ounces to prove it. 

So, sound off if you will.

Until next post, happy homesteading,

Candace 

Protecting Your Animals and Human Error

Try as we might, we can't always protect our animals.  Weather and predators play a huge role, but at some point, human error comes into play as well.  Human error is the hardest to accept.

We are in the middle of a heat wave.  Yesterday at 5:00 p.m. my car thermometer registered 110.  At 9:00 p.m. the temperature was still 100, and the low last night I think was around 80.  Right now, at 1:35 p.m. it's 101, and the high is expected to be 105.  Tomorrow is expected to hit 103. 

At times like this, I am so thankful for the technology we have to predict the weather.  In anticipation of this week, I plucked Olivia and Blue Moon, my angora rabbits, and trimmed them down to the skin.  All of the rabbits got frozen 2 liter water bottles in their cages yesterday while I was at work.  The rabbit shed is in deep shade, so I know that helps.  They all made it through yesterday.  Today I am repeating the frozen water bottles, and I've brought Olivia and Blue Moon inside. 

The chickens seem to be holding their own against the weather; however, we lost our Pearl this week.  We are so sad because she was one of our original two chicks when we first started keeping chickens over 3 years ago.  She was the end of our beginning, and I love to say she was one tough bird.  She was our special needs chicken who hobbled around the animal yard on her deformed talon.  She got special preference from us.  She survived two night attacks when we were new to chicken keeping and a hawk attack.  We saved her about two weeks ago from drowning when the coop flooded.  She seemed to have as many lives as a cat.  So, to lose her because of our mistake is especially brutal to take.  We forgot to close the coop door last Sunday night and a night predator got her.  Only once before have we forgotten to lock them up at night, and that was at the beginning of our chicken keeping experience.  We could chalk that up to a beginner's mistake, but after three years, we have no excuse.  We just plain forgot.  And, because of her disability she would not have been able to run from it.  

RIP Pearl. We're sorry, and we love you.

Candace



Well, I Did It

Our little farm has raised its first meat.  Or rather, I should say I've raised our first meat.  No one thought I had it in me, including myself.  Nate said he didn't want to have anything to do with it.  And he didn't.  I reminded him that he spent hours fishing while growing up and that he cleaned and ate the fish he caught, but to him that isn't the same because he didn't know those fish.  True, but he still took life.  He didn't know the rabbits either.  He wasn't the one who fed, watered and petted them daily.  I don't blame him or think any less of him.  I certainly can't sit in judgement of him, because up until the moment, I didn't know if I could do it. 

Slaughtering an animal for food, especially one that you've raised, takes not only physical preparedness, but also mental preparedness.  The physical preparedness was no problem.  I knew I could assemble everything I needed to do the job.  The mental preparedness was a little more difficult to wrap my mind around.  To prepare myself, I watched videos online, I read the Rabbit chapter of Novella Carpenter's "Farm City," and I went and sat with the rabbits and thought long and hard about the task at hand.  I thought of my beekeeping too.  Some days when it's hot and sticky outside, like today, I really don't want to put on all of my equipment and go check the beehive.  I know I'm going to sweat and the potential is there for getting stung.  I hate getting stung.  But, I know I have to check the hive for several reasons, mainly the health and maintenance of the hive.  So, I do it.  I go outside, and I get the job done.  So, if I sometimes hate checking the hive, why keep bees?  For the pleasure and reward I get when I extract honey.  Several of my friends told me before I slaughtered the rabbits that they would only do something like that if they were starving and they had no other choice.  If it boils down to choice, I feel like I have no other choice.  I have grave concerns about the meat industry and how it treats its animals, and while I've been a vegetarian in the past, I enjoy eating meat.  So, the answer to my dilemma was to raise my own.

On the day at hand, Nate's friend, Aaron, came over with his two kids to help.  He has experience with rabbits, so I felt like he would be the best person for the job of helping me.  What amazed me was the reaction of his two kids, a son and daughter.  They were fascinated with the process.  I mentioned to Aaron my awe, and he said he had been talking to them all week about it.  I like to think they embraced it in their childhood innocence because they haven't been stigmatized yet by the void the meat industry and society have created with regard to how an animal is raised for the table.  We are so separated from this experience that all most of us knows is the packaged meat at the grocery store that looks nothing like the animal itself.  I'm honored and humbled to have had this experience, and just like when I eat a vegetable I've grown myself or an egg one of my chickens has laid, I felt equally so when we ate the first rabbit because I know what it took to raise it in a clean healthy environment, to show reverence for a life, and to dispatch it humanely and with thanks.

Happy homesteading,

Candace     

Truck Rally Anyone?

We've been getting some good rain lately, and for that I've been very thankful.  It has taken the pressure off of me to keep everything watered and the garden is looking lush and green.  Until Sunday, the rain has been just enough but not too much.  The animal yard sits in the low part of our yard and a few days of rain makes it wet and somewhat muddy, but nothing too bad.  Well, Sunday was a nightmare.  It had already been raining throughout the week, but the bottom fell out on Sunday.  I'm talking serious flash flood rain.  I was putting everyone up for the evening when it really let go, and I mentioned to Nate that I saw some standing water in the coop, which I had never seen before.  At the point where our front ditch started flooding, I asked Nate to go out and check on everyone.  He was gone for longer than I expected, so I went outside to make sure he was okay.  He had been digging a drainage hole in the coop because it had filled with water.  The worst part is he found Pearl, our handicapped chicken, up to her neck in the water.  She can't get up high on the roost like the rest of the birds, so she stays on the bottom rung.  I guess the water overwhelmed her and she couldn't even get on the bottom rung.  She was close to drowning.  We brought her inside and put her in the bathtub  with a heat lamp over her.  She was soaking wet and shivering.  I thought if she makes it through the night, she's going to have some respiratory issues, so I went ahead and put some VetRx in some water for her.  The next morning I awoke to her clucking in the bathroom.  She is one tough bird!  So far she seems to be fine; however, the animal yard isn't.  It rained again most of Monday, and yesterday was clear, but it rained again last night.  Enough already!  The animal yard is a serious mud bog right now.  We could hold a major league truck rally.  Bigfoot?  You out there?  You want to have some fun, boy?  Since the yard is pretty shady, it's going to take several days to dry out.  Until then, I'll have to sink in the mud. 

Oh, and today is the day the meat rabbits will be harvested.  Stay tuned!

Happy homesteading,

Candace     

Yippee!

There was no rest for the weary this weekend.  Earlier this spring, we had seven trees taken down in my neighbor's yard.  Six of them were hardwoods, so we had the tree service leave them and only take the pine.  What they left was stacked fairly neatly along the retaining wall that runs between our yards.  Compared to the mess that is our neighbor's yard, they really didn't make it look any worse or any better.  We have been making an effort to tackle this pile of trees along with all of our other projects, but we had not made it a priority, mainly because our neighbor really didn't care when we did it and it seemed so overwhelming that knocking away at it piece by piece seemed the best strategy for us.  Well, the city cares.  Based on a call about another yard, a city employee was driving down our street and noticed the felled trees.  He knocked on my neighbor's door and told him he needed to clean up his yard, especially the backyard, which was overrun with poison ivy.  He also told him he needed to make some progress on the trees.  Our neighbor then received a letter giving him 10 days to get the job done. 

Not getting this project finished has really been bothering me.  I don't like to leave things undone.  So, I'm glad the city set a time limit for us; otherwise, we would have continued knocking away little bits of it and not making it the priority it should be.  So, this weekend, we tackled the remaining trees and got them all cut up and moved to our wood pile.  Our neighbor's yard looks much better as I knew it would, and I feel relief at having this project no longer hanging over my head.

When we started working yesterday, we knew we had probably a full day's work ahead of us.  The trees has all been cut to length for splitting, but we knew we still had to load the truck several times, pull into our driveway, and wheelbarrow this wood to the wood pile.  I had already filled and wheelbarrowed two truck loads of wood the day before while Nate was at work.  Our neighbor had told us someone was coming to take care of the yard, and as we were beginning work, the yard guy and his son pulled up.  He had been hired to take care of the front and back yards and been told to work around the wood.  While we were loading wood, we overheard him talking to our neighbor about the poison ivy and Roundup.  My heart skipped a beat.  Nate went over and told him we had honeybees and that we really didn't want him using Roundup.  Of course, we can't control what our neighbor does, and he would not back down on the use of Roundup.  This started a conversation with the yard guy about our bees and our urban farm.  They both took a tour of the place and offered to help us with the rest of the wood.  They didn't ask for any payment for helping, but Nate helped with the yard and I sent them home with some jams and honey.  After they finished, the man told me he sparingly used the Roundup and if he saw any type of flower in an area where he was spraying, he pinched it off just in case a bee might want to visit it.  I know he was being paid to spray Roundup, but I certainly appreciate the extra care he took to minimize any damage that might result.  He certainly wasn't obligated to us to take any special care. 

At one point, when his son was looking at the chickens and rabbits, he said, "Y'all are old-fashioned."  I smiled and said, "We are old-fashioned, and we like it that way."  I could tell he said it in awe and not like we were strange.  At one point, he also said our house and yard are his mother's dream.  We have a very humble house by most standards, but that comment made me feel blessed in so many ways. 

So, what to us looked to be a weekend worth of heavy labor ended up being laced with neighborly support and consideration.  They live in the neighborhood next to ours and know our across-the-street neighbor, so in our world, they are neighbors.  The best part is the project is DONE!  CROSS IT OFF MY LIST! 

Happy homesteading,

Candace