Weird Harvest

We have a zucchini plant growing in a pot and it is still producing zucchinis!

I'm getting anywhere from 1 to 3 eggs every day. Today I got a weird egg.

It's a little hard to see in the pictures but the egg is kind of flat on one side.Here it is laying on the flat side.
This is from one end. You can kind of see the weird shape here.

And today we went in to the title company and signed escrow papers. Here's the stack we got.

I've decided not to bring the chickens with us. My friend Vicki's mother in law said she will take them. This way I don't have to worry about making sure there is some sort of an enclosure for them for when we get up to Oregon. When we find our final place I'll start over with the chickens and that should be pretty easy.

I've also decided to sell Ladysmith and this year's heifer calf; taking Dakota, the bull, and Waneata, last year's heifer calf, besides the two horses. We may already have a buyer for them too. (The cows, not the horses.)

The worst thing right now is that we apparently have to wait basically until the last minute to move. That's the way it sounds anyhow. We've asked several people and it seems like the laws are greatly in favor of the buyer. It sounds like we could go to the last day of escrow and they could back out at the last minute if they wanted to.

So I guess we are supposed to wait until the last minute to get everything out of the house and get moved. If we took a chance and did it sooner and they backed out we would be stuck with a rental and this place and then have to start over.

Somehow it just doesn't seem quite fair. You would think there would be a sooner-than-the-last-day-of-escrow-point-of-no-return. These are all just thoughts that are going through my husband's and my heads.

But I do think these buyers are very nice people and I think they will be very accommodating. I know they are eager to move in and they couldn't be more excited. For my part I know I am excited too.

One more off the wall comment. I didn't realize "weird" would be spelled e-before-i, since I thought the general rule was i-before-e-except-after-c. I found that out when I did the spell check.

How weird.

A Good Hatch

It turns out all four eggs in the incubator were good! All four hatched.

We got two yellow and two black chicks. It will be interesting to see what they look like as they mature. (That big blob in the front is a damp paper towel to keep the humidity up.)

Tomorrow I will move them out of the incubator and into their own little box where they will have access to water and chick starter food.

What fun!

Hatch Update

It is now just after 9 pm. The chick did not seem to be making any progress so I decided to help it a little. I'm not sure if I should have or not. Various sites on the internet say it is possible to help. I didn't wait 24 hours because I was afraid it might not make it that long. It is still peeping so I take that as a good sign. What I did was very carefully and gently break the shell all around like it would have (should have). It is now sitting on a very damp paper towel to help with the humidity, which apparently is very important to helping the chick break out.

I hope I have happy news tomorrow.

Keep your fingers crossed!

Right On Time

As I reported last week I was expecting the four chicken eggs I put in the incubator to hatch today, Cinco de Mayo. I checked them first thing this morning and one of them is starting to peck its way out.

Here's a close up.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that the rest of the day progresses nice and smoothly with no problems. I'll update later!

Meanwhile-- Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Kestrel News

There's good news and bad news regarding the kestrel. The bad news is that I candled the eggs we "rescued" from the nest box and they proved to be not viable. My theory is that when the female died the period of nonincubation was too long and they just didn't develop.

The good news is that the male found another mate and they have once again taken up residence in the nest box.

Meanwhile, since I now have the incubator I decided to try and hatch a couple of chicken eggs. It seems like not too long ago I had an overabundance of chickens. Then through one happenstance or the other, eventually I just had an overabundance of roosters. So we took care of that and now it is one rooster with five hens.

I put four eggs in the incubator. I know for sure that two of them are good. I'm not too sure about the other two.

Right now I'm going to take the chance that the other two are still good and won't explode into a stinky mess rather than destroy them and find out they were good after all. Chicken eggs take 21 days to hatch, so we may have Cinco de Mayo chicks. Stay tuned!

Here are a couple pictures of one of the kestrels. Or maybe one of each?

Roosters Be Gone

It' been some time since I talked about getting rid of our excess roosters. And as usual we kept putting it off and putting it off.

But recently they have started actually brutalizing the poor hens so I knew something had to be done whether I did it or somebody else did it.

I decided today was The Day.

Last night all the chickens went into their pen (they don't always) so this morning all I had to do was catch the roosters and put them in one of the dog crates to be dealt with later. Easier said than done, but I managed to get it done. They were not happy.

After working out on the treadmill this afternoon I started getting ready to dispatch the roosters and my dear sonny boy walked in. He agreed to do the dirty work.

I'll spare you the gory details and I did not take pictures of the actual act but we did have a warped giggle about the back flips and break dancing roosters.

The End.

My Roosters

Here's a couple of pictures I took last week of my roosters.

These are cuckoo marans.

This is a wheaten marans.

The wheaten marans rooster is very beautiful. His colors practically glow when he's in the sunlight.

I still haven't brought myself to do anything about the excess of roosters running around. And I'm not sure when anything will happen, but it will happen. Eventually.

Chocolate Eggs

My marans chickens have laid their first eggs!

Pretty cool, huh? The reason they are so shiny is because I just washed them and they were still wet.

I found these this morning so I haven't had a chance to try one out. I'm sure they'll taste just like a regular egg. Wouldn't it be neat if they were chocolate inside? HA HA. (I did make a chocolate egg once. Blow the egg out and fill with melted chocolate--simple! Later when it's dried you can peel it and it's chocolate inside! Good for Easter.)

My Saturday is off to a great start. This afternoon my sister in law and one of her daughters will be here from Illinois and then we, along with my daughter and my sister that lives here (mt--the cheesemaker) will be going out to dinner for sushi!

Hope you all have a great day too!

Too Many Boys

It's about that time. Time to thin the flock, that is. The chickens are now about 4 months old, and some of the roosters have started crowing. They've also started asserting their dominance and are creating a pecking order, as it were.

I'm still having a hard time figuring out exactly which are the boys, but some are more obvious than others.

One of the two remaining Speckled Sussex. Not sure if this one is a boy or girl.
A Cuckoo Marans. Pretty sure this is a rooster. I think I'll name him "Stu".
Here's the other Speckled Sussex. She doesn't have much of a tail.
This is the Wheaton Marans rooster I got as an egg off of e-bay.

If I keep any of the roosters it will be him. This isn't the best photo of him, but he is pretty.

I've talked my husband into "taking care" of the roosters for me. After all he is an avid bird hunter and does all that stuff with the doves, quail, and ducks he manages to shoot. The only experience I have with processing an animal is from when I raised and sold rabbits a long time ago. That's a story I just haven't gotten around to telling yet, but eventually I will I suppose.

Here is a picture of my oldest hen. I can't even remember what breed she's supposed to be. I got her from the feed store as a chick. She used to lay brown eggs, but now she just hangs around eating and drinking and trying to stay out of the way of the younger chickens. She has a most unusual comb and I don't know if it's normal or if it is like this because it got injured or it just grew deformed like this.

Click on the pictures to enlarge and you may see what I'm talking about. It looks like it's a tube, with a hole going all the way through. Otherwise, if you don't look closely at her she just looks like a chicken with a cushion comb. Of course I haven't yet picked her up to examine it that closely.

I'll let you know how our first "Stu" goes. I may end up just selling the roosters for a few bucks, but I'm afraid around here that may mean an unkind fate, so I'll have to wait and see.

Trail Of Feathers

Saturday evening my husband and I went out. That in itself is an amazing statement, because we so rarely go out. But the point of it is what happened as a result of us going out!

My normal routine these days is to feed the animals just before dusk. This makes it much easier for me to lock the chickens in their pen to keep them safe through the night. There is always one rogue leghorn (I don't know if it's the normal or super sized egg layer) that likes to insist on roosting on top of the pen rather than inside the pen. I am usually able to persuade her to join her flockmates with a 12 foot section of pvc pipe.

Saturday we had to leave at 5:30. When we got back at around 11pm I went out to close the door on the chicken pen. I didn't see the white leghorn on top, but then I didn't bring a flashlight with me to count the chickens either. I usually do a quick head count before I close the door.

Sunday morning I went out to feed and found a big white trail of feathers.

It doesn't show up as well in the photos but the trail was very obvious.

My husband talked to the neighbors. One said she saw a fox and the other and said he heard "a ruckus" around 5:30 in the morning. My guess is that the chicken hopped down from her roost early and was pecking around. They are used to the dogs racing around the backyard so probably wasn't too concerned when the fox came in. That was her undoing.

Here's what's left. : (

Every time I put the chickens in I can't help thinking about a story I read when I was in elementary school. As I recall it was based in China and it was about a huge flock of geese. Every morning they were let out to the fields to eat and every evening they came back to their farm where they lived. The last goose in always got a hard smack across his back. One day a young goose lingered too long and didn't want to get smacked so he stayed out. The story goes on about all the dangers he had to avoid that night. The next day the goose decided it was worth the smack if he was the last one in.

Too bad that chicken didn't know the story of the goose.

Eggs

Not much is going on right now. We've just started thinking about what to plant in our winter garden and other than that there is not much to report.

So today I am showing you the eggs my hens currently are laying. Usually I will put my eggs in the carton so that when I take an egg out, I will always know which eggs are the oldest. The way I do that is to pretend the carton is a book. Open the carton as you would open a book and put the eggs in starting at the top left, then in the slot next to it. Then to the next "line" of the "book", and so on. I take the eggs out in the same order. Fascinating, huh! Well, it works for me.

However for the purposes of this particular post I've rearranged the eggs for easier viewing. There is the banty egg on the right, the regular white leghorn in the middle, and the other leghorn must be cranking out the monsters on the left. Surprisingly they are not double yolkers and we get a giant egg like this about every third day. Currently the banty is the most consistent layer with one a day. We get a regular sized egg about every 1 1/2 days. So if you're following that means we get anywhere from one to three eggs per day. I haven't had to resort to baking pound cake yet. (That link to the old fashioned pound cake was from two years ago. Maybe it's time to repost the recipe here.) We seem to have the right amount of eggs for now. Heaven help me when the new chicks start laying!

Growing Chickens

I would say the chicks are no longer cute little chicks. They have grown up fast and are now young chickens. I think their favorite part of the day is when I let them out of their pen. Sometimes I let them out earlier, but today I didn't open their door until around five pm.

They race each other to various spots around the yard, hoping to be the first to find the elusive golden grub.
Busy pecking away!

Here they come racing through the gate to get to the big yard.

Wait for me!

Sometimes you just gotta stop the dirt scratching to do a little itch scratching!

Buck buck buck baaawwwkk!

Chickens & Cows

I weaned the calf late last week by putting her mother in a separate pen and leaving her in the pen with her father. So far it's been relatively painless. There's been just a bit of mooing from mom two pens over but for the most part all is calm and good.

Here's father and daughter. She's growing nicely.

With one exception the chicks I got from the hatchery are doing well. About six of them developed a case of "pasty butt", where their vents (number 3 definition of the noun) get caked up for some unknown reason. I washed them carefully with warm water. Only one had a recurrence and sadly, it was just too much for the little chick. So now there are 11 cuckoo marans and five speckled sussex. Oddly enough none of the sussex chicks were affected.
Here are the two wheaton marans chicks that hatched from the eggs. Notice the feathers on their legs have started developing. This one is a little darker.

This is the lighter one.

Since I'm no expert I still can't tell if they are girls or boys. I have noticed that the darker one has more of a comb and less of a tail at this point. I don't know if that means anything. If I had to guess I'd say the lighter one is a hen and the darker one will be a rooster. We'll just have to wait and see.

This will be my last post for at least a week and a half. We are leaving on vacation tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it because first of all it's VACATION, and secondly and most important we'll be meeting up with all my husband's family and their families. Sadly, we have to leave Carli and her little family behind because she has to work.

Til then!

New Chicks In Town!