The chicken situation

I was worried a few months ago about what would happen when Shinny went broody, how would Curious react. Would she go around "bawgawking" waiting for someone to answer her? As it turns out she didn't do anything bad, she was her calm quiet self, she kept Shinny company during the day. I never did get a picture of it, but Curious would roost as close to the nest box as she could and hang out with her broody friend. It was really very sweet. Shinny went broody for the entire month of May and about 2 weeks ago she started again.

 I have a farmer friend who has a rather large flock of chickens, I called him up and explained my situation. He suggested we bring Shinny to his house so that she can run with a rooster and have the chance to hatch some babies. We agreed to trade, so I went outside and grabbed Shinny off the nest box and put her into a basket and drove over to my farmers house. I set my broody chicken onto a nest box and she seemed rather dazed, I can only imagine it was quite the shock. Broody hens always have this dazed look about them though. I digress... I picked out 2 chickens and paid for one of them.

The black/orange small kid is a Campine chicken or a Hamburg we're not sure. She has her wing clipped because she is a good flyer. I think they are more of an ornamental chicken, however she has laid the last two days, we'll see if she lays today. They are decent sized white eggs. The black/grey girl is a easter egger (EE) mutt. She has some of the characteristics of an EE like the beard but she doesn't have a rose comb. So I'm not sure what she is. Her eggs are a decent size and a soft brown/pink in color.

So far they are both extremely quiet, neither one has "sang" after they lay, which is awesome. Curious seems to be coping well, she tries to bully them but since they were with a large flock and a rooster the new girls are used to dodging attacks. Both of them are very shy and not at all apt to let me handle them, which is ok. Hopefully the Campine chicken will not become an escape artist. Only time will tell.

Picture and Video Update

Chicken Reduction Program

When it comes to chickens we either have ones that won't lay and go broody, or ones that are so loud they are practically roosters. Neither one works for us in our current location. About 2 weeks ago I had put the babies out in the coop and Curious proceeded to have a chicken tantrum for well over a week. More babies were to follow since we'd planned to raise way more than we needed and keep the ones that seemed calm and quiet. But the noise level got to be too much to handle around here. I've been buying eggs from our local country market since October when all the sussex chickens went on strike. All the other breeds we've tried picked up egg laying after a molt but the sussex's didn't.

Since we purchase our eggs well over half the year it got me thinking about why we have chickens in the first place. I am starting to think that anything less then 10-15 birds is a waste of money. Jake and I talked it over and decided to get out of the chicken business. Not forever, just while we are here. The problem is Curious, since she has the freezer pass she is the one who makes a big stink about the new baby chickens. She's not mean to them, but she gripes about them constantly dawn --> dusk! If we didn't have her, we would have no problem culling old hens and rearing new ones. So for now we just have the two adult birds. I put an ad on craigslist and sold all the babies within 3 hours! Both adults, Curious and Shiny have a freezer pass, it might be temporary though. Shiny will inevitably go broody, and leave Curious all alone for 1 month so we are not sure how that's gonna go. I just don't want to butcher Curious, she's too sweet, I don't have any sentimental attachment to any other farm creatures but.... we'll see she may force my hand when Shiny goes broody.

March 26th Homestead Update

We had nice weather this weekend and much outside work was done. Our to-be espalier trees are all in the ground, they are 2 year old trees which isn't ideal for for espalier but such is the way of gardening most of the time. I also planted the 4 red current bushes I intend to cordon on our east side yard that is sun/shade mix, but currents can be understory plants so I'm not worried about the lack of sun. I was also given by my neighbor a branch of black currents, and told to propagate them by sticking whips of them in the ground, leaving about a foot above and 6" below ground. With luck a few of them will root out and I'll have some black current bushes.

I put the first round of baby chickens outside in the rabbit tractor for the first time on Sunday. They were pretty freaked out, the world is a lot bigger than the broody box as it turns out.  I snapped a rare picture of all three out in the sun, most of the time they stayed in the back huddled together for safety.  I let the two remaining adults chickens loose in the garden to "help" me spread the manure around.

Once I got the ground rototilled, Jake helped me stake out the new garden bed locations. Then I worked away at shoveling the walkway soil into the garden bed area. It's amazing how much soil is in the garden bed area. We had so much pathway in our garden layout before that the growing beds seem really tall. Which is good because it'll give the roots deeper growing space. I know the soil will compact with the rain but it seems huge right now.

Jacob meanwhile was working on finishing up our woodshed and transferring the wood into it's permanent home. We had built a makeshift wood pile and covered it with a tarp, since we got the wood and stove in December it was too late to actually build something. The shed is a pretty simple lean-to using two sides of the fence as walls and only covering one side with plywood. This leaves the east side open for access, since our prevailing wind/rain come from the southwest the wood should stay nice and dry.

 Before:

After: Without one plywood wall.

Since the woodshed is over in the "bee hive" corner, Jacob got a video of the girls flying. The Stripes hive we were sure would die had so little bee's going into winter, they are still weak but getting stronger as spring progresses. It's hard to see on the video but they are bringing in orange and pale yellow almost white pollen, likely from dandelions and crocus plants.

And then there were two.... sort of

On Saturday Jake and I reduced our "laying" flock down to two. One grandma and one layer, that term being used very loosely. Curious (grandma/pet) and Oh Shiny (layer) were spared from Camp Freezer. Oh Shiny will end up there of course, but I couldn't leave Curious without a companion. Chickens begin to wander around and talk to themselves very loudly if left totally alone. We opted to reduce the flock size because egg production dropped off to nothing again.

The babies in the brooder box inside are getting nice and big, about the size of a small Flicker or a big Robin. It's still too soon for them to go outside as they aren't fully feathered. If it were warmer outside and the nights didn't dip below freezing they would be fine to be outside.



It's official, one of our babies is a rooster. Ugh! Which is fine really we'll just raise him until he starts crowing. Since one of our replacement layer birds has the audacity to be male, I opted to start more chicks and then take the best personalities for egg layers and the rest will go to Camp Freezer. The rooster is the black one speckled with white. Since they are sexlinked chickens the color does matter. Males tend to be grey/white/black, and females black/red.

Yesterday I went to our farm store and got 6 babies. 3 Wyandottes (the black and white ones) and 3 Red Star Sexlinks (the egg yolk ones). Coupled with the original brood box of 2 Black Sexlinks and 1 Buff Orpington, we seem to be over run with babies! It's all good though, I appreciate the meat they'll give us in the end, plus it saves me from breeding the rabbits as intensively.

well crap...

When I went to pick out the chicks I selected the sex-linked Black Star pullet/girl box. They should be all black, well one of them is developing a white crown on the head. It's a roo...

UGH!

New Girls in Town

Since we've had nothing but broody from the Sussex girls we've decided to refresh the flock. I opted to go with black star, (I have tried red star in the past) and buff Orpington. One of our Sussex girls will get to remain, I'd like it to be "ooh shiny" (yes that's her name) but she's a roo in a hens body and we might get some major bullying if I allow her to stay. At this point I'm not sure which sussie will get a pass, but it's a real game of survival now. This way I'll have 'curious' our grandma buff orpington who has a permanent freezer pass, one sussie, and the new black star's and BO.

So with that said it's baby chick time:

I do intend to put the Sussies up for sale on Craigslist just in case anyone in my area is looking for broody hens. Since most people use an incubator to hatch chicks, I doubt I'll be able to sell them all. We'll see.

Chickens on Strike

Since about late September our chickens have been on strike. We fought with them all year about going broody. Once a month each chicken would take it's turn at broodiness. We kept breaking them of it, only to have the cycle repeat. It got old. So by late summer early fall we decided to hell with ya'll just go broody then! I think we collected our last egg sometime the last week of September.

Broodiness was then followed by molting. To which one of my girls is just now growing back feathers. I thought we might loose her for a while there because she was so naked. Everyone has pulled through with a new coat of feathers and no baby chicks (big wonder there as we don't have rooster.)

Yesterday we found this:

It seems as though one of are girls has decided to cross the picket line. We have a scab on our hands! I thought for sure we wouldn't see any eggs from these girls ever again. I intended to put a few of them up for sale as many people are looking for a hen that will go broody. But the rest were going to meet the stew pot by April if they didn't get there act together. Possibly we won't have to worry about that because it looks like we might start seeing some production around here!

I'd love to get some fertilized eggs and stuff them under one of our girls just to see what happens, but I've been unable to find
any locally.

I heard some chicken grumbling a while ago, so there might be two eggs to put in here. I always find it amazing how loud they are after such a long stretch of quiet. At least my girls are quiet when they go broody/molt. They sure complain about egg laying whenever they actually get around to it.

Livestock update 7-12-11

Well our new bee girls are doing well. They seem to want to build wax comb where they're not supposed too. Normally bee's won't attach comb onto the screen mesh of an inner cover,  some of our bee's haven't heard about that.

This is "dots" hive (yellow polka dots) they are doing the best out of all our hives. The neighboring hive "stripes" had a virgin queen, meaning she can't lay because she is unmated. Weather plays a crucial role in the queen being mated successfully. If it's too windy or raining she won't go on a mating flight. In short that's all the weather we've been having. We checked on Sunday 7-3 and she still had not been mated. But half way through the inspection TONS of bees went to the top boards put butts in the air started fanning their wings. A phenomenon not often seen, they were directing her home making sure she came back to the right hive. It's amazing how important her mating flight and her presents is to the hive. We didn't get a picture of it because of course we forgot the camera. But Peace Bee Farmer has a great picture and explanation of the mating flight. 

'Stripes' queen mating was confirmed on Sunday 7-10, her butt was twice as big as before and finally eggs are larva were seen! They will be our weakest hive since no queen meant no babies for the last month. Jake took a frame of capped brood from dots and put it inside stripes to give them a boost since 'dots' is kicking ass!

The chickens are doing good, each and every one of the Sussex's have gone broody. So our break broody method involves the dog kennel and a lot of patience. We put the broody girl on the side yard for the day locking the not broody girls in the chicken run. Then in the late evening we grab the broody girl and put her in the dog kennel with a roost. If she has any access to nesting material she will sit on it and be back at ground zero. This goes on for 3 days, by then she's broken broody and will just lay eggs. UGH! This is round two of the broody antics, every one has gone through it once, then we had about 3 weeks broody hen free and the cycle started over. Last night was the first time we've had two girls at once. They are only in the kennel at night when they sleep then get to enjoy the side yard and taunt the other girls all day. YEAH for heritage breeds raised by mothers not incubators! It really makes me wish I lived on property and could have a rooster then we'd have free baby chicks.

Side yard on the right. Chicken run on the left. Dog kennel (tan box) in the upper right. Silly girls.

Bunny pile! I split Big Mamma's first litter of 8 into two cages of 4. They are getting big. Tubbers is nearing the 5lb harvest weight. Likely they will reach weight by the end of July, then it's off to Camp Freezer. I am going to have Jacob build me a bunny tractor because transferring them back and forth from the pen to the cage is stressful.

This is Baby Doe's first litter of 4 they are really big! I think it has everything to do with being only 4 kits their was more milk to go around. Not sure.  One of the white spotty kids has splay leg the rear right looks like a seal flipper. The only way to fix it, is to hobble them. If it were a front leg it's easier for the bun to handle but being a back leg it's more stressful to cure. So far little spotty's had no issues and doesn't seem to mid it, so I'll just monitor it.

Big Mamma had another litter about 2.5 weeks ago. She had 9, but we lost 2 from Mamma squishing them on accident. One of her litter is a runt and is distinctly smaller (in front of bunny pile), think of an apricot vs. an orange. It's been doing fine though, I am just worried that the other bunz will beat it up. So far though eyes are open and everyone is getting along, they are in the adorable stage where their head is bigger than their body.

I know it seems like a ton of babies,  Mom asked me if we're going to have the freezer space for it. But if you think about it 5 lbs harvest weight means 2 lbs of meat but that 2 lbs also includes bones. So Big Mammas litter of 8 is only going to yield 16 lbs of meat and we don't intend to breed them in the dead of winter, we're stocking up now.

Everyone is good, busy but good.

Size to squalk about

Yesterday I noticed around 11 am that the chickens were particularly noisy, grouchy and vocal. I didn't think much of it since they are just starting out laying. The girls have just shy of 2 weeks under their belt, but not all the girls are laying yet. We've been steadily getting 4 eggs a day, but we should be getting 5, since I have 5 Sussies. Curious hasn't started laying yet and may never start again... who knows. Anyway, long story short.... I went out to the "barn" for the evening feeding of bunz and chicks, opened the nest box and found this!

The picture doesn't do it much justice since the big egg is thicker than the little one, and that doesn't come across in 2D. The giant egg weighs 73g and average egg weighs 49g. That's a 24g difference!!!! Noisy, grouchy, and vocal indeed,  I would have sung my heart out too! I am assuming it comes from Big Bertha, we thought for a while she was a Rooster because that's how much bigger she is than the other girls. (*in exasperated voice* "She's big boned ok!") LOL. I have yet to actually catch her in the nest box, so I think this giant egg was from her. It also stands to reason that since she is so much bigger she'd have bigger lungs and thus be noisier. I'll try to get a picture comparison of her vs. another sussie but I'll need a camera assistant and he's at work right now.

Babbies and Eggs

It's official our Big Mamma just popped! I went out to feed the bunz and chickens this morning at around 6 am, earlier than normal because Jake and I both had pre-work day dentist appointments. It was a good thing to because had I been on my normal route we probably would have lost 2 kits.

Before: (big and preggers)

 
After: (look she has a waistline again)

When I went up to the cage I could tell that the bunz had been born because Mamma was looking rather skinny. She didn't pull much fur to cover the nest, which is another indicator that the babies have arrived. I gave her some treats and took the nestbox inside to to inspect the contents. I found 6 babies in a huddle with one slightly outside the baby pile. That one was moving but not much, it was just too cold. I proceeded to poke around and found another baby, way in the back all by itself not moving at all. Rubbing it I could tell it was alive but only just. So I rearranged the baby pile and fur so they all had a good coating and brought the nestbox upstairs and placed it on the heating pad. Only about 15 minutes did the trick and the two little cold ones were moving and a squeaking.

I got the babies back out with Mamma, but first I put a drop of vanilla extract on her nose, this disrupts her sense of smell so she doesn't smell me on her babies. Rabbits only feed the babies 1-2 times a day, so bringing them inside isn't a big issue. Since it's still going to be below freezing for the next week (insert pissed off grumble here) I plan on bringing the nestbox inside at night and putting it out with her during the day time. I do have the cage covered with a burlap sac, just to help out with the the wind chill. It's 42* outside right now and windy. So anything I can do to help out those kits the better. I also slid a piece of cardboard in between Big Mamma and Confetti's cage's to further help block that wind. If I leave that cardboard in place I'll likely leave the babies in with her overnight, but I haven't decided yet.

Here's the babies in mostly straw with some fur, I know it looks like a bunch of straw in a box but trust me they are in there.

Our baby doe, Confetti isn't so much a baby anymore, she got breed for the first time today. By mid May it will be her turn to be Mamma.

At least two of our Sussies are laying with a possible third. Today is our first 3 egg day, I am not sure if Curious our Buff Orpington is one of the three... but I doubt it. Training them to use the nest box has been difficult. One girl doesn't mind the nestbox and use's it gladly. But the other insists on laying in the dirt. Maddeningly I fought with her over this point for at least an hour. She jumping out of the nestbox and running back down to the dirt, me placing her back in the nest box. Over and over and over. The egg size is cute too, rather small so far but they may get a bit bigger as the girls get into gear.

Red Star egg (purchased from a local farmer), Sussex egg. Just to give a good comparison, I am not sure if the Red Star egg is considered jumbo or just large but it's big. I don't mind the size difference I'll just need an extra egg in the omelet.

Insanity

Well it's spring time around here and all the jobs are piling up. I am busy on the best of days with a fully working shoulder but now being as I am not fully recovered, I'm swamped. I have to rely heavily on Jacob's "boy strength" because I have super wimpy "girl strength" right now.

I have tons of pictures on the camera, to be posted here.... but that will have to wait until later. In the last week I've repotted just shy of 50 tomato plants, about 20 pepper too. Last night I got all the baby onion starts outside, along with the pea's I started inside about 2 weeks ago.

Jake and I are in the process of building a shed, our garage has to many wood shop tools in it to hold the hay and straw bales plus all the garden tools. Our straw was kept outside under tarps and so far this year we've caught 5 mice and 2 voles in traps, so that straw needs to move inside. Today is the official raising of the shed. It's a plastic thing, but we wanted to be able to take it with us when we move out to land as a temporary housing for what ever we happen to be working on.

Big Mamma doe is preggers (finally), she is due to kindle any day now. I feel so bad for her because she is obviously pregnant, they say some rabbits you can't tell by looking at them.... well it's not so with Big Mamma. I plan to breed our other doe soon after BM has her babies, that way the cycle of baby bunz is 1 month apart.

The new girls the Sussex's have finally started laying. Only two of them so far, and the egg size is adorably small. The old gals, the red star's laid large to extra large eggs and for the small size of bird they were, it was impressive. The Sussies however are big birds and they lay medium sized eggs. I think they would likely make a nice meat bird too since they seem to have a lot of overall heft to them. We'll find out eventually...

I made rabbit-chicken-bacon sausage the other day. I had one bird left from the Halperns and it needed to get used, so I deboned it and a half a rabbit, plus about 4 strips of bacon (mostly fat) all through the meat grinder. I added tons of spices: onion, pepper, garlic, sage, salt, cayenne and chili pepper and made some lean sausage patties. They are pretty good, a valiant first attempt.

More to come later.... I gotta go raise a shed.

Chicken coop and run lay out

I figured I'd just do a blog post about this so that ya'll can see what our set up looks like. A lot of this stuff I explain in the video but just to give you a look at what our coop started out as.

This is the playhouse coop design, we purchased the plans directly from the website and built it ourselves. I liked how open it is. But being new at this we didn't consider winter. When it's really cold the girls have to come out of the roosting area and down into the open in order to eat. They won't do it. It's been 3 years since we built this coop and it's meant to be a single inclosure without a run hence all the floor space. But I just didn't think that was enough run around space for the girls, so we attached the the chicken run (I'll show that in the video, also in the previous post the picture of the Sussies is in the run). On weekends we give the girls free access to the side yard for grass and extra bugs. If they get too much time in the grass side they'll kill it and scratch it to death.

The above picture is the coop in it's original form. We've since added an addition of 2+ feet for extra roosting space and the extra nest box. Those nest boxes have been removed since none of our girls are laying yet and we needed to lower the roost so the Sussies could figure out how to roost. We're going to either put nestboxes on the side double stacked vertically or on the back side by side horizontally, not sure what yet. That's our project for this weekend since the Sussies are getting close to laying age.

Chicken Integration

The chickens are finally all figuring out this new life and the routine of it. The Sussex's  still huddle into a big group together and seem very afraid of this big world. I think that's mostly because they were raised in a barn and then my garage until they were around 14 weeks old. That's a long time to be inside not feeling the sun on your back. But steadily every day they explore the chicken run and side yard they have access to. No matter how many times I feed Curious our one pet chicken from my hand the Sussie's still won't come over and try some, Curious = bad ass brave chicken to them I am sure. Another thing these girls don't do is scratch, growing up on a concrete barn floor they learned their is no point to scratching. It should be funny to see what they think when Curious dust baths for the first time. We did have to teach the Sussie's how to roost, it was completely foreign to them. We'd go out every night just before dark and place each bird on a roost. Jacob came up with the idea to lower one of the roosts and keep one at it's original height, which seemed to help the girls figure it out quite a bit faster. Now two of the Sussie's will roost next to Curious although she still isn't happy about it.

I get the chicken butt pose all the time from these girls. It's the "this is what we think of you" pose.

The red stars were dispatched the same weekend we started integration. They were so pissed at the new additions that yelling ensued and in a very unhappy chicken way. I feared that the neighbors might get really mad if we didn't do something fast. So the red girls went to Camp Freezer.

This is what Curious thinks of the whole deal, she is in operation protest mode: seen here giving me the stink eye.

Jacob's going to work on building some outside the coop nest boxes this weekend. We took the nest boxes out of the nesting area to give the Sussies more room to figure out how to jump up and roost. Now with one roost lowered our nest boxes no longer fit inside the roosting area. So we have to think of something else.

New Additions

Oh crap here we go... I know your thinking goats or something! HA HA!!

Jacob and I have wanted to rid ourselves of the Red Star chickens since they started laying. They've taken to noise making, not "singing," that I am fine with, but yelling and general noise making. Not in an unhappy chicken way either. I know that might not make sense but when chickens are unhappy they have a way of yelling that lets you know. This is different from the unhappy sound, its more like a conversation a REALLY LOUD ONE!! The "twins" the two red's I can't tell apart are the guilty ones.  They talk and yell all day long, which is a noise I can sometimes tune out, but Jacob can not. One has this guttural growl that is particularly annoying. It's more apparent in the summer when the windows are open all the time. So long story short, we're not sure if they are stew pot material or if we should sell them. They are a year and half old and still laying strong through the winter. Regardless they need to be removed from this farm, one way or another.

So I was looking on cragslist last week to see what kinda chicks were out there. We also checked out different hatcheries, but I didn't want to order 25+ birds and deal with selling the chicks we didn't want. I found a lady selling 12 week old Light Sussex pullets for $10 each. If I ordered and brooded birds I'd probably be into each bird $7 to get them to 12 weeks old. So I figured paying someone else to raise them to that age was worth $10 each. I contacted her and a deal was made for 5 girls.

Here they are. 

The Light Sussex won't lay as many eggs as the Red Star's but that's why we got a few more of them. I think I'd rather have a heritage breed than a production one. So the "babies" are in quarantine right now in my garage! LOL!! They have been in there for one week now, all seem fine. I am going to start this week on introducing them to the other girls. Since I don't want to be out of eggs, we'll keep our Red Stars until the Sussex start laying. Curious hasn't started laying since she molted, I have a feeling her being 3.5 years old is playing a part in jump starting that egg laying. Regardless she has a freezer pass because she is an awesome bird and she likes hugs. :o)

In the pictures the girls have blue zip ties around their feet, that was from being sexed, blue zip tie = girl. Shouldn't it be pink? Anyway, after all is said and done with the Red's we'll have 6 girls on site. Which will be more than enough for us, my parents, and our neighbor.

Chicken Experiment

Since we started eating meat again we've been extremely picky about where it comes from, who's raising it, and how. I touched more on our thoughts in the post On Meat Eating so I won't go into them here. Regardless we found a couple raising chickens that fit our criteria, for chicken the criteria is:
1. Local
2. Organic or better
3. Harvested Humanely
4. Not Cornish Cross

I will hand it to the Cornish Cross chicken and it's genetic engineers, they know how to make a bird PACK on the meat. These are the birds they show in the movie Food Inc. Birds that have so many health issues they are impossible to list, and for the most part if you eat chicken in the USA this is the bird you eat. It's the most cost effective, the 'CC' chicken can be harvested at 2 months of age, it takes normal chickens 4 months to come close to the same weight. But you also ingest all that animals health issues, um no thank you. So I decided to run an experiment. I purchased a chicken from Rocky Ridge Ranch that fit all the criteria accept that last one. Then Jake and I picked up our chickens from the Halpern's a local couple raising Delaware or RedStar's for meat. The difference's were obvious even before cooking.

The chicken on the left is a "real" chicken, what chickens are supposed to look like. Long legs that can support the body weight, proportional leg and breast meat. The chicken on the right is the Cornish Cross, short fat legs that can't walk far or at all, and giant breast meat. I affectionately refer to the CC chicken as the freak show chicken. We wanted to see if we could taste the difference in the meat. Being solid vegetarians for 3+ years and only eating "real" chicken not freak show chicken when ever we did eat meat. We wanted to know, can we taste a difference between them? So I decided to slow cook each one.

With a resounding YES we can taste the difference! The CC fell apart, that was sure nice but I am wondering if it's because through tampering with it's genetics it's joints and ligaments were weakened. Or is it just because this bird didn't walk much in it's life. In any case the meat has NO flavor of it's own, and if it weren't cooked in anything would be really yucky. But what was truly bad about this bird was the texture of the meat. Mushy, soft, and lacking any firmness at all. The 'real' chicken had a much richer taste like mushrooms. That might not make sense but, that's the closest taste I could come up with. I wonder if that's what people mean by "gamey" when referring to meat. Maybe we are all so used to the mush flavor of CC meat that if it's not breast meat it's gamey? I don't know. The real chicken didn't fall apart however, but retained much of it's consistency and was lovely to cut into. It didn't produce as much meat as the CC did, but I knew it wouldn't. Nothing can compare with mutant tampering.

It was a good experiment to run, eye opening for sure. For a much more through Cornish Cross vs. Heritage chicken experiment see Antiquity Oaks Chicken for dinner?: part one, part two, part three.

SlowFoodUSA egg campaign

Thank you SlowFood this is awesome! I urge everyone I know to please sign the petition for our food safety. Keeping my own backyard flock has made me more sympathetic towards the treatment of our animals and the entire food industry.

Thank's to Halpern Homestead for allowing us to support up and coming farmers and for our winter meat supply! It's video's like this that make me appreciate people who are on the leading edge of this food revolution.

A Wild Garden update

Well it's our anniversary folks, 9 years we've been married. What did we do you ask? Dinner, romantic somethings, breakfast in bed maybe? Nope. We got up at 1:30 AM and again at 3:30 AM and stoked fires in our garden to warm the 36* area up. Then once dawn finally arrived we uncovered our poor tomato jungle and went into town. We joined the throngs of city foragers at the farmers market and then went and ordered some chickens! A lovely couple advertised on craigslist for chicken meat birds. Only not the freak show Cornish Cross meat birds.... these are Delaware and Red Stars! Jacob and I have been looking for a source for heritage meat animals and we've found gold. The couples blog (Mike and Kelsi) is here . It was an awesome few hours spent gabbing about food, gardening, and general environmental geekyness! We reserved 20 birds, when they get harvested late September we'll go and pick up our winter dinners! YAHOO!

In other garden news I got Yard of the Month from the city of Cheney gardeners. For me it's kinda like winning Employee of the Month. I was really honored, when we took the grass out of the front yard this spring and put in the wild spiral garden, I wasn't sure what reception we'd get. So far most of it's been positive.

I took a few videos of the garden to showcase it in it's wild state. The first is the front yard spiral garden. I know they are a little bumpy, but it's hard to walk around and film stuff at the same time.




Here's the big show, the back yard veggie garden and tomato jungle. Isn't it insane how fast it grows?

I forgot to mention, during the chicken harvest we had a rather surreal soundtrack... the ice cream truck was driving around the neighborhood playing It's a small world after all.

Chicken Harvest and a story about Quizzie

I read a lovely article this morning about owning livestock animals and dealing with the issues of a farm. The first rule of farming: be prepared. The last paragraph struck me most of all:

"But livestock aren't pets. They are on a farm because they serve a purpose. If I can't raise an animal to eat, then I shouldn't keep sheep whose purpose is to become meat. Furthermore, if I can't eat meat that came from an animal I know was loved and respected, that had a good life playing in the sun and eating grass, then I should go back to being vegetarian."

I could not foresee the issues we would face with our layers, but it's our job as chicken raiser's to deal with the problems that arise. 

We did it. We're down to 4 hens now....

Quizzie, a lovely hen who's antics are very similar to Curious, stopped laying about 3 months ago. I thought she might have been egg-bound a serious condition where the egg usually being too big gets stuck and can't get out. But after days of warm baths and many poking arounds by me, I decided she must be an internal layer. Not much is documented on this from all the chicken sites I frequent. Regardless the gist of it is this, somehow the egg white and yolk don't pass into the shell making part but out into the body cavity. Gross I know! So essentially her body was filling up with eggs. I am not sure how the egg ends up in there, maybe a tear in the tubing? In any case however it happens that was my best guess as to why she stopped laying. I decided I was right when she started to look much fatter than her fellow sisters. Internal laying will eventually kill her, chickens body's will not stop making eggs, period. Being less than one year old I knew that if I let nature take it's course it would be painful. I didn't want that.

So we gobbled up information on how to kill a chicken humanly and with as little trauma possible. Chickens, or any (being, human or otherwise with a brain) when beheaded will thrash around. All of the muscles fire after there is no brain to supervise activities. That is too traumatic for me, I didn't want to hold my bird down while her body thrashed around in it's final stages. We opted for the 'cone' method, where she is placed head first down a cone and the jugular is cut. This cause's the body to go brain dead instantly due to lack of blood. In an upside down position the chickens fall into a trance similar to sleep and stop struggling. That's how I can clip there wings without them struggling like a wild thing. It was as humane and trauma free of a death I could give her.

I told her what a lovely chicken she was, I held her and said thank you for the eggs, and the meat.