Eggs, Eggs, and More Eggs

Dear chicken-crazy daughter got a surprise the other day: EGGS!

A couple of months ago, I sold some turkey eggs to a lovely lady from Lytton who got to chatting with my girl and discovered they have a mutual admiration for Salmon Faverolles.  "Tricia" promised to bring my girl some eggs next time she was through town.  Well.  I don't like it when adults promise kids things, as most adults do not respect the power of the promise to a child.

But this special lady does :)

She arrived with no less than 12 Salmon Faverolle eggs AND 6 Mille Fleur D'uccle eggs for us to hatch!!  Whoa Nellie!  Talk about sweet gifts!

Salmon Fav's are big and beautiful and gentle, and winter well.  Mille Fleur D'uccles are lovely hens... the jury is out on the roosters (I haven't heard good things).  So all these eggs went into the trusty incubator (I told you it was getting a work-out!  Add to those eggs, the couple of Easter Egger eggs from here, and we'll see what we get in a couple of weeks.  Needless to say, we'll be selling most of the chicks as we are bursting as I've mentioned.  And I thought I was done with chicks for this year!

Mrs. Broody-Pants

AGAIN, this was NOT the plan.  I like my plans.  But This One was not part of ANY plan for this summer, anyway.

We have this sweet, two-year old blue Ameraucana hen, whom we've had since she was a chick and she has never before wanted to be a mom.

"Misty" AKA "Mrs Broody-Pants" before motherhood

Until now.  We tried several times to discourage her, taking her eggs away, moving her, locking her completely away from where she thought would be a good place to brood.  No such luck.  We finally decided that we'd give her a chance to see what she could do.  We let her have 4 brown eggs (not her eggs, as the only active rooster we have right now is either her nephew or her son).  One of her coop mates decided to lay her eggs right beside her about a week after she starting setting, so Mrs Broody-Pants adopted these eggs too!  Problem is, I think, obvious.  The other 2 eggs would hatch 10 days after the first 4. 

This is where having an incubator comes in handy.  So, seeing how today is day 18 for the first 4 eggs, we candled all the eggs, figured out which ones would be the ones to hatch on Tuesday, and put the rest in the incubator to hatch with the Salmon Faverolle eggs and Mille Fleur D'uccle eggs already in there.  Oh, what? I haven't mentioned those?  They were a gift for my 4H daughter.  We couldn't really say "no", could we?  Even though I feel like we are totally bursting at the seams of our little place here.  Oh well.  We'll just have to get picky and sell some birds.  Or build another coop.  Ahem.

My New Favorite Thing

Wanna get totally blissed out for a couple of minutes in the middle of a crazy day??  
I have 1 word for you: Affogato.  It is, quite literally, a scoop of vanilla gelato drowning in a shot of espresso. 

We slide out to our favourite Italian deli a couple of times a week and have one of these little numbers.  And seriously, I can tune out just about anything when I'm sipping one of these babies.  You get this with wine, you say?  Well.  I self-diagnosed gout about a year ago so have barely touched a lick of alcohol since. No wine for me.  Especially no beer.  Thank the powers that be I can still drink coffee!!!  And it's not just about the drinking of it, either.  I can and do (often) go to the deli and order one, but I can just as easily make one at home.

Measuring the coffee into the stove-top espresso maker.  Scooping the still-hard gelato (too soft and it is just in a puddle in your cup).  Pouring -- slowly -- the steaming hot espresso over the gelato and watching the merger.  Taking that first sip.  

Ahhhhh.

And Then.  

A sigh of pure relaxed joy, knowing ... 

I can have two.

Oink.

I truly don't know what I've gotten myself into this time.

We've talked about expanding in this way before, but then, it just kinda happened.

Pigs.

The extent of my knowledge on pigs comes from Wilbur in Charlotte's Web and Babe in the movie of the same name.  The pigs (there are 2!) are about the same size as Babe looks in the movie, and they are only 9 weeks old.  Apparently, they are a Berkshire cross, but they are pink, not black as one might expect a Berkshire to be.  They are about 50 lbs now, but will get bigger.  Much. Bigger.

So, what is a person to do?  Well, first off, we all agreed that if we were getting these animals, it was to be a family project, not just a mama project, no thank you.  I've enough to do with the lambs, ducklings, geese, turkeys with babies, and chickens around here already.  We are raising them for meat, as my family really seems to enjoy eating pork and the way that commercially-raised pigs are kept is beyond horrific.  For these sensitive, intelligent animals to be kept in filth and fed garbage (literally), is inexcusable.  When really, honestly, their taste buds seem very discernible.  Believe it or not.

Then, I consulted my "bible" or my first go-to book when any farm-type question is raised.  Then, I go to our library site and reserve, "Storey's Guide to Raising Pigs" as I find the Storey's guides the most informative and comprehensive farm-animal handbooks around.  Then, we just observe.  Watch what they eat, when they like to eat and how much (a lot!),  the noises they make when they're happy, and when they're not.  Wow.  What a learning curve this one is; bigger than most I think.  Relative to the critter in question I suppose.

We've learned a couple of things already: They like their backs scratched.  It only took 1 night to train them to go to bed in their "house".  (The coyotes that were howling right outside their pen the night before might have helped to convince them it was a good idea.) They would rather not eat anything rotten, thank you.  They LOVE grass.  They do not defecate or urinate near where they eat or sleep, if they can help it.  They are AMAZING rototillers!

They are in a pen at the far back of the property, in our old dog run which we had reinforced with cement when the dogs were younger as they were diggers and escape artists.   So far, it's working for the pigs.  We are feeding them as organically as possible, gathering gleaning from local (small) grocery stores mostly, plus some "pig pellets" which is really just insurance that they are getting all they need. (Incidentally, it seems near impossible to find organic pig food, so if anyone has a lead on some, I"d love to hear it.  Who knows what goes into these manufacturer pellets that pigs are expected to eat every day of their lives.  Gross.)  Ideally, we would be raising them on pasture, and might still do, but we've been warned about pigs and how they can eat chickens that get in their way, and that they bite, and they escape from anything.  You know.  The kind of horror stories new pig farmers want to hear.  Not.  So we'll see how we go once we've gotten used to them, and them to us.

There will be more on this later.

Oh ya.  Bet on it.

Incubator Work Out

As promised: Ducklings!!

Bath time:

These 4 little fuzz balls have got to be the cutest things I've seen of late! 

Ya, and going back to that thing I wasn't supposed to do -- incubating waterfowl with turkeys.  Well.  Um. OK, so not only did I mix water and land, I also had the eggs due to hatch on different days, like a week apart, so I stopped turning the turkey eggs while the ducks were hatching.  Not supposed to do that.

Are you waiting for bad news?

There isn't any :)

Eight turkey eggs went into lock down, after resuming the turning schedule after the ducks hatched (I also did a quick clean out of the incubator after the ducklings were in the brooder so the turkeys would have a clean start)...

and...

8 hatched: fine and fluffy and healthy as anything.

Whew!

Chicken Garden 2013

The one and only, "Beep"

Lettuce in the chicken garden

Mixed spicy Asian greens in the Chicken Garden

New black silkies!

I like to spoil my chickens.  They deserve it.  They give us a bounty of beautiful, healthful eggs almost all year-round, they clean up the insects and kitchen scraps, add nitrogen to the compost pile and are a joy to watch.  And so, Chicken Garden 2013 begins.  I've netted the same area that I used for the chicken garden last year.  This year, I'm taking more precautions as I actually want to grow some stuff in there for the people too, like corn and pumpkins (lots of pumpkins!) and different squashes.  The chickens can have a variety of different lettuces, peas, beans and sunflowers.  Plus the millet and oats that we planted in there last year has re-seeded itself so there's that too.  I've roped off part of their main pen as well and planted more corn, millet, oats and sunflowers in there.  Hopefully I can keep the sneaky devils out of there until it comes up enough that they won't devastate it in a matter of minutes.

There's quite a few of our feathered friends down there now -- the main flock of 13 (including Bowie the Rooster and our one last "Old Lady" Sex-sal-Link hen who hasn't laid in YEARS)-- Daughter's 5 Buff Orphingtons, the 9 mixed Orphingtons, and the new trio of black silkies.  Of these, we'll be keeping almost all the hens, and Daughter can choose one Buff Rooster to be her breeder-man for next spring.  Of my Birthday Presents of marans and wheaton ameraucanas, we'll keep one blue marans rooster ("Elvis") and the wheaton ameraucana roo ("Sting").  Of the rest of the boys, I may try to sell a couple, as marans are not always easy to come by, or, failing that, apparently they dress out nicely for the table as well.  It looks like, of the 6 ameraucana eggs I purchased, only 2 hatched, but I may have gotten my ultimate wish -- 1 hen and 1 rooster.  I've learned my lesson about counting my hens before they lay, so  the one I believe to be an ameraucana hen we've dubbed "Happy" -- because that's what I'll be if it does turn out to be a hen :)

Happy and Sting

So Much to Say ...

So Few Pictures!

Like, none :(

Things are rolling right along on our little slice of land, I just haven't had time.  There's couple photos I have taken, and will share as soon as I can get them downloaded, but for now, you'll just have to be patient and enjoy the mental images.

The lambs are getting SO big!  It's getting hard to tell who are the mama ewes and who are the babies.  I'm letting the mamas wean the babies gradually, instead of seperating them as most shepherds do after about the 2 month-mark.  For a couple of reasons.  I think my sheep are happier all together and I'd rather not shock the mamas into mastitus or something of the sort. Plus, I really don't have a lot of extra space to seperate them completely, far enough away from each other, and provide adequate housing so that they are safe from predators at night.  So, I'm going with the gradual wean.  And it's interesting to watch.  Being a long-term breast-feeder of both my babes (we're talking over 5 years and almost 5 years, respectively), it's just easier on the moms and babes, physically and emotionally.  And I'm noticing that the mama ewes are letting the lambs nurse less and less, and for much shorter periods (like, seconds!). So ya, right or wrong, that's what I'm doing and it seems to be working for my girls.

The ducklings hatched last week -- I started with 4 eggs in the incubator, and got four ducklings!  I had to help the last 2 out.  I think they might have gotten a little shrink-wrapped when I opened the incubator to nab the first two.  You're not supposed to do that either - open the incubator when there are critters hatching -- but ducks are messy and I didn't want them pooping on the other duck eggs or disturbing the turkey eggs that still had a week to go.  Ya Ya, I know, you're not supposed to do That Either -- put land poultry in with waterfowl, but hey, I'm on a bit of a roll of doing things against the grain.  So far, it's working for me; hopefully that continues.  We'll see when the turkeys are due to hatch this week!

The turkey mamas are doing fantastically with their babies in the netted yard.  We had a couple of casualties in the first day, when the little tiny poults were finding their way out of the pen through little tiny cracks we didn't even know were there.  But since then, it's been all good.  Mamas are keeping them warm, the poults are eating well and growing strong.  I have someone coming for 8 little ones this week, which will leave mama Tasha with 3 to raise.  Mama Violet still has her 3 (she hatched 10, I sold 4 and some winged predator gobbled down 3 before we could blink).

The chicks we hatched out this spring are all doing well.  My 4H Daughter is slowly but surely selling off her extra roosters to people who want "Daddy Birds" as opposed to dinner, which makes her very happy, and at this time, supplies her with just enough extra cash to pay for their food.  Man, those large breeds can EAT!  She's got the Buff Orphingtons, which we affectionately call "The Monsters".  They are so big, but so gentle, and they way they walk is a sight to behold.  It kind of reminds me of Jurrassic Park - Thud Thud Thud as they cruise the pasture.  Too Funny.  The marans and my 2 sweet little wheaton ameraucanas are coming along too.  They are just 10 weeks old, but so sweet and colorful!  It seems that out of my ameraucana eggs that hatched, I have gotten the ultimate chicken wish: 1 rooster and 1 hen.  Rooster has been named Sting (we name all the roosters after singers), and the hen?  "Happy".  'Cuz that's what I am that she's a hen :)

Lastly, for now anyway, I was perusing the chicken classifieds and thinking "I am NEVER going to find any dark silkies this year"  and lo and behold, the next ad I saw was just that -- Three 12 week old black silkies!  Obviously I didn't hesitate.  I was hoping to get a hen, but now it seems I may have a little breeding pair!  Oh bliss!

I'll sound off for now -- and publish again -- with Pictures! -- very soon.

Take care, friends.