I'm exercising my blog muscles, and making a point to take photos every day of something interesting that I can tell us about. I see my beautiful flock of birds and tell myself that I've exhausted chickens as a subject matter. But I can't resist! I write about what tickles my mind, I guess, and after all these years I've still got chickens for brains.
This is my entire flock - my old birds in the laying flock, two guinea fowl, plus the young meat and layer birds. It's a lot of birds! Beautiful birds. I've never had so many at one time before, and I happily admire them every day.
All of my old birds molted last fall, and now they have fresh fluffy feathers and no bald spots from the rough handling of roosters. Its fun to have so many different colors, and I especially like having pretty white birds mixed in the flock. I worry that the white birds will be targeted by the hawk because they stand out from a distance. We've been lucky not to lose any birds lately, despite the predators. We spied a raccoon in our little forest recently. We regularly see a fox on the road not far from home. The coyotes sing to us nearly every night and Wendigo responds with a monotonous barking song of her own.
I have two young spare roosters that were hatched here, in addition to gentle Cogburn the head rooster. This one, with his red color and fluffy beard, looks like an Easter egger, like his father. I bet he hatched from a green egg.
But this little rooster looks like an Easter egger on the top, and a barred rock on the bottom. He must have come from a brown barred rock egg. If all my roosters are descendants from an Easter egger father, does that mean it's likely that their offspring will lay blue or green eggs?
This is how many eggs I found in the nest. I have more than forty birds, and I only get two eggs!
This is Light River, one of the twin Nigerian wethers that were gifted to me from my goat mentor. She gave me Light River and Dark River so they could keep Peaches, my big Nubian doe, company. Peaches was much happier, and less noisy, once she had the River brothers to snuggle with at night.
Can you see the bloody red spot on the top of Light Rivers head in the photo above? Also notice that he and his brother have flattened hair on the top of their heads. This is because they spend so much time knocking their heads together or butting heads with Little Buck. They rear up on their back legs, aim their heads, and then fall forward and bang their stupid heads together. Over and over again until their hair is flat and their heads are raw.
They find it entertaining I guess, since they spend so much time doing it. Now that Little Buck is growing up, he sometimes wins the contest and pushes Light River out the stall door. The girl goats and I just try to ignore their antics. Sometimes they get carried away and disturb Peaches from her food. Uh oh. She is quick to lay down the law and pushes the offender away. She reigns over the herd and none of us question her authority. Do not interrupt her dinner!
The goats appear so content when they have their hay. If we would like a few minutes of goat induced zen, we can watch them happily chewing in this video.
The floodwater isn't over the road, but it's getting close. I know I'm not supposed to drive through water, especially in a low riding car, but once I did it anyway. It only looked like a few inches of muddy water on the pavement, but by the time I hit the deep spot I was already committed and had to keep going. I made it through just fine, but I promised myself not to do that anymore. It was too much excitement for me. Once, both roads to our house were flooded and I couldn't get home after work. After spending more than an hour trying all the alternative routes only to find them flooded too, I drove back to town for dinner and waited for the water to recede.
This picture is through the glass of the front door. The whole flock of "baby" birds are anxiously awaiting their meal. These bossy birds sometimes fly into the glass trying to get to me. They think food magically falls from my fingers and they don't give me a chance to get to the food bin in the barn. If only they had brains!
I have to run the gauntlet of hungry birds on the way to my barn, where the food lives.
I feel like the pied piper of chickens with all these birds running at my feet. I feed them chicken pellets for breakfast and dinner, which I spread on the ground, but I don't let them have unlimited access to food. I want them to find lunch on their own by foraging for a salad of grass and tasty bits they find on their own. It's healthier for them to eat their salad, and if they are full of tasty grain pellets I don't think they eat as much greens. Since I plan on eating the birds or their eggs, I want them to be as healthy as possible. The eggs I get have dark orange yolks, and I think it's because they eat so much grass. They graze like cows, traveling all over our property plucking at the vegetation.
It' really very annoying the way they crowd my feet and hamper my progress. I try not to step on them, but sometimes they get their toes smashed by my big boots. They also peck at my feet. I start to feel claustrophobic from too many birds in my way.
Remember the free bonus chick from the hatchery? It's the black and white bird in the photo above. I still can't decide if it's a rooster or a hen.
I've been admiring Wendigo's fur coat.
She gets tangles around her elbows, tail, and ears, but the rest of her winter fur is long and soft.
And so thick! I think her hair could be spun and turned into a sweater. How weird would it be to wear a dog hair sweater?
Somehow, I lost my blog mojo. I miss the habit, and I want to catch myself up!
Who would have thought I would prefer freezing temperatures, but, oh my - the mud has been remarkable. Especially where the animals walk. We had record breaking amounts of rain here, but finally cold enough temperatures for some of that precipitation to be a real snow and for the ground to freeze solid. The donkeys were frisky and wanted to play. We can watch them frolic in this video:
In anticipation of the coming cold spell, Brandon made Wendigo a new dog box for her sleeping place in the barn. She is warm and comfortable inside her new box, even at night when the temperature drops.
Look! A winter rainbow!
I've been hibernating, but Brandon has been busy building dog boxes and erecting the frame of a hoop house. Last summer, we found a good deal on a used hoop house and spent a sweltering day dismantling it from someone's back yard. I think this person bought it used from someone else, with big garden dreams in mind, which didn't work out when they never got it fully assembled. Taking a hoop house apart is much easier than putting it back up! We've done it twice now, so we are practically professionals, right?
Now it stands in our back field waiting for a solid cover so it can be our future hay storage. It's big - even bigger than we thought since we counted wrong when laying it out and ended up with an extra hoop... how does that happen? Not quite professionals after all.
The greenhouse is mostly empty right now, but I have a few garden experiments in place that are working well.
The onion bulbs, gifted to me from a friend, were planted on December 3, and now have green leaves that are several inches long and could be harvested for chives.
The lettuce greens that were planted near the end of September grew wonderfully under the plastic dome, and were harvest-able all the way until this week, when the freeze got them despite the plastic. If I weren't used to hibernating during the winter months, I could have been harvesting fresh greens for nearly four months. Next fall, I want to plant even more greens, and then encourage myself to actually harvest and eat them instead of just admiring them. I have a mental block I think - I'm not used to food harvest chores once the leaves are off the trees, but I'm going to overcome it. Remind me, would ya?
It's a double rainbow!
Wendigo is napping with the chickens. If you remember, I've been raising some Red Ranger chickens to harvest for meat, and some Pearl Leghorns to be our youngest egg layers.
These chickens are three months old now, and are voracious eaters. They follow me in a giant flock and peck at my boots hoping I will drop some food. With thirty young birds, plus a dozen or so old birds, sometimes I can't make any progress walking because the flock swarms around my feet honking for food.
The red meat birds are growing fast and should be ready to harvest any day now. I'll be glad to thin the flock. I prefer raising these birds to those white cornish cross birds. These grow fast too, but they are mobile and good at foraging.
The young birds sleep in the mobile coop.
The old birds sleep in the coop attached to my barn.
We made some upgrades to the barn coop this winter. We added some steps to the perch, a wall from the roof to the ground on the north side, and built a new nest box.
Rooster Cogburn was the first to try out the nest box and let me know that it needs a curtain for more privacy.
The stork should visit Peaches in March and Noobi in May. More baby goats!
Why do I want more goats? Good question.
The beautiful snow and nice solid ground is gone again, and the rain and the mud is back. I overhead farmer Joe say that if you have the right clothes, it doesn't matter what the weather is. It's a good thing I have muck boots!
It snowed! It was just a dusting, and didn't stick around long, but I think it finally settled in my mind that the summer is over.
Brandon spent hours last weekend chopping firewood from a fallen tree. The tree fell from our wood line into the neighbors hay field. It lay there for several weeks before someone used their tractor to push it from the field into the trees. Brandon fought through the brush to claim it for firewood. He thinks we already have enough wood stored from his efforts last fall to squeak through the winter, but he gets antsy without a surplus. This new wood isn't seasoned, so it will be best if we don't burn it this winter unless we need to.
That old saying about firewood warming you twice is true, he was overly warm from his efforts to saw and chop the tree, and and we haven't even burned it yet. He was sore from all that chopping too, but the strength that comes from all the effort is just a bonus.
Just look at the moat around the mobile chicken coop. If I miss my dry path to the door, I slosh through the mud that softened up by the moles who excavate here. Brandon curses and threatens the moles when he stumbles in their excavations, but I find moles so interesting I don't mind sharing our soil with them. I like to envision a whole different world inhabited by strange predatory creatures under our feet.
After the snow melted and the puddles dried up, I blocked the big chickens from using the mobile coop, and set it up as a shelter for my baby birds that have been living in the greenhouse brooder. I stapled tarps over the open sides, filled the bottom with a thick layer of dry hay, stretched extension cords all they way from from the outlet in the barn, and hung a heat lamp, feeder, and water bucket. I was so proud of my work I was convinced Brandon would mention the tidy job I did with the tarps. As we took our evening walk he looked at it and said "You managed to make that ugly coop even uglier." What!?!
Well, the chicks appreciate my efforts anyway. The big Red Ranger chicks weren't too hard to catch to transfer to the mobile coop, but those little white leghorns are like canaries. They fly! And they run really fast. They scrambled so hard to escape me that they kicked up dust in the brooder and I had tie a bandanna around my face to keep from choking on the chicken dust. At night the little white birds are centered under the heat lamp with a ring of big red birds on the outside of the cluster. I think they like their new digs, and are learning to jump onto the perches.
At night the coop glows red from the heat lamp. When I approach to look in the window all the chicks scatter and squawk like I'm the big bad wolf. It makes me miss Helen and Mrs. Hall, my first chicks who were raised in a box in the house, and were so tame I could pick them up and feed them by hand.
I hope the chicks enjoy the heat from their lamp as much as the house cats and I enjoy the heat from our wood stove. I love wood stove season so much I can welcome the winter. Do you love your wood stove too?
This morning the world was coated in a thin layer of ice, and under the crispy ice shell the ground was saturated, making each step slurpy with mud. Despite the cold I felt warm inside my down jacket as I trudged through the mud to deliver hay to the goats and donkeys. I had to break the ice on the latch to the greenhouse door so I could tend the baby chicks in the brooder. The bed of lettuce survived the freeze, and the chicks were content under their heat lamp. Wendigo waited patiently in the cold rain, knowing her breakfast was coming soon.
It's nice to look at the colorful leaves on the trees in the photos I took several weeks ago when we visited the blue bus. The leaves are off the trees now, and the ice crust on every branch is making it harder for me to deny that winter has arrived. We were lucky to get two nice weekends in a row free to visit the bus, enjoy the views, host a picnic, and do some much needed maintenance.
Our closest neighbor to the bus let us know that people had been visiting the bus. We already knew we had hosted uninvited guests, because we had to clean up the trash they left behind. Having a door that wouldn't latch must be the same as an open invitation! We replaced the broken door with a new door, made from a piece of painted plywood, with sheets of metal screwed on to protect it from the weather.
Our old door had more of a cute cottage look, and the new door has more of a Mad Max aesthetic!
We have decided to revamp the bus interior too. In years past I've had fun decking it out like a little cottage as our frequent weekend get-away. These days, we don't even want to get away! We haven't camped at the bus since we moved to the farm, and the furniture inside is dingy with neglect and moisture. Not to mention whatever cooties the guest might have left behind. So, we took out the iron cook stove that was never used, the futon, the chairs, and sink. We are rethinking how we want to use the bus now that our lives have changed. It's likely that our bus visits will continue to be short day time trips that focus on being outside among the trees.
We swept the leaves from the deck and from the top of the bus. Brandon says the view of the river is best from up top. I wonder how hard it would be to build a deck on the roof?
A journal of creating a home in an old blue school bus, as well as a do-it-yourself farm house renovation, living with backyard chickens, learning to farm, gardening, preserving food, and other projects.
