Monday, December 30, 2013

Wow what a year. I don't even know where to start. I should be able to blog a bit more often now that I have a good computer. It is December now and the garden is starting to look awesome. We have been picking greens and baby beets for a while now but I am starting to see small heads of broccoli, some carrots and beets and the cabbage I starting o form heads. We should be harvesting these in a month or more.

The garden is having a bit of trouble with a fungus bit it isn't too bad. The weather has been uncommonly warm this winter so the crops have had a bit of trouble with insects too. The chickens have not been helping, they have been escaping and getting into my kale patch and making it look like Swiss cheese. Hopefully the new chicken wire on the fence will remedy that. Little feathered brats!

We have lost four chickens so far in this feathered adventure. The first was when they were very small, we suspected a disease so we separated her and kept her isolated until it was obvious she needed to be put down. That was tough for me but I got it done. The second was very weird, we went to check on everybody in the afternoon one day as it was very hot and we wanted to make sure they all had water and we found one of our morans dead in the coop covered in ants. It was awful and I could not tell what had happened as they had pretty much eaten her. It was ugly, sad and hard to watch Billy bury her without knowing what happened. The third was even harder as I found one of my Buff Orpingtons slumped over in one of their cool spots and picked her up, rushed her to the house and she died in my arms while I was trying to research what to do. We did a mini necropsy and found she had a blockage in her intestine and it had backed up all the way to her beak. Poor girl. That was our first processing job, we plucked and processed her and made chicken stew. Hard but nothing goes to waste here so she fed us all for several meals. It was a delicious stew. The last was one of our new banty hens, we were on a trip to se Bill's folks for the holidays and had some woofers taking care of the place and they said the three banty hens disappeared for the day and only two came back. No sign of the third anywhere so we have no idea what happened.

Other than all of those the rest of the birds are just fine. We have thirteen again and they are all in great shape, gorgeous plumage, healthy birds. We dropped in egg production when it got cooler but we still get from two to four eggs a day from them.

We do have a broody hen with five eggs under her. We are letting her sit on them to see if she can hatch them. She is one of our Rhode Island Reds and she is bound and determined to hatch these eggs of hers. She lets me pet her but she is very clear on what my boundaries are! Good luck to her. Mrs. Williamina B. will soon be a Mom is everything goes as she has planned. It will be fun to se if we have babies in a few weeks.

I have to sign off but I will try and write again very soon!
TL