Summer's End

One of the things I love most about life in the Pacific Northwest is the seasonal changes. No season ever wears out its welcome by sticking around too long. I'm especially happy about that when it comes to summer, whose backside I've never been sorry to see -- even up here. This year we had two days of 100 degree-plus temperatures, a handful of 90 degree temps, but mostly our summer stayed in the 70s and 80s. Perfect.

The lawn at our newly-bought home did turn brown in July and August since the property has no irrigation. Early in August, when we were sick of looking at it, we briefly entertained the idea of putting in some sprinklers, but with .75 inches of rain later that month and the same so far in September, it's all greened up nicely -- and quickly.

There is a three week difference in when these photos were shot. What a difference an inch of rain makes!

The one downside to those mild temps and rain is that my tomato harvest has really come in slowly. This necessitated a new protocol for canning, which is actually not canning this year. Instead of running the water bath canner for just one or two quarts of tomatoes, instead I've started blanching bowls of tomatoes as they come in and then vacuum freezing them. Next year I'm planning on planting a variety of tomato called "4th of July," which as you've probably guessed, is an early ripening variety. Live and learn.

We do have plenty of pumpkins for pies and bread this winter; squash, eggplants and cukes are just about done, so the only thing left in the ground are some late season lettuce and onions. All in all, I'd say our 2019 garden was a success, and we'll expand next year with more raised beds as well as some fun new galvanized troughs for planting containers.

When we weren't in the garden or fixing things around the house we were installing and painting a new chicken mansion for the girls. It's 8 x 10 feet inside, so in the rainy season they will still have plenty of room to scratch and peck. Unreasonable, you say? Nope. Not when it rains 48 inches a year.

La Poulet Mansion

Sadly, we lost two of our favorite hens -- Callie and Chloe -- in that weird 2-day heatwave, probably due to their age. So yesterday I headed to the feed store to get two fall chicks. Ella and Esme will take their place in the flock for spring laying, provided they are both hens, which the feed store only provides a 90 percent guarantee on (so fingers crossed). But for now it's been fun having them peeping and cheeping in the dining room, where they'll live until they're ready to go outside (hopefully before Thanksgiving).

The next and last big push will be to paint our pump house, front door, garden shed and shop before the regular rains set in. We're hoping the painter can paint the house by then, too. But since it's still a little chilly outside right now, I think I'll have a cup of tea, kick my feet up and watch my new chicks explore their world!

The forecast: Foggy, with a splash of autumn.

Three months

Mound of rosemary

I've long thought that it takes about three months for behaviors, moods, and patterns to change. We're in about the third month of temperate weather now, and I can tell by my general mood that I've been out of the heat long enough to recover from the five months or so of torture it inflicts on me.

Of course it's been in the high 70's this week, but somehow spring warmth seems different than fall warmth. 78 degree autumn days seem like a horrible post-script to summer, yet they are delightful in March. That's because by now we've had three months of not baking in the heat, so once again the warmth is welcome.

Speaking of welcome, we've welcomed two new chicks into our home, Daisy and Delilah. Daisy is a Welsummer, Delilah a Cuckoo Maran. Both will lay dark brown eggs once they are mature. And they have their own personalities, even at this early age.  Daisy is a mellow, calm chick and Delilah is full of drama and quite noisy. The day I brought them home Delilah regaled me with shrill peeping that let me know she was NOT happy about riding in the car, and even now, if she can't locate Daisy or feels a little chilled, she sings out. 

Delilah (L) and Daisy (R)

It makes me wonder what her personality is going to be like as a full-grown chicken...we've already had one psycho hen who attacked people, a psycho rooster who attacked other hens, and so we're just hoping Delilah ends up relatively well-adjusted and calm.

In this household there is not much chance of that, but hope springs eternal.

I also got hit with the dreaded spring creeping crud, which laid me out flat in bed for two days and severely sapped my energy for about another five. They say you don't miss your health until it's gone and that's certainly true. Same goes for energy. So of course now it looks as if someone has set off a dust bomb in the house, since when I am sick the house keeper (me) is also. The advantage to that is that I will never be woken from my sickbed by the vacuum. The drawback is that the dust is right there waiting for me, doubled in thickness, once I recover.

Glorious mulch. And a shout out to the trees that lost their lives to provide it. It's nature's cycle.

Another tidbit is that the trees which were uprooted in the storm last month were chipped by our neighbors and so everyone got as much mulch as they wanted. What a bounty! We covered our raised bed area with it and really like how it looks now. Plus it will keep the weeds down. That was my first task upon feeling better and it really felt great to be out in the sunshine with the wheelbarrow. Plus it gave one more legal excuse to procrastinate cleaning house.

In the garden there are blossoms, potatoes sprouting, lettuce and a brand new irrigation system. In the house there is soon-to-be-restored order and cleanliness. 

All things pass away eventually...sickness gives way to health, winter gives way to spring, and dust gives way to clean surfaces.

The counterbalance is, of course that health does eventually give way to sickness once again, spring ushers in hot summer, and dust always returns (sometimes within just a few hours, it seems).

So enjoy it all while you can, because tomorrow will be different. As I said, if you get three months of something, it's enough to change your attitude or life, so I hope all your changes are good ones from now from now 'till summer, and beyond.

Three hens, no rooster

Otis

So our experiment with having a rooster is over...tonight Otis went to that grand chicken coop in the sky, culled by us after fighting with Callie, the largest yet most submissive of our hens. 

Otis' story began a couple of years ago when, we made a big, sentimental mistake and acquired some eggs from a friend so our brooding hen Ellen could hatch them out and become a mother. We found good homes for three out of the four of Ellen's chicks. Otis we kept, mainly because roosters are hard to place and we figured we'd try having one and see if he'd end up a good addition to our flock.

Otis and Ellen

 Otis ended up causing us no problems.... while his mother Ellen was alive. We realize now it was her influence that kept him in line. After Ellen died (she was put down several months ago after suffering a debilitating tumor) his personality became less cooperative, and more typically rooster-ish.

The attack this afternoon was not Otis' first infraction. A few weeks ago he attacked Chloe, our lovely barred rock, and opened up a sizable gash on her comb, which bled profusely. Chloe spent Christmas morning in our bathroom getting doctored up, and when she was ready to go back out Otis was put in a separate pen for a few days so that both would forget their altercation, which chickens often do. Brain the size of a peanut and all that.  

But if we thought the temporary time-out/isolation worked, we were wrong. As I mentioned earlier, today I found Otis full-on fighting with Callie, our young Silver-Laced Wyandotte. And so, before another hen was injured, we decided Otis had to be culled. 

And while it's never easy to put a bird down, as I was carrying Otis out into the garden and Big Ag was loading the shotgun, I thought about how many chickens grace my dinner plate every single year, and how each one of those chicken dinners represents a bird that died just like Otis was about to. 

That's one thing that keeping animals has made me thankful for -- I never take for granted the meat or poultry I eat. I know something that once lived and breathed lost its life in order to be consumed by me, and I don't consume it as mindlessly as I once did.

And so I say farewell to Otis and to roosters in general. We're planning on getting another couple of hens this spring and I'm sure there will be plenty of pecking-order drama when we integrate them into our flock of (now) only three birds. But while it may be difficult to watch the pecking order re-shuffle itself, it will settle down in time, which probably would not have happened with Otis. 

Sometimes it's survival of the fittest, but in Otis' case it was a different rule, no less valid or important: Survival of the congenial.

Should you let your hens hatch chicks?

So if you are a rural homesteader keeping chickens, this is a question you will probably ask yourself at one time or another. I know I did.  I had two Buff Orpingtons who went broody on me on a semi-annual basis, and always wondered how it would be to let one of them hatch a clutch of eggs. All the chickens I'd raised to that point were brooder babies, and I was always under the impression that letting a mother hen do all the work meant no work or me.  So here is an honest look at my experiences, with the pros and cons openly discussed.  Remember, the following is based on my opinion only, so others may feel differently.

Is it, on the whole, easier?  The answer to that is a resounding NO. It is just difficult in a different way.  Sure, you never have to worry about the brooder temperature, barn fires from heat lamps or stuff like that, but you have other worries.  First, you have to make sure your brooding hen is kept isolated from the other hens, or its possible there will be competition for the eggs, and even egg-icide. (is that even a word?) My New Hampshire Red, Ginger, got into Ellen's eggs early on and broke all but two of the first clutch.  She's not an egg breaker OR eater so I think this was just a bit of Darwin-type natural selection competition going on.  (And I won't even re-hash the issue of Ellen herself turning on the two late-hatches in her clutch.  That meant that, unexpectedly, I ended up with two babies in the brooder and two under a live hen.  Not what I had anticipated, but it can happen.)

But what that competition from other hens means is that you may need to construct a coop within a coop for the broody hen -- or put her in a specially-constructed brooding area of your garage, barn, spare room, etc. -- to keep the her and her eggs safe while she's sitting and of course once they hatch into chicks. I luckily have a small coop, which we owned before we got the large chicken mansion the ladies currently live in, so that part worked out OK.

Ellen and babies in the condo.

But here is the other thing....now you are feeding, watering, cleaning and caring for two separate batches of chickens. Double the work, easily.

One other thing is that once your sitting hen has been isolated from her flock-mates for several weeks, she will have to re-establish her place in the pecking order.  Since Ellen has always been Head Hen, this only took about 15 minutes, and oddly enough it was the hen in the lowest spot on the pecking order who challenged her, but for me it was a stressful 15 minutes, full of fighting, comb-pulling, feather-grabbing, mounting, and pecking.  Luckily Ellen's babies were sequestered elsewhere, or there could have been a fatality there.

Then of course there is also the issue of the sex of your chicks.  Right now I am not sure if I have one rooster and three hens, or three roosters and one hen. The black bantams are extremely hard to sex, but obviously I'm hoping for hens. Brooding hens, of course hatch a "straight run" of chicks, where there is a 50/50 chance of the chicks being either sex, whereas at the Feed Store, there's something like a 90 percent certainty the chick you bring home is, in fact, a female. Luckily I already have a home for ONE rooster (at the winery), but if there are three of them I am not sure what we will do. Dine on Cornish Game Hen I guess.

Time will tell whether the naturally raised chicks are any better for having been raised by a real chicken mother. Ellen has been an excellent mother and has taught them a lot, however, the two chicks I have in the brooder seem to have learned the same things on their own -- scratching, dust bathing, etc.. They are also a lot tamer because they've been handled a lot more. But I'm open to seeing their differences once they're all integrated.

Claire and Otis in the brooder.

So was it worth it? Well, I am happy to have gotten a good education by doing this. But as to whether or not I would do it again, the answer is probably no. It IS nice to know a hen can survive the starvation and deprivation they put themselves through when they are broody, but the whole isolation thing has proved complex and a little more demanding of my time than I honestly anticipated, so our next batch of hens will probably come from the Feed Store and I will rest easy, in the near-certainty that they are all hens and therefore have a lifelong home here at the old homestead.

Chickens are coming along

All four chicks and Ellen. The two she did not accept are separated for their safety.

So this is the stage when the fuzzy baby chicklets become awkward adolescents. Feathers are halfway grown in, there are odd fuzzy remnants sticking out of necks and on backs, and the play-acting as adults begins, which is pretty cute to see.  It's the beginning of the end of chick-dom for these little ones.  Soon they will join the flock as juveniles and learn their place -- probably at the bottom of the pecking order in the beginning. 

But since I am probably not keeping any of these lovelies and will instead give them back to the couple who the eggs belonged to, it's also the beginning of the end of my time with them.  From the two that Ellen is successfully mothering to the two that she rejected and became brooder babies, I've enjoyed having chicks around again.  

But while I'd love to keep one or two for myself, the fact is I already give away far more eggs than we eat, and so from a practical standpoint there's really no point in adding to the flock.  But I'm happy Ellen got to become a mother at long last, and also happy that so far, all four of these little lovelies are doing great.  My guess is we have three hens and a 'roo, but I'm not positive about that so only time will tell. 

This is the chick Ellen attacked as it was born. I call her Claire. She has a lovely disposition.

Ellen's Black. No name yet.

Ellen's black and white chick.  Pretty sure he's a he.

My little black, Claire's best friend.  

A rejection and an injury

So Ellen's late eggs finally hatched yesterday (she already has two three-day old chicks from the first hatch), but she rejected the chicks, even going so far as to attack one of them -- the little buff chick.  Luckily I came home from work in time to save them both, and now they are brooder babies.  I will probably put them in my neighbors' brooder this weekend with several other chicks they are raising, since a flock socialization from the get-go is always a good thing.

I'm thankful I was able to save these little ones, especially the one Ellen attacked.  That one seemed on the brink of death when I brought her inside. It turns out she just needed some love, including water. food and most importantly, a warm place to nestle. Hopefully her wounds will heal in time and she can go on to live the life of a happy hen or roo. 

I've begun thinking I should re-name Ellen...maybe Joan Crawford might be more appropriate? 

Hatch Day!

Woke up to this today!

Today was Hatch Day, day 21 of Ellen's incubation of some of our neighbor's fertile eggs.  Both eggs hatched, right on schedule, the buff colored one a few hours older than the little black bantam. Needless to say, it was very exciting, actually more exciting than incubating them artificially because it is such a joy to see mother and babies interacting.  Ellen is, as I predicted, an absolutely wonderful mother.

And came home to this later on!

She still has four eggs under her, which are not due to hatch until Thursday or Friday, so I don't have much hope for them since she is off the nest quite a bit now, clucking and chasing after her already-hatched ones.  That is how it is with chickens (and humans as well).  Once the babies arrive it's hard to focus anything else. Its certainly hard for me to focus on much today; I keep sticking my head inside the coop to visit with mama and her small brood.

A fertile time

Things are going like gangbusters here on the homestead right now, especially where fertility is concerned. I am pleased to report that Ellen is sitting on a small clutch of fertilized eggs which I got from the neighbors across the street.  They lost several hens at once to old age and disease about the same time that Ellen went broody for the third time in her three-year life, and so I took four eggs from their non-broody hens and put them underneath Ellen who is happily clucking and mothering them under her fluffy wings.  

We will see if this pans out; if these eggs hatch I am guessing it should be around May 15 or so (chicken eggs incubate 21 days) and I would love to see Ellen become a mother in her golden years. All the other times she went broody I had to break her of it, meaning she did not get to do what she most wanted to do, which in those cases was hatch a batch of sterile eggs, a pretty useless endeavor for something as energy-sapping as brooding is.  We shall see!

Mama in-waiting.

The other fertilization project is going on outside, in the vegetables.  I have some peppers and eggplant with clear nitrogen deficiencies, but before I start monkeying around with organic fertilizer I am going to try a gentle, natural nitrogen booster, which is our own urine, diluted at a 1 to 10 ratio and used to water the plants around their bases.  I do not use this on anything where we'd be eating the crop either from or on the ground, but with peppers and eggplants this is not a concern. (And it's probably OK to use for other crops like lettuce, I'm just concerned about splash-age and don't want to risk it. 

Urine great shape, vegetables! Or will be soon.

So hopefully we will have green vegetables...and maybe even some chicks running around here soon.  Just two of the reasons spring is my favorite season. It's all about fertility...fertile earth, fertile animals, and hopefully fertile crops.

Hen Update: Chicken Shuffle

Moxie is a juvenile Black Australorp like this one. (photo from Backyardchickens.com)

Back in May, I succumbed to second round of 2014 chick-buying and bought three new chicks:  One Silver Wyandotte, one New Hampshire Red, and one Black Australorp.  This weekend I gave the Black Australorp away to a friend who had been raising two hens within San Luis Obispo city limits and discovered an awful truth:  One of her hens, "Tammy," was actually Mr. Tammy.  And Mr. Tammy had begun crowing.

And so began a chicken shuffle of sorts.  She managed to find Mr. Tammy a home at a nearby nursery, with a nice but eccentric lady who loves having hens and roos around her plants to perform insect control and just to liven the place up a little more. (There is nothing better than shopping for landscape plants and getting followed around the place by a gang of roosters and a giant turkey, believe me.)

Once that was done, I gave my friend our Black Australorp, Moxie, since I had three new youngsters and could therefore part with one and still have two to keep each other company.  It is never wise to introduce just one young hen into an entire flock -- there is safety in numbers for youngsters when it comes to the pecking order.  And they do form close relationships with their "siblings" even if they are different breeds who've just grown up together. Cleo and Chloe are quite close, as are Portia and Ellen. And soon Callie and Ginger will join the flock and take their place on the roost with the other girls.

The real Moxie and her new friend Loretta.

The first night, Callie and Ginger were peeping a bit pitifully and looking for their friend, but by morning they seemed to have resumed business as usual. I noticed the same thing when I gave Evil Red to the winery.  Ellen and Portia seemed to notice her absence and it upset them.  So it's interesting to note the relationships that form, even between animals we don't credit for being the most intelligent of creatures.

So Moxie will now get to be Loretta's new friend.  I hope it all works out, I'm glad to have reduced my flock by one and I know Loretta will be happy with another hen to keep her company.  And hopefully my friend will be relieved she no longer has to worry about violating the city's ordinance banning roosters from within city limits, plus she'll get to sleep in a little more without Mr. Tammy greeting the dawn, too.

And since happy hens lay happy eggs, it's a win all the way around. I love happy endings.

Peep Show

We came up with a new chicken run design that will allow us to keep a few more chickens than we had previously thought.  So after a lot of jotting down numbers, estimating lifespans and laying years,  Big Ag made a trip into town last Saturday to catch the local Farm Supply's shipment of just-hatched chicks.  It was their last shipment of the year! We got an Australorp, a Silver Wyandotte, and a New Hampshire Red.  They will join Ellen, Portia, Cleo and Chloe in a couple of months, once they are bigger.

In other news, Red, our Rhode Island Red (who had been so aggressive with Cleo and Chloe) has now gone to live at the winery with about 10 other adult hens.  She will no doubt get on better there, as there are no youngsters for her to torment.  

She was particularly good friends with Ellen, and already Ellen has been looking around for her friend, but hopefully in a day or two everyone will settle down, the three babies in the brooder, our two juvenile pullets and our old golden girls in the new chicken house and soon-to-be-built new chicken run.

Chick update

At about 2 weeks old, I am enjoying both chicks a lot more.  They seem a little more sturdy and active, and they must surely eat their weight in feed every day because it seems like their food container is always almost empty.

I named them Cleo and Chloe.  Cleo is named for Cleopatra, and she is the lighter of the two ... her Ameraucana breeding shows up in the fact that she looks like she's rocking some serious black eyeliner.

Chloe, the black chick with white markings, is a Plymouth Barred Rock named just because it sounded good with Cleo.  She is a sweet girl, but Cleo is definitely the boss of the two. Cleo and Chloe.  Just a couple of girls growing up on the homestead.