No eggs, but...

The hens have been poking around in the nesting boxes. The wood chips have been disturbed. The ceramic eggs aren’t where they used to be. And nobody pooped in there, just like the books said. It appears that instinct will carry the day again.

Ellie remains the friendliest of the bunch. Yesterday when I was tidying up the coop, she came in for pets. I picked her up and almost instantly Julia and Sara came in and stood as if waiting their turn. Does Ellie’s cooing call them for attention?

The girls are getting their combs and wattles. I thought it was time to put up another series of portraits so you can see how they have changed. It’s very hard to tell some of them apart. Sara and Giada’s beaks are nearly identical now. I have figured out that Sara’s tail has a black stripe all along its length while Giada’s is broken by bands of white. Ellie, for the moment, still has a beak that is lighter than her sisters’.

Ellie

Ellie's comb and wattle
 

 

Sara

 



Giada



All of the Araucana remain distinctive. Julia gets browner all the time. Nigella has stray gray feathers among the tan. Bridget has kept her pure white color. Ina’s feather patterns seem to become more intricate all the time. Ingrid is developing gray beneath her dark tan feathers.

Ina's beard is getting blacker

Bridget, ever pure white

Ingrid, with her underlayer of gray

Julia (note: Ellie's tail is in the picture because she is pecking at my cuff)

Nigella with stray gray feathers

Jennifer’s comb is darker red and more pronounced that Clarissa’s, but I suppose that could change too. We have discussed leg bands, but I don’t know where to get them. I’m also a bit daunted by the prospect of installing them. I can’t think the girls will like it much.

Clarissa

Jennifer (Ellie is never far away)

On the nature front, Hilda spotted a lovely spider sitting on its orb web in the garden. She found it after she watered, which accounts for the picturesque droplets on the silk.

Spider in the garden

Rainy Sunday

The chickens passed another milestone last week. They are now 16 weeks old and are eating pelleted “layer feed” instead of chick crumbles. As the names suggest, the adult food bits are bigger than the chick bits. The “layer” here refers not to stratifications (which is what first popped into my mind) but to laying hens. Layer feed has somewhat less protein than chick feed.

I made a video of the chickens going after an ear of too-ripe corn. Hilda and I cleaned out the corn patch on Friday, ate what was salvageable and saved the rest for the girls. They LOVE corn. I imagine chicken dialog as I watch them: “CORN! Corn, corn, corn, corn. MY corn. No, MINE. Give that back!”

The pumpkins are nearly ready for harvest a month early. All the vines are dying back to reveal a pretty good crop.

About half of the pumpkin patch

My little Johnny-jump-ups are blooming bravely despite the drought and heat we’ve had this summer.

Johnny Jump-ups

We are enjoying a glorious and long-awaited rainy day today. I can almost hear the oaks sigh with relief.

The fifth oak rejoicing in the rain

We see the turkeys just about every morning. As they cruise through the tall grass with their heads down and their backs hunched, they look more like a herd of raccoons or anteaters, even. Not bird-like, in any case. They visit all the oaks, eating the numerous acorns that have fallen.  They hunkered down beneath the river birch for awhile this afternoon. It doesn’t seem like much shelter to me, but it seems to work for them just fine. The chickens, snug in their coop, are much drier.

Our turkey flock (usually two hens and 10 chicks)



Hunkered down under the river birch

Basil harvest

I put up the basil yesterday. First I give all the basil plants a serious pruning. I’ve heard that the way to keep basil from senescing is to keep it from setting seed. In the Darwinian sense, the purpose of all living things is reproduction. Once a basil plant has produced seeds, ensuring the survival of the species in general and its own continued presence in the gene pool, it has fulfilled its function and dies back. By this time in the summer, the pruning gives me a huge amount of basil. I use only the perfect leaves. In the picture it is hard to tell the difference between the stems before (on the left in the green bin) and after (on the ground to the right) I have done the harvest. The bowl in the middle shows the leaves I have removed.

Left to right: basil before I take the leaves off the stem (green bucket), harvested leaves (blue bowl) and rejects (ground)

After I have picked off all the perfect leaves, I wash them, blanch them (to keep them green), and make pesto. I freeze the pesto in ice cube trays for use during the winter. I find that the frozen pesto gives a fresher and stronger basil flavor to sauces than dried basil. Whether drying or freezing, the time consuming part is the harvest.

I took a picture of Hilda with the chickens this morning. She still has a round robin with a few of her college friends. For those of you who are not in your 80’s, a round robin is a mechanism of sharing news among several individuals through actual paper letters. The round robin comes to one person with letters from all others. That person removes her previous letter from the collection, puts in a new one, then sends all the letters along to the next person on the list. I’m sad that the round robin has gone out of style. How fun to get letters from five or six friends all at once! Anyway, the round robin is on its way to Hilda, and she wanted to have some pictures of the chickens to include.

Portrait of my mother as a chicken lady. She is holding Ellie as Ina stands on the cage and Bridget climbs the ladder. Giada (left) and Ingrid (right) look on. 

We ended up looking through the whole blog and marveling at how little our chickies were when we got them. It seems so long ago. We gave the girls some Happy Hen mealworms today so we could get everyone in one picture. While we were at it, I made a video. If you listen carefully, you can hear (in addition to Hilda calling them) “the gentle cooing and soft growling of chickens at peace” (Bailey White, 1994).

Our girls enjoying dried mealworms.

Corn harvest

Every day brings new things from the garden. Three cantaloupe were ready on Friday. Hilda and I also harvested the Kandy Korn and Incredible sweet corn.

Corn harvest with the best of the first three cantaloupes.

The hot weather finally broke. Out of habit, Hilda and I set up our corn husking operation in the shade of the second oak. With a brisk wind blowing, I was almost cold! We would have been more comfortable in the sun. We put up 14 ten-ounce bags of sweet corn from that day’s harvest. With the 9 bags we froze when the Peaches and Cream corn was ripe, our total yield came to nearly 15 pounds! That should do us for the winter.

Hilda cuts corn from the cob using an angelfood cake pan to catch the kernals.

There were a few ears of Peach and Cream left, but we found them to be overly mature. As with all things that get away from us, we fed them to the chickens. They enjoyed the corn very much.

Mmmm! Overripe corn is the BEST!!!

I finally took the row cover off the cabbage and Brussels sprouts. It did a pretty good job reducing the number of cabbage worms, more so on the cabbage than the Brussels sprouts. I have never had such beautiful cabbages!

Such beautiful cabbages!

 I picked several worms off the Brussels sprouts and fed them to the chickens. That was the best thing they’d ever had since the overripe corn! The chickens are still living in the moment. It was quite fun to watch them steal cabbage worms from each other. Too bad I didn’t have my camera handy.

The green beans did not do well this year. The peppers, on the other hand, are fabulous. They must like the hot weather. The fruits are so numerous and heavy that I worry about the plants toppling over.

A yellow pepper plant loaded with fruit

I started harvesting baby lima beans today. I haven’t shelled them yet, so it remains to be seen if I was rushing it. Zucchini, eggplant, and cucumbers are still coming in. So far we have donated over a hundred pounds of cucumbers to the food pantry. We have never done so well with cucumbers. The tomatoes are gearing up to full production. It never fails that the garden is busiest just when classes start.

Nesting boxes

Another busy day. I finally bit the bullet and went out to catch the bumblebees I need for Lab 2. Yesterday, I tried putting out traps (yellow bowls full of soapy water), but I caught not a single one. I got the butterfly net that I bought for $1 at True Value a month ago out of my car, put on long sleeves and gloves, and set out. I checked both gardens without much success. I picked up the bowl of soapy water and walked to the wetland. The goldenrod was a few days from flowering. No pollinators there yet. Ah, but the Joe-Pye weed was blooming! I had to walk through the goldenrod and nettles to get to it. I’d worn my thinner gardening pants; the fabric was not up to the task of keeping out the nettles. The first bee I spotted was hanging upside down at a peculiar angle. On closer inspection, I saw that the bee had been captured by a beautiful white spider. So then I had to go back to the house to get my camera. It was a great example of ambush/piercer predators for my Ch. 47 lecture.

White spider sucking out the digested contents of a bee on Joe-Pye weed

There were plenty of bumblebees on the Joe-Pye weed. I discovered that bumblebees die right now when they hit the soapy water. Not like Japanese beetles that can swim around for many minutes, if not hours. Here’s another news flash: bees are black. All the yellow is in their hairs, for both honey bees and bumble bees. When wet, they appear as solid black. Wasps are yellow on their exoskeletons and look the same wet or dry. I’m learning a lot from developing this bee lab.
The other momentous occasion today was the installation of the nesting boxes. The girls are probably a month from laying. Terry built and painted the boxes Sunday and Monday. Today we shut the chickens out of the coop while Terry screwed the boxes to the 2X4s. The girls HATE being locked out of the coop. All the while Terry was working, they knocked at the door.

Terry positions the nesting boxes

 

What are you doing in there? Let us in!

When the boxes were in, I put in a layer of wood chips and the ceramic eggs. This is why we got the boxes in early. I have heard a couple of places that ceramic eggs serve two functions. First, they teach the chickens were the eggs belong. Secondly, they teach the chickens not to peck at eggs. Chickens sense their environment with their beaks. If the first egg-shaped objects they encounter are ceramic, they peck at them awhile, decide they are not interesting, and stop pecking at them. If they first encounter real eggs, they might peck the egg open and learn that eggs are good to eat. It’s a habit that can’t be broken, and the hen has to be put down (or, as Hilda says, “into the stew pot”).

Nesting boxes with ceramic eggs

Nesting boxes complete, I let the girls back in. They gave the boxes a careful look, but did not attempt to get in. I hope their instincts will once again take over when the time comes. I suggested to Hilda that she give them The Talk about becoming a hen. She laughed.

What are these things in the wall?

So the coop is pretty much done now. We are now on the countdown to the first egg.

Do I dare eat a peach?

I’m starting this post with a quote from T. S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to celebrate our peach harvest. Terry has been trying to grow peaches for several years; each year the winter was too cold until this year. The mild winter allowed the flower buds to survive. Unfortunately, a late frost killed most of them. Our crop—the whole crop—is shown in this picture. That’s right, one peach. We picked it on Monday and cut it into four parts so we could each have some. We could have waited a day or two. The peach was quite firm, but sweet and flavorful, not sour. Maybe next year we’ll have TWO peaches.

Peach harvest, 2012. Surprisingly blemish-free for not being sprayed, don't you think?

During the week that I was gone, the orioles and rose-breasted grosbeaks left us. Summer is slipping away. I am fully immersed in the cycle of harvest, put up, harvest, put up, caught up in the desperate race to eat, blanch, roast, freeze, and/or can everything that comes in from the garden. Over the years, I’ve gotten a pretty good idea of quotas. We won’t use more than a dozen quarts of dill pickles. Eight pints of sweet pickles is plenty. I’m done with those. I’m just getting started on freezing green beans; the goal is 20 10-oz bags.

Just this week the standard tomatoes have gotten ripe. (We’ve had cherry tomatoes for three weeks.) Oh my, that first ripe tomato is almost orgasmic. It is just so much more flavorful than anything that can be found in a grocery store. If I could only grow one thing in my garden, it would be tomatoes. Tomatoes and cream cheese on toast for breakfast. BLTs for supper. Tomato wedges with salt and pepper for lunch. Can’t get enough. I’ll feel differently in 6 weeks.

Terry and I went to the McHenry County Fair in Woodstock Wednesday night. We had mini-donuts and Chicago-style hotdogs complete with the celery salt and nuclear green pickle relish. The hot item of the fair was the nubby ball, a large inflated plastic ball with little nubbies all over it. I expected to see them for sale among the vendors, but did not. Apparently they were all being given away as prizes from the carnival games.

We watched some dog obedience demonstrations before going to the 4-H building. The number of entries in drawings and photos were pretty constant. Every year there are fewer and fewer entries in the gardening section. I was surprised at the size of the zucchini. For God’s sake, anyone can grow a baseball bat zucchini. The trick is to get them when they are 4 to 6 inches long and still edible. Size does matter, but inversely. Sewing, quilting, canning, and baking seem to be shrinking as well. There were two entries in “Dry Cereal Mix.” Are you kidding me? Since when is mixing dry cereal with raisins, peanuts and M&Ms a domestic skill?

We got our usual ice cream cones in the back of one of the commercial buildings. I got a full scoop more than Terry did. It took me awhile to get through it. All we had left to visit were the animal buildings, and I had to finish eating before entering that world of manure smells. We stood outside finishing our cones. Meanwhile, the dog obedience demonstrations had cleared out of that arena, and the stage had been taken by a man playing “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” on the accordion.

From where we stood, we could see a big crowd by the swine barn. Terry had read in the paper that three women had died in the previous year, and each had bequeathed a considerable sum of money for a new swine barn. The crowd was attending the dedication. The dedication of a new swine building takes longer than you might think. I finished my enormous ice cream cone, and we walked through the sheep barn while the speakers were still going strong. I heard a man say, “a quarter of a million dollars.”

“Could that new pole barn have cost a quarter of a million?” I asked Terry.

“Probably,” he replied. “That’s a hundred thousand in cement alone.”

Upon closer inspection, we saw that some of the concrete had been reused. Still, with the bleachers around the show ring, the roof and supporting posts, and the fencing, I could see that a $250K was a reasonable price. The gutters, a sign informed us, were donated by a local business.

Of course we went to the poultry barn. Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed like there were fewer sheep, swine, and cattle and more goats and poultry. The rise of the hobby farmer. The poultry barn seemed different to me this year. For one thing, I didn’t notice the smell as much, presumably because I am becoming used to the smell of chicken poop. Also, I looked at the breeds with more than idle curiosity. I wouldn’t want to have the ugly bare-necked chickens, but the Mille Fleur bantams, maybe. All things considered, however, none of the chickens were as beautiful as my girls.