On the home front

What with all the travel and adventure this summer, it has been quite a while since I have updated you on domestic activities. I have been trying to remember to have breakfast on the patio when the mornings are pleasantly cool.

Breakfast on the patio with the chickens in the background--blueberry muffin, hard boiled egg, banana, and green tea

We harvested the garlic the Monday after I got back from the Boundary Waters. Recall that we had had 2” of rain two days before. It was a muddy process. The whole family was involved. I dug the garlic. Hilda and I trimmed of the ball of mud and roots. Hilda hosed the rest of the mud off with a hose. Dad cut labels from a plastic milk jug. We have found that a China marker (black wax pencil) and a plastic label last longer than anything labeled with a Sharpie. I tied the garlic together in bundles with their plastic labels. Terry hung the garlic under the deck to dry.

Garlic under the deck

Six more days until we send the meat chickens to freezer heaven. So far, I don’t feel bad about it at all. If my transition to Farm Wife is truly complete, I will not have pangs of sadness on the day we take them to the butcher. I’m looking forward to only having the new laying hens to take care of in Coop 2. They will be a lot less work.

When Terry first (over)built Coop 2, we had a terrible time moving it. It was way too heavy for the wheels he put on it. I successfully lobbied to put it on a trailer, which we accomplished with the help of the Pumpkin Party guests. With a dozen people, it was much easier to lift. Last year we raised dual purpose chickens, which were agile and active. They had no trouble getting up and down the ramp to the coop. They also took forever to mature, and even after four months had hardly any meat on them. We put them down more out of exhaustion than because they were ready.

So we went back to Cornish X Rock broilers this year. Being overweight and sluggish, they take exception to walking up and down the ramp. Like all couch potatoes, however, exercise is good for them. I have read recommendations to raise regular chickens along with the broilers because the regular chickens will pester them into moving, sort of like a personal trainer, I guess. You may recall that we have three Rhode Island Reds and three Americauna hens in with the broilers, and they do chase them around.

We developed a system for moving the chickens in and out of the coop based on food rewards. I have mentioned that we have to take the food away at night so that the broilers don’t outgrow their legs. We accomplished this goal in 14 of the 15 chicks. One rooster grew even faster than his companions. I noticed by the second or third week that his right hip was not developing normally. We call him Gimpy, and he has to be lifted out of the coop in the morning and into the coop at night. Other than that, however, he is able to move around some. In my research, I found a USDA 10-point Scale of Gimpiness (lameness, actually) on which Gimpy scores about 2. They didn’t recommend culling unless the chickens get up to 10.

For the rest of the chickens, getting them out of the coop in the morning is easy. Open the door, show them the feeder, and here they come!

At 5:00 each evening, we take the food out of the run. A bonus to this system is that all the chickens, broilers included, walk around the run grazing and looking for bugs. At 7:00, we put the food, the water, and Gimpy in the coop. The more mobile and ambitious chickens run to the gate the minute we get the food from its hiding place in the storage box. Most everybody will then go up the ramp to eat, because two hours is a long time for broilers to be without food. At 8:30 when the sun is going down (when chickens instinctively go in the coop to roost for the night), we chase in the last of the broilers, take out the food, and shut the door for the night. Here’s a video of the process, along with some daytime activities.

Don’t these chickens look happy? This is what I find most gratifying about raising meat chickens. They spend their short, accelerated lives doing normal chicken things, eating, drinking, lounging in the shade.

Hanging out

Size comparison of a laying hen and broilers at 6 weeks

A definite upside of having the coop on the trailer is that the coop stays a lot cleaner. When the coop was on the ground, the only midday shade the chickens had was in the coop. We had to change all of the bedding every day for the last two or three weeks, and nasty work it was. Now they spend most of the day under the coop instead of in it. We can get by with changing the bedding every two or three days with spot cleaning in between.

At Coop 1, Gracie had gone broody again. We tried our previous cure, which was to put her in the kennel in the run for a few days, but she always ran right back to the nest box. I hypothesized that it was because the weather was so hot that her belly didn’t cool enough. My next solution was to wrap ice packs in a towel, put them in the bottom of Della’s carrier, and put Gracie on the ice packs.

Gracie on ice

How long would it take? I didn’t know. The trouble was that she didn’t have access to food and water in the carrier. I started with 45 minutes. That didn’t work. Over the next three days, I got her up to 2 hours on ice alternating with 2 hours in the kennel, where she had food and water. That brought us to Wednesday night. When I let her out of the kennel, she was in the nest box in a matter of minutes. Now at my wits’ end, my next plan was to leave her in the kennel overnight.

I had an evening meeting yesterday. When I got home, Hilda was just coming in from putting the girls to bed. She was very worried about leaving Gracie out. “Do you think a coyote will get her?” she asked.

“How could it?” I responded. “She’s in a cage enclosed in the electric netting. I don’t think coyotes come this close to the house anyway.”

Yet even things that are unlikely do occur. I was not completely free of worry until this morning. Gracie looked miffed in her cage but was very much alive. And so far, she has been out in the run with her companions. Fingers crossed.

I was thrilled to pieces to see numerous cardinal flowers in my restoration area. I love the intensely red blossoms. The weird thing is that the species is not listed among the seeds that were in the seed mix I ordered. However, I think it more likely that the seed mix list was not correct than that seeds survived in the seed bank through all those years of farming.

Cardinal flower

I also have another flower that I had never seen before. I couldn’t find it in my wildflower guide because I looked under blue/purple, and it is in the pink section. I knew it was a mint because of the opposite leaves and the square stem. I tried the taxonomic key but got bogged down in the vocabulary and couldn’t tell some of the characters from the picture. Rather than walk out to the flower, I went through the seed list, searching for pictures of the probable suspects (flowers that I didn’t know) on the Prairie Moon Nursery website. And finally I found it when I got to the P’s—Physostegia virginiana (Obedient Plant).  It is so named because the individual flowers stay wherever you move them. Something to try next time I’m out that way.

 

Obedient plant