A pullet egg at last!

When I came home from visiting Jane and shopping on Friday, there was little gift from Hilda on the kitchen counter. She found the first pullet egg in the coop and put it in a tiny basket for me. The egg had been laid in a nest box! Very exciting. 

Our first pullet egg in a tiny basket

The second pullet egg appeared this morning, but was on the floor of the coop. Hopefully, they will all catch on to the coop boxes eventually. Both eggs were Americauna eggs, being blue. We have no way of knowing if they are from the same chicken or two different ones. We’ve seen both Antonia and Chloe squatting. Lillian is more standoffish, so she doesn’t come around to be petted. None of the Rhode Island Reds have shown signs of maturity yet. Lordy, they are slow! I hope they are good producers when they do get started.

To tie up another loose end before telling you about our Halloween, a few days ago, I was doing my shoulder exercise as I do three times a week when I saw it—the sauerkraut cutter that was MIA on Sauerkraut Day. We turned the house upside down looking for that without success. Apparently none of us—five total in pursuit—looked up.

The sauerkraut cutter, wrapped in a plastic bag, up near the ceiling of the store room

We lost a number of trees back by the creek on July 18, when a tornado passed nearby. Terry has been working on getting the downed limbs and trunks cut up for firewood to heat his shop this winter. We picked Halloween to burn the slash. Pat and Nancy adopted a policy of never being home for Halloween when the neighborhood children became greedy and ill-mannered upon reaching Junior High. Friday was beautiful. Saturday was not. I emailed everyone Friday evening suggesting that they bring a change of clothing in case we got soaked. I kept checking the radar, which said that the rain would be out of our area by 1:00. Never fun to drive home in wet clothes. Pat, Nancy, and Jane arrived around noon, as scheduled. We had a nice lunch of broccoli cheese soup that Hilda made with apple cider doughnuts, courtesy of Jane, for dessert. 1:00 came and went. The rain was blowing sideways in the wind. We played Farkel, which took a long time with 7 people.

By the time we had a winner (Hilda), the sky brightened. We put on our layers and our boots and walked out to the fire ring. It took some patience to get the fire started. Terry’s idea was to soak corn cobs in gasoline. My contribution was to pile tinder on the corn cobs. After I got positioned by the fire, everyone started handing tinder to me. Eventually, we got enough small sticks burning to dry out the larger sticks. After that we hauled brush and quickly built it up to a conflagration.

Nancy bringing a stick to the fire

Pat feeding the fire

Before long, we had to move our chairs back from the fire to avoid burning our knees. After a dry period, a light drizzle started up again. It was hard to feel it when next to the fire, but the larger drops from the trees were surprising and cold. Still, it was a much better day to be out than any of us predicted in the morning.

Jane and Hilda by the fire

At 5:00, with the fire pretty well burned down to embers, I went to the house to turn the oven on and get frozen Lou Malnati’s pizzas ready for baking. Everyone else came up shortly thereafter. Nancy assembled the tossed salad she’d brought, and we all sat down to eat at 6:00. We talked and laughed, as we always do. At 7:30, it was safe for everyone to go home, as trick-or-treating would be over by the time they got there. Such a fun day!

Today I continued to check of my end-of-season list. I baked the last of the apples that were in the refrigerator and picked the last jalapeno and peppadew peppers. I winnowed the beans to get rid of the membranous pod lining and small bits of pods by pouring the beans from one bowl to another out in the wind. I sorted through them, removing all the wrinkled, immature and/or deformed beans, and divided them into more or less half-pound bags. It was not a good bean year. Some varieties produced only 6 ounces. Of the 14 varieties we planted, we had only about 11 pounds of beans. Pathetic. Nevertheless, will probably be enough to get us through the winter.

This year's pathetic bean harvest