The Big World

There was enough rain this week to soften the ground, which was a necessary prerequisite for putting in the posts for the chick fence. Not a moment too soon, either, as we are having a hot spell, and the chicks are too warm in the coop.

Hilda and I got started on the fence early yesterday. Even so, we were soaked with sweat and exhausted by the time it was up. It always looks so nice at first. Over time, it will start to sag.

Chick run ready for action

We put up the shade shelters and dragged the kennel from under the deck. Hilda filled a second feeder and waterer to put outside under the shade shelters. We opened the door. Two chicks looked out in bewilderment.

What is this Big World out here?

Hilda went into the coop and herded the chicks toward the door. The first one out wanted to go back in immediately.

Hmm--I don't know about this.

Once they were all out, they hung around in a tight group behind the windbreak.

Safety in numbers

They soon started pecking at everything from the wind break to the grass and weeds to the ants and other insects.

The sun seemed too bright for them. A few brave individuals left the shade, but most did not. One of them was overcome by fatigue and flopped down on the grass.

Too tired to stand any longer

Hilda and I retired to the deck for glasses of iced tea. I went downstairs, sat in my chair, and promptly fell asleep, waking up shortly before lunch.

After awhile, Hilda moved the water and feed closer to the door. This morning, I put the food and water farther from the door but still in sight from behind the windbreak. It was cloudy, and the chicks found their way to the refreshments. I was just about ready to go to the garden to weed and thin the beans in the cool of the day when a thunderstorm rolled in. I retrieved the feeder from the chick run in the nick of time. Now the garden is too wet to weed, which is why I’m sitting at my computer updating the blog. Well, Scarlett, tomorrow is another day.

Bigger and bigger

Chicks grow up so fast! In a week, I expect they will be fully feathered and ready to go outside. We have been hoping for rain because one storm front after another mysteriously divides and goes around us. It will be hard to get the posts in for the chick fence if the ground is dry and brick-hard.

Black Australorp--note how much bigger its tail is than last week.

Whiting True Green

Murray's Big Red Broilers--note that some are darker than others

The chicks do a lot of running with their wings pumping, but I haven’t seen any take off yet. I wonder if that is a surprise to them the first time they become airborne. All of the Murray’s Big Red Broilers are male (they grow faster), and they have chicken fights quite a bit. Unfortunately, they don’t do it on cue, so I am not able to get a video. They literally run right into each other head on. It’s hilarious!

The robin chicks have at least doubled in size this week. It even seems like they were larger today than yesterday. The nest is very crowded. I expect them to fledge any day now.

Robin chicks on June 22.

Robin chicks on June 23. No room! No room!

I caught a picture of the illusive female orchard oriole. While the female Baltimore oriole is a paler version of the male, the female orchard oriole is bright yellow with olive wings, and the male has a black head and wings and a rufous breast.

The female orchard oriole is smaller and yellower than the female Baltimore oriole

I did the big reveal this weekend. I took the row cover off the peas and cabbages yesterday. My first plan was to put fencing on one side of the peas as a trellis. I got to worrying that the rabbits would eat the cabbage and decided to extend the fence to include the cabbage as well. As with the landscape cloth, the pea trellis fencing was not quite double the length of the row. Jane was visiting and helped me by holding one end of the fence so it wouldn’t coil up on itself. She didn’t feel like she was doing much, but I assured her that her role was pivotal.

Beans, left; cabbage and peas in a fence; potatoes, far right

Today I uncovered the beans and Brussels sprouts. I gave up weeding and thinning the beans because the ground was too wet from the last watering. I had to constantly wipe mud off my weeder. Too much bother.

Brussels sprouts

This year, we planted the carrots and beets in a raised bed by scattering seeds. They grew thickly and must be thinned. The beet leaves were big enough that I put some in fried rice for dinner. Like all greens, they cooked down to nothing and were barely perceptible. I’m sure we got good vitamins and minerals.

Baby beet greens before cooking

The miracle

Gardening is magical. We put seeds in the soil, give them water, and wait for the miracle: plants make food out of air. It never fails to amaze me and fill my heart with gratitude. It’s not just a miracle, it’s THE miracle. Photosynthesis provides the energy for all life on earth except for those weird organisms that grow around the deep-sea vents. As our tender seedlings grow, we watch them carefully, pulling out the weeds that perversely grow more vigorously than the ones we want to eat. If crab grass was good in salads, we’d be all set.

The miracle: a bean seedling

The shooting stars and geraniums have gone to seed. Now penstemon takes the main stage.

Penstemon

Other lesser miracles are all around us as well. The robin under the deck has three chicks. I waited patiently to get a picture of her return to the nest with food.

FEED ME!!!

And later settling down to give the chicks a little warm up. It was cold and damp this weekend.

Is this comfortable for anyone?

Our chicks get bigger every day. I took some pictures on Wednesday. The Big Red Broilers like the perch I put in for them.

Big Red Broilers on the perch

The Black Australorps were getting cute little tail feathers.

Cute little tail feathers

The Whiting True Green chicks have lovely bars on their rings.

Decorative wing feathers

Here are some picture from yesterday. The Broilers are getting dark feathers on their wings. I’m surprised that their down is so light colored when they are supposed to be red when mature. We’ll see.

Dark feathers on the Broilers

I think the meat chickens are growing faster than the layers, but it isn’t so obvious as it was with the Cornish x Rocks. The chicks are also taking on “big girl” postures, standing around with their necks extended.

I think the meat chick is bigger, maybe

I have been terribly disorganized about suppers lately. After working outside all day, I’m sore and tired. I thought it was time to muster some effort on Sunday, so I made biscuits to have with Tundra Surprise beef stem (i.e., beef stew that had been languishing forgotten in the freezer for months). A dear friend included some cooking magazines in her retirement gift bag for me. One of them was all about Southern breakfasts. I read it cover-to-cover, as I do all cooking magazines, and dog-eared the page with Our Favorite Biscuits. If it is the favorite of Southern cooks, it’s got to be good, am I right? They live on biscuits down there.

Part of the appeal of the recipe was that it used self-rising flour. I needed said flour for a cookie recipe I tried recently and discovered that It was surprisingly hard to find here up north. I had to buy a 5-pound bag, of which I had used about a cup. If these biscuits were good, I had an opportunity to use up the flour. (The cookies were okay, but I’m not sure I’ll make them again.)

I did the mise en place in the morning while I was fresh. The biscuit recipe began with grating one stick of frozen butter on a box grater. I’d seen this technique on TV and was intrigued. I am intrigued no more. God, what a mess. I did it over a cutting board. The butter thawed instantly on impact, and there you are. I scraped the butter off the cutting board as best I could without getting it balled up too much. I tossed it with 2.5 cups of all-purpose flour and put it in the refrigerator. It was only supposed to be in there for 10 minutes, but I figured all day wouldn’t make any difference.

Before supper, I mixed in one cup of buttermilk. “The dough will be sticky.” Understatement of the year. It was impossible. And I was supposed to roll it out “on a lightly floured surface” and fold it in half five times to layer the butter. It seemed that no amount of flour would keep it from sticking to the counter and the rolling pin. I did what I could with my bench scraper and ended up patting it flat with my (well-floured) hands. I tried to cut out the biscuits but could not get them free of a) the counter or b) the biscuit cutter. They weren’t awfully round when I put them on the parchment paper.

They didn’t rise much either. Here they are, looking more like cookies than biscuits.

Failed, and yet successful biscuits

Note: Terry loved the moistness of them, declared they were “better than Popeye’s”, and ate four. So there you go.

Free to roam

At last, all the chicks passed the pasty butt test this morning. We spread wood chips all over the coop and turned them loose. I hoped that hanging up the food would prevent them from walking (and pooping) on it, but I soon learned that it is still low enough for the chicks to hop up on it easily. 

The feeder hanging from a chain

The waterer was completely filled with wood chips this morning. Now that we have more space, we installed the green mesh platform that keeps the water away from the wood chips. The chicks were hesitant to walk on the grid at first, but a few of them got the hang of it. I’m sure the rest will learn from them before too long.

An early adopter drinks on top of the green platform

Here is a video of the chicks on Saturday morning (the beginning of their third day with us) for the first 15 seconds and from today when we first let them have access to the whole coop (fifth day).  Many of them stood in the corner and pecked at the wall. The instructor of the first chicken workshop I went to described chickens as “curious, but not bright.” This seemed to be a classic example of that. As the video shows, some chicks suddenly left off pecking the wall to tear across the coop, wings flapping.

Speaking of, the wing feathers are coming in rapidly.  They will be flying soon, and we’ll have to clip their wings.

Wing feathers growing with amazing speed

Miss Clavelle is broody again. We have her in isolation until her brood patch cools off. Probably we will put her back with the other hens tomorrow and see if she’ll stay out of the nest boxes.

Miss Clavelle isolated in the greenhouse

We finally have all of the plants in the garden. The landscape cloth is down; the row cover is over the peas, beans and cabbages. I hope it will be sufficient deterrent for the ground squirrels and rabbits.

Row cover (white) protects our plants from herbivorers

The potatoes have sprouted.

Potato sprouts, now 

Nancy gave me some irises last year when she thinned out her garden. They not only survived the winter, but are blooming. I love irises. This one is a little past its prime, but there are two more buds on it.

This is a good time in the garden. The pressure to get everything planted is over. Now we’ll be weeding for a couple of weeks, and then the harvest mania will begin. For now, we just get to watch things grow.

Chicks!

We ordered our chicks to be delivered the week of June 3. We anxiously awaited the 6:00 phone call every day until if finally came on Thursday. We jumped in the car and drove to the post office. This was not our first rodeo. We knew to look over our heads for the doorbell. Hilda pushed it once, but didn’t hear anything from inside. I was about to press again when I saw a man with a small box headed for the door.

We took the cheeping package home to the brooder box that we’d had ready since Sunday. Here are the chicks in the box they were shipped in.

A little box o' chicks

Here they are in their new home on their second day.

 We are trying a new meat bird this year, Murray’s Big Red Broiler. They are slower growing, but don’t have the leg problems that plague the Cornish x Rock. Based on the information we had when we ordered, we scheduled the butchering date at 8 weeks. When I checked the website just now, it said 12 weeks. We’ll have to get that sorted out.

Murray's Big Red Broiler

We are also trying two new breeds of hens, Black Australorp and Whiting True Green. The Black Australorp are supposed to be not only friendly, but also excellent layers of light brown eggs. 

Black Austrolorp

We got Whiting True Blue last year (Whiting is the breeder’s name). I will be interested to know if one can really tell the difference between blue and green eggs.

Whiting True Green

We dipped the beak of each chick in water for their first drink. Once we saw them swallowing, we released them into the brooder box. We put the feeder in the box and took a guess as to how high the heat lamp needed to be. We checked on them frequently and adjusted the light. Last year the chicks came in the middle of an unseasonably warm June; we lost three of the meat chickens to heat stress. The end of the week was hot this year also. It wasn’t long before we had the windows and doors of the coop open.

In the afternoon, I took a break from gardening to take picture of the chicks. They weren’t all there. In particular, we were missing one Black Austrolorp and one Whiting True Green. Figures it would be the layers. We might have been missing a meat chicken as well. I counted 18 chicks. It is hard to count chicks as they do not stand still for long. I asked Hilda if she had seen three black chicks before. She was sure she had. She returned to the coop with me and counted 19 chicks. Terry and I had seen a stray cat hunting voles out in the hay field. Would it have been bold enough to come close to the house and snag two chicks out of the brooder box? All of the other usual suspects—racoons, foxes, coyotes—were nocturnal. This was very upsetting. Needless to say, we shut the outer coop door. Hilda and I talked about options. She went to the Murray McMurray website to see if the minimum order had changed as the weather warmed. No. Still had to order 15. That was way more than we could raise. Farm and Fleet and Tractor Supply wouldn’t have chicks for sale this late. In the end, we decided we would just keep two of the two-year-old layers another year to bring the flock up to 12.

The next morning, we counted as we moved the chicks to a storage bin and checked for pasty butt. 17, 18, 19. We had all the meat chickens. I lifted the feeder out of the box to refill it and said, “Twenty, twenty-one.” A black chick and a brown chick had been under the feeder, presumably since we put it in the box the day before. There wasn’t any way they could have crawled under. They were a bit wobbly and noticeably smaller than their sisters (amazing how fast they grow with proper nutrition!), but otherwise seemed fine. We felt like terrible caregivers. Why didn’t we count after we put the feeder in? Well. The should-haves don’t count, and all’s well that ends well.

There were FIVE meat chickens with pasty butt. We never had a problem with pasty butt on the Cornish x Rock. If there was one thing they were good at, it was pooping. None of the layers had a problem, so that was a victory. After we cleaned the brooder and put in clean water and food (while the box was empty), we put all the clean chicks back in, and I took the storage bin with the pasty butt chicks into the bathroom. In case you don’t remember or are a new reader, sometimes young chicks get poop stuck to their down around the vent (the dual-purpose opening for the oviduct and intestine). If it isn’t cleaned up, it can completely block the vent, which will kill the chick. I am amazed at how good I’ve gotten with pasty butt. The first time it happened, I was very nervous, wore exam gloves, and tried to remove the poop with a damp paper towel. That resulted in open wounds that required further research and the purchase of antibiotic ointment. The next year, I found a better method, which is to hold their little butts under warm running water while gently rubbing with a finger until the poop softens up and washes out. I don’t even bother with gloves anymore. Then I dry their butts with a hair dryer set to low. It’s sort of like a spa day for chicks.

Chicks outgrow pasty butt after a few days. On the second morning, only two chicks needed a butt bath. This morning, it was only one. We will have to keep them contained in a small area until there is no more pasty butt. I don’t want to chase the chicks around the whole coop every morning.

The lilacs are blooming profusely. I love my sunset walks down to the orchard to close the door to the hens’ coop. As the wind dies in the evening, the air fills with lilac fragrance. I admire the color of the sky, inhale deeply, and listen to the birds. It’s a peaceful time.

Two varieties of lilacs in bloom

By day, the lilacs are an important source of pollen and nectar. There are always red admirals flitting about.

A red admiral drinking lilac nectar

Yesterday I saw a butterfly that was unfamiliar to me. It is a silver-spotted skipper.

A silver-spotted skipper

On my way back to the house, I nearly stepped on an American toad on the lawn. I wondered if it was the same one I'd been careful not to hit with the mower last week.

An American toad living a dangerous life in the lawn

I love this time of year.

Busting butt

I don’t know how or when “busting butt” came to mean working hard, but it could have been from gardening. My butt muscles are always the ones screaming the next morning. My thighs ache too, but “busting thighs” doesn’t have the same alliterative ring. Let’s face it. I do very little kneeling during the non-gardening months, and the muscles one uses for kneeling seem to be unique to that activity.

Painful as it is, however, it feels good to get the garden in after so many weather delays. We got the potatoes in on May 25. The first sprouts are starting to come up.

The first potato sprout

The second task was putting down the landscape cloth. Hilda and I started with a grid for the tomatoes. After begin flooded out four times in the south garden last summer, we have moved most operations to the former, smaller north garden. When we first moved from north to south, we pieced together the shorter landscape cloths to fit the longer rows. It was a big pain. Finally we bit the bullet last year and ordered more landscape cloth so that all pieces were the right length for the rows. We were so proud! And now we had to cut them down as Terry had put the short pieces in his nursery beds. Of course, the north garden is not half the width of the south; it’s 5/9^th (20’ vs 36’). It would be too easy to just cut each length in half. We had to piece together every other row.

Tomatoes on a grid of landscape cloth

Hilda planted the tomatoes while I did the onions. Planting onion seedlings is an act of faith. You just have to believe that they will grow in spite of the fact that they look like limp, thin threads. They did have roots, at least, which is more than you get when they come in the mail.

Sad, sad little shallots

And then there was the dreaded task of putting down the drip lines. The tomato lines were, as expected, too long. It was much quicker work to set up irrigation for 18 tomatoes rather than 32.

When I started putting down drip lines for the rest of the garden, I found that while the landscape cloth was 16’ too long, the drip lines were 4’ too short. How is this possible? I know it’s the same set up we used last year because that was the first time I installed shut-off valves on each line. I was able to reuse the end plug and cable ties that I use to secure the line.

I invented this system of using two cable ties to hold down the end of the drip line. I reused the cable ties and the plug at the end when I extended the length.

While I was putzing with the irrigation, I spotted a broken arrowhead (the notched base is missing) right on top of the potato row. This is the second arrowhead I’ve found. The first was after we first bought the property. Some people find arrowheads by looking for them. Arrowheads seem to find me. Before white folks installed drain tiles in our field, the hill on which our house stands would have been an island in the middle of a swamp. It does not surprise me that Native Americans would have camped here and left arrowheads behind. As Terry said when I found the first one, this is a sacred place.

An arrowhead with the base broken off

We are also using the raised beds for some of our vegetables. Hilda has done all of that planting.

Planting the raised beds

I hoped to get the beans planted today, but it looks like we’ll be rained out at least for the morning.

One day last week, a doe was behind the apple orchard when I went out to put the chickens to bed. The next day, Terry told me that he spooked a fawn from under the solar panels while he was mowing. He though the fawn was a day or two old. A few days later, I was able to get a bad picture of the two of them on the far side of the field.

A distant picture of a doe with her new fawn

We have some birds with personality disorders. A pair of house finches and a red-bellied woodpecker think that they are orioles. It is also possible that they learned jelly-eating from watching the orioles. In either case, I hope they are not developing nutritional deficiencies by eating junk food.

A pair of house finches eating jelly that is not for them

A red-bellied woodpecker doing the same

I’m pleased with how well the shade garden by the tractor shed is filling in. The shooting stars are blooming next to a prolific display of wild geraniums.

Shooting stars and geraniums

A robin has built a nest under the deck again. I watched her fly repeatedly in the direction of the north garden. I think her nest is built entirely from the straw that we used to cover the garlic for the winter. Terry suggested that the bird was thinking, “This is too easy!” The lines in the photo are from netting that we hang in front of the window to keep the robins from flying at the glass.

A robin on a nest of straw from the garlic bed. 

We should be getting our chicks this week. Hilda is concerned that they did not come this morning. Murray McMurray does not send an email when the chicks are shipped, which seems very last century to me. They should get with the times. The only information we have is that they will be shipped the week of June 3, and that came when our order was received months ago. Maybe tomorrow.