Separating the hens

We had quite a week. Hilda and I put up a chick fence inside the coop run on Tuesday and separated the laying hens from the straight runs in the evening. We could put the hens right in Coop 1 for the night, which would teach them where they were supposed to sleep. Also, chickens are supposed to be easier to catch when it gets dark because they don’t have good night vision. As with so many other things, the chickens had not read the book. Or perhaps it wasn’t dark enough. As long as we were at it, we resolved to clip everyone’s wings in hopes of curtailing the escapes over the chick fence.

It didn’t go too badly. We moved the Silver Polish and the Araucana first. We grabbed them one at a time, clipped their wings, and put them in a big black plastic bin with a lid. They did seem to calm down once they were in complete darkness and did not try to escape when we opened the lid for the next hen. When all five were in the bin, we carried the bin to Coop 1 and put them in it.

The life and death decisions were next. Sadly, explaining the implications did not cause any of the Welsummer of Buff Orpington hens to volunteer for laying duty. We grabbed whomever we could. In addition to wing clipping, we put leg bands on N – 1 of each variety (i.e., 2 of the 3 Welsummer and 3 of 4 Buff Orpington – not  having a leg band counts as an identifier if all the others have one) so we could keep them straight if we had too. We haven’t gotten around to naming them yet. We’ve been busy.

After installing these hens in Coop 1, we shooed all the remaining chickens out of Coop 2 and shut the door. One by one, we caught and clipped the wings of the roosters and unlucky hens and put them in Coop 2 for the night. It was dark enough by this time that they settled on the roost and did not try to get back out every time Hilda opened the door. When we checked on the hens, they were settling in also.

The hens' first night in Coop 1

Unlike the chickens, I was not ready for bed after all the excitement. I went to bed anyway because it was time, but could not fall asleep. Some nights are like that.

What were we thinking, moving the hens the night before Hilda was going to be alone with them all day? Terry and I left early Wednesday morning to take a trip to Chicago. We like to take in a show now and then, and MCC’s bus tours are both convenient and not that much more expensive than taking the train down. Despite dire warnings of snarled traffic, we got downtown in record time, leaving us two and a half hours for lunch. It was a stunningly gorgeous day, warm (but not hot) and sunny. We walked to Millennium Park where we saw a new sculpture of a giant head.

Giant elongated head sculpture

We took a picture of ourselves reflected in The Bean.



Self-portrait in the Bean. We are in the center. Terry is wearing a yellow ball cap and dark pants.

A musical group which I presumed was the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was rehearsing in the band shell. The only reason I knew they were rehearsing is that they started over on one of the numbers. Other than that, the quality of the performance gave no indication that it was just practice. They were doing jazz with a woman singing and a man singing and playing the trumpet (not at the same time). We sat down and listened for two numbers.



Rehearsal

We walked through the prairie garden.



Prairie garden

I was surprised to see the entrance to Taste of Chicago at the south end of the prairie garden. I thought it was farther down in Grant Park. We weren’t up to facing the crowds, however, and went to the Berghoff for lunch. We got there ahead of the lunch rush and were seated immediately in a nearly empty dining room. By the time we were done, people were waiting for tables. It was a good lunch, although Terry confided to me later that his beer had been warm.

We still had some time to walk around before we were due at the theater at 1:30. We sat in a little park in front of a bank for the last 10 minutes or so watching people.

The show was The Last Ship. Not my cup of tea, really. My impression is that most of the stuff coming out of England these days is not exactly happy-go-lucky, what with the economic collapse and all. I found the premise lame. A shipyard is closing, and the workers decide to build one last ship using money that the local priest misappropriated from the collection to repair the church’s roof (or something—closed captions would have been helpful) and sail it around the world. Really? What are they going to use for the operating fund? And only one guy, the bad boy who left 15 years previously to become a sailor, knew anything about sailing. The performance was professional, I’ll give them that.

We got home a little after 7:00. I asked Hilda how the day had gone. Not well. Clipping the wings had not prevented escapes from either enclosure. We would have to put more posts in the chick fence around Coop 1 because it was sagging. The girls loved the kennel, spending the day in and on top of it. She noticed in the afternoon that the girls were not going into the coop. She put the food and water in the run, and they ate and drank greedily. She had spent the day worrying and chasing chickens. She was dispirited. Could I help her get the chickens in the coops in an hour?

Of course. At 8:30, we shooed the chickens into Coop 2. Easy. The girls, on the other hand, had not gotten the idea of roosting in the coop. Three of them were roosting on top of the kennel. No, no, you need to be inside. They were easy to grab, at least, since it was getting pretty dark by then.

The next morning, I suggested that we just leave them inside all day. I had to go to work for meetings all day, and that seemed easier. They would learn where the food and water was. Friday morning we put in two more posts before we let the girls out. It helped, but we are still chasing chickens more than we’d like (i.e., more than never). Our current hypothesis is that they are escaping in the gap between the chick fence and the coop. At least they are going in and out of the coop to get eat and drink and are going in at dusk to roost. Here’s a video of opening the coop on Friday morning.

 

And the livin' is easy

This is a nice time of summer. There’s just enough produce from the garden that we can go from farm to table every day. Tonight we had steamed fresh peas, so very tender and sweet just two hours off the vine, and baby zucchini, young garlic, and spring onions, tossed in olive oil and roasted in the oven. Before long, I’ll be so overwhelmed with freezing and canning that we’ll be eating Spam with macaroni and cheese from a box.

Another fun part of this time of year is watching the fledgling birds. All species seem to have the same behavior of cheeping and flapping furiously to get attention from a parent. I was in the garden last week when I saw three bird sitting on a tomato cage. I couldn’t recognize their shape or color. They seemed to have little tufts of down here and there. A swallow flew overhead, and the three birds launched into action, quivering their wings and chirping. Without the characteristic V-shaped tail, I had no idea they were swallows. I’ve seen Baltimore orioles feeding their chicks grape jelly at our feeder. At times like these, I wonder if these miracles are new to my environment or if I just wasn’t paying attention when I was younger.

The chickens got their first watermelon rinds this weekend. It takes them awhile with every new food to get the hang of it. In the second part of the video, one chicken doesn’t seem to know whether to eat the watermelon or walk on it.

 

And here’s some updated photos.

Cleopatra

Nadia, left, Gracie, right

Clockwise from noon, Gracie, Lizette, Lidia, Nadia, unnamed Buff Orpington

Those little...chicks!

I got back to the prairie restoration area last week, after many weeks of thinking about going. Terry’s been mowing it regularly. While I think we were only supposed to mow it once, the most important goal is to keep the invasive annuals from going to seed. I walked out on Wednesday to find that I now have half an acre of weeds. I have a sinking feeling that I have wasted a whole lot of money on prairie seeds. I expect this is why every other page in the Prairie Moon catalog reminds customers that it takes three years before the prairie plants bloom. They must get a lot of calls from people with giant weed beds in the first year.

The prairie restoration area

Which is, alas, mostly clover

Nadia is starting to get bits of white on her head feathers. Gracie is not, but she was not inclined to pose.

Nadia with white streaks in her head feathers next to a Buff Orpington hen

The Welsummer rooster looks like he is wearing brown pants. Even though all the chickens have feathers on their legs, the dark color somehow produces a more striking image.

Mr. Welsummer Fancy Pants

I made a video of the chickens running from the coop. If you watch closely, the all exit except for Gracie, who ducks behind the feeder. She can never make up her mind about going out. Many mornings she stands at the top of the ramp debating. The video also shows three chicks roosting on top of the sunshade, which is simply not wide enough for their feet. Still, height is status in the chicken world.

The chicks are getting big enough that Hilda got concerned about having 24 of them in Coop 2. We decided that we would separate the hens and move them to Coop 1 today. It never ceases to amaze me how, given that I have a Ph.D. in Biology, I can take action on thoughts that come into my head without ever stopping to question my assumptions. In this case, I took as a fact the assumption that the chicks were big enough to not get through the electric netting. Thus, when I suggested that we take down the chick fence, Hilda concurred and said, “Let’s do it before we let them out.”

And so sure we were of our assumption that we not only took down and rolled up the chick fence, we also took out all the poles. You know where this is going, don’t you?

We let the chicks out and began our Saturday changing of the wood chips. I climbed up into the coop to begin scooping out the dirty chips. From that vantage point, I looked over the yard and saw the chicks very happily dining on the cilantro outside the electric netting. (The netting was not plugged in at the time, but we know from last year that they are not deterred by the current in any case. The electric part is more to keep predators out.) They were walking through the netting as if it did not exist. What to do?

We let them free range until we had the coop cleaned. They didn’t wander far as the best foraging was mostly between the two fences. The first thought I had was to put the screen across the coop door so we could toss chicks in as we caught them and have them stay. HA! That’s a good one. We chased as many in as we could and put in the screen.

“How many did we get?” I asked Hilda.

“Four.”

“Okay. Only 20 to go.”

We managed to catch two more. It was impossible to corner them. Whenever we got close, they would scoot through the netting.

When Hilda left the run for something, she fussed with trying to get the netting closed at the entrance. Suddenly the absurdity of what she was doing occurred to her. “I have to get the fence closed so they don’t get in,” she said.

Which gave me an idea. We put the chick fence back up. We did a better job this time. We left both fences opened and started herding. Most of the chickens were inside the netting behind the coop in a particularly luxurious patch of volunteer dill. It still wasn’t easy. Initially, I was on the inside, and Hilda was on the outside. We should have left the chick fence open on both ends. The should-haves don’t count. Hilda herded a group of chicks all the way around perimeter between the two fences to the gate. One of them broke off and turned the other way. Hilda got most of them inside the chick fence and shut it. “Stay where you are!” I yelled and started herding the stray.

I got her to the gate, and Hilda was nowhere to be seen. “OPEN THE GATE! I told you to stay put!”

“I didn’t hear that,” she replied, but she came back to her post, and we got the chick in.

After that, Hilda stayed at the gate with the screen while I took the lid to a large storage bin to try to herd the rest out of the dill. And two hours after the whole fiasco began, they were all back in. We counted twice. Hilda took the coop; I took the run. First we counted the absolute number. She got 12, I got 13. Oops. I must have had 12. Then we counted by variety. I had 4 Welsummer, 1 Araucana, and 7 Buff Orpington. Hilda had 2 Welsummer, 2 Araucana, both Silver Polish, and 6 Buff Orpington.

We are totally NOT moving the hens today.

I heaved a sigh of relief and went in for a much deserved and much delayed cup of tea.

Chicken fights

The chicks continue to grow quickly. The roosters’ combs are getting ever so slightly larger and redder than the hens. I’m not prepared to separate the hens just yet, but I certainly have my suspicions. It looks to me like we have only one Welsummer rooster of the six survivors of that variety. The rooster is a darker color overall in addition to having the larger comb.

Buff Orpington rooster on the sun shade

Welsummer hen

Welsummer rooster

Lidia is getting a black beard. She and Cleopatra look more alike than they did when they were chicks.

Nadia and Gracie’s head feathers are almost long enough to flop over.

Cleopatra

Lidia (left) and a Buff Orpington hen

Nadia

I tried hard to get a good video of a chicken fight. It is a difficult task as the location of any given chicken fight is completely unpredictable. Instead of one good video, I have a montage of bad ones. The typical sequence is that the chicks fly at each other (sometimes they collide, sometimes not), have a little stare down, and then pretend that nothing happened. I find it hilarious and could watch for hours. The world would be a happier place if humans adopted the same battle strategies.

I saw the strangest thing on the patio yesterday. Early in the morning, I noticed that ants were swarming out of the cracks. When Terry put the patio down, he very carefully filled the cracks with some kind of hugely expensive sand that was supposed to prevent the ants from nesting. The ants didn’t get the memo, and we’ve got ant hills all over the place. About 11:00, I saw odd star shapes in the area where the swarm had been. I had to look very closely to make out that several ants were surrounding one ant. The head of the central ant had its jaws locked with the jaws of another ant. The remaining ants seemed to be tapping on the central ant’s body. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to pick up chemical signals or attacking. I concluded it was the latter because in some of the stars, the central ant was curled up and not looking so good. Yet all the ants looked exactly alike. I may have witnessed a hostile takeover of a nesting site either by a different family of the same species or a physically very similar yet different species of ant. Only the ants know for sure. By 1:00, it was all over. Regular ant traffic had resumed at its low level.

Stars of ants on the patio

We have had some rain every day for the last week. Yesterday Hilda and I walked down to the creek to see how full it was getting. Despite the precipitation, it is still well below the banks. Terry looked up the stats from last year’s floods. The pattern was similar—between half an inch and an inch of rain every day—except for the day of the flood, when we got 3”. Hopefully that won’t happen.

While we were back by the creek, we checked on the wild black raspberries. We are on track to have a good harvest. We saw a meadowlark in the field. I don’t remember seeing one here before. Also new this year is a large population of frogs out in the tall grasses. I haven’t seen one, but the chorus at night is amazing. I heard the calls of at least two different species. We saw a couple of fireflies last night. The primroses are blooming. It’s really summer now!

Primroses

Schmaltz

To catch up a loose end, the robins fledged last week. It turns out that one of the four eggs never hatched.

All that's left in the robins' nest

We ate our first garden harvest (not counting the asparagus that comes up annually by itself) Saturday night. I thinned the pak-choy and used it as a substitute for cabbage in bubble and squeak (a British dish of fried potatoes and cabbage with a name that ranks right up there with spotted dick and bangers-and-mash.)

Pak-choy, the first harvest from the garden

Also on Saturday, we saw the chicks in a dust bath. They were so cute! They all crowded in, vying for position. Gracie hopped out of the coop, strolled right over and plunked herself down smack in the middle. Sadly, I arrived with my camera just seconds after Terry had started weed-whacking nearby. All the chicks were cowering in the coop.

Sunday the wind blew and blew hard. My brother and his wife came out to take us to the Grandview Inn for Fathers’ Day brunch. When we got home, one of the chicks was between the chick fence and the electric fence. I grabbed it and tossed it back where it belonged. When it was bedtime, two chicks were between the fences. How were they getting over the chick fence?

Our first hypothesis was that they were escaping near the coop door. Accordingly, we spent some time this morning moving the posts of the chick fence closer to the door. We also put more earth staples around the bottom in case they were sneaking underneath. When Hilda was doing the usual chores, however, we saw the chicks walk right up the fence where it lay at an angle after she had moved the post to access the food and water. Well. Presumably, the wind had blown the fence over enough that the chicks had just walked over it literally in pursuit of the greener grass (and better dill). We reinforced the fence with another post. No escapees today. So far, anyway.

Also on Sunday, the row cover came loose from the cabbages and Brussels sprouts. When I went down after supper to secure it again, I was astounded at the size of the plants underneath. I put the cover back with plans to uncover the Brussels sprouts today, as they were getting stunted. The Napa cabbage seems close to harvest. After an internal struggle, I decided to leave it all uncovered. The downside is that it will get bugs. The upside is that it won’t be so hot, and the Coles tend to like cooler temperatures. They do look so very beautiful with the cover first comes off.

Back to front, cabbage, Napa cabbage, Brussels sprouts

I cooked the first hen today. I used her in a new recipe for red pozole from Pati’s Mexican Table. I put the pozole (hominy) in the slow cooker before I went to work. I quit in the garden at 3:30 to start on supper. I knew the chicken would need longer to cook. I figured on simmering the cut up pieces for an hour instead of the 35 minutes given in the recipe would be fine.

What I learned is that I have never in my whole life cooked a grown-up chicken. The first surprise was how thick the skin was and how much fat that chicken had. Big blobs of bright yellow fat were under the skin, by the joints, around the neck and belly. Also, the chicken was hairy. A fair number of inch-long hairs were here and there, especially on the wings. Those hairs were not easy to pull off. Knowing I was going to throw out the skin anyway, I gave it up fairly quickly.  I covered the chicken with water, put in the onion and cilantro, and set it to simmer. After an hour, I took the pieces out of the stock, let them cool a bit, and tried to get the meat off the bone. I couldn’t even get the skin to peel off. I had to slide a knife beneath it and cut. I had to peel the tendons away from the entire outside surface of the leg muscles. The wings and thighs were almost as bad. It took forever. Only the breast meat behaved normally, except that I had to pull the tendons out of the middle. I gave up on the back. These were some hard-won calories, let me tell you. I feared that the meat would be inedibly tough. Note to self: cook the hens longer.

On the top of the broth was the most schmaltz I have ever seen from one chicken. I ran it through the gravy separator and ended up with a little over a cup. It was the same amazing bright yellow color it had been in the chicken. Seems almost a shame to throw it out, but it is neither healthy nor part of my cultural heritage.

One cup of bright yellow schmaltz on top of some by-catch broth

So after all that, I was feeling pretty flustrated, as one of my coworkers in Mandan used to say. But when I tasted the broth, well, it was all so totally worth it. It was the best stock I have ever made. While the chicken was cooking, I had rehydrated dried chiles and put them in a blender with seasonings, garlic, and onion. I sautéed the paste in oil until it was thick and mixed it into the pozole, chicken, and stock. And then I read the part about “simmer another 25 minutes.” So much for supper at 6:00. At 6:30, three hours after I began, we sat down to eat. The chicken was not as tough as I feared it would be. And I was grateful to Ina, Ingrid, Giada, Bridget, or Nigella for her sacrifice. Whoever she was, she was delicious.

The finished red pozole

The homes we'll never own

Despite being on my summer break, I had a very busy week and have not had an opportunity to follow up on my birthday until just this minute. I was in a meeting most of the day Thursday. The most valuable thing about that was a free lunch. Thursday evening I was out celebrating the end of Leadership Greater McHenry County (LGMC) at our official graduation. On Friday the 13^th, Hilda and I gave Coop 1 a thorough cleaning in the morning, and I drove to Elgin to help Jane get her mom’s house just about ready to be listed with the realtor. At the end of the day, I went to a restaurant in Algonquin for an informal celebration of our LGMC graduation with my cohort. The first problem was that road construction has made it nearly impossible to get from Elgin to Algonquin. After two detours, I got to the restaurant and then spent 15 minutes looking for parking. I finally found a spot on the street and began the trek to the restaurant. Just as I was carefully stepping around some vomit on the sidewalk, a redwing blackbird swooped down on the back of my head and clawed my scalp. I am not making this up. I must have infringed on his territory. I was not injured but was certainly surprised.

Anyway, back to Wednesday. We got to Lake Geneva in plenty of time to pick up our tickets and get on the boat.

Fountain by the entry to the boat dock

 

Despite the cold, cloudy weather, we opted to sit upstairs in the open air. We were the only people up there for most of the cruise.

Boarding the boat

Group shot before we moved to the upper deck--Jane tried twice, but having everyone look at the camera all at once seemed beyond our ability

Terry looks out from the front of the upper deck

 

Our tour guide introduced himself as a college student between his junior and senior year at UW-Whitewater. He wanted us to believe—without any supporting evidence—that he was an interesting person. He encouraged us more than once to ask him anything about himself. He also intimated that he was available. The fact that nearly every woman on the cruise was old enough to be his grandmother made his flirtatious remarks more than a little creepy. His alleged attempts at humor centered on midnight trespassing forays on the grounds of the palatial estates we saw on the tour. So not funny. Twit. “The bar is open,” he said. “The more you drink the funnier my jokes are.” There’s not enough alcohol in the world.

We pulled away from the dock and started around the lake. Twit kept saying, “On your right, you can see…” Lake Geneva is a big lake. Moving in a counterclockwise direction, everything is going to be on the right. It seemed redundant to mention it.

In between the bad jokes, however, the twit gave us some genuine information about the homes we would never own. Property values ran at tens of thousands of dollars per linear foot of shoreline. Taxes are upwards of $100,000 per year. Think about that a minute. Yes, I’ll just sit right down and write a check for $100,000, put a stamp on the envelope, and send it to the assessor’s office. Most of these mansions are summer homes, by the way.

After we passed downtown Lake Geneva, we came to a bunch of homes on the sprawling Wrigley Estate complex. We heard the story of Wrigley’s fortune in chewing gum and how he built homes for various relatives and friends. I had thought that there was one Wrigley mansion and that it was on the other side of the lake.



One of the Wrigley homes (I think)

Lake Geneva was settled primarily by filthy rich business owners from Chicago. Most of the original mansions either burned down or were demolished to build more modern homes. Here are some examples of the homes we saw:

Seriously, just look a the size of these babies!

This house has a pond in front (that's water in the middle of the rock boarder) because the lake is just not enough.

Many homes had terraced gardens down to the water

 

We came to a strip of closely built and less ostentatious houses of the Elgin Club. This homes were built on land purchased by a group of businessmen from Elgin.

Houses of the Elgin Club

As we came into Williams Bay, we could see the Yerkes Observatory dome peeking out above the tree line. This observatory, operated by the University of Chicago, has the largest refractory telescope (40 inches) used for research. The telescope was demonstrated at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago before being moved to Lake Geneva to get away from the light pollution of the city. Many famous persons have visited the observatory, including Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, and Carl Sagan.

Yerkes Observatory

In the bay itself, several (presumably freezing) young persons were taking sailing lessons in three small boats accompanied by a larger mother ship.

Sailing lessons

There are still several camps along the shores of the lake. Most were established in the 1880’s to bring poor children from Chicago to have a wilderness experience.



Holiday Home Camp, established in 1887

Twit explained that all the docks around the lake have to be taken in for the winter. Having grown up on a lake, this was not news to me. I recall it vividly as a pain in the neck. On Lake Geneva, of course, the home owners have people for that. It is, in fact, a $6 million industry. Six million!

One of the boat in the pier service industry

Toward the end of the tour, we came on the mansion that I always thought belonged to Wrigley. It was really built by Otto Young, an entrepreneur who bought up the “worthless” land along State Street after the Chicago fire in 1871. Contrary to popular belief at the time, Chicago was rebuilt, and Young made a fortune. He spent a million dollars building the structure at the turn of the 20^th century. If I remember correctly, Young died just a few years later. His heirs kept it for a time. It was donated to the Episcopal Church for a short-lived school in 1939 and sold for back taxes in the 1980’s for $74,000. After several unsuccessful business ventures, it is now divided into 6 luxury condos worth well over a million each.

Youngsland, the mansion of Otto Young

As we pulled back into port, Hilda asked, “Do you think this is one of those tours where you are supposed to tip?”

“I’m not tipping him,” I said. He had just told us that the view from the pool of a house on the top of a hill was nice at 1:00 in the morning, but you have to watch out for their dogs. Trespassing was still not funny.

But others did tip. I exited among of group of grandmas and gathered from the conversation that Betty had given the guy a ten to split with the captain (another undergrad who had done part of the narration), and everyone in the group was supposed to give Betty one dollar to pay her back.

The tour was over at 3:00. Our dinner reservations were at 5:00. We drove 3 miles north of Lake Geneva to Northwind Perennial Farm. While the driveway from the road was easy to find, the parking lot was less so. Signs directed us down a gravel road for some distance to the entrance.

Northwind is a laid-back place. Gardens with interspersed sale tables spread among old barns and repurposed outhouses. Exactly where one paid for the plants was not obvious on the first pass. We looked through some value added items (objet d’artsy-fartsy, antiques, etc.) in a barn that smelled strongly of cat urine. One of the offending cats sprawled on a table outside. I puzzled over a “diamond” hoe hand-forged in Holland and attached to a very long and heavy pole. It was an elongated diamond shape about 2” wide where it attached to the pole, tapered to 3” long points on either side, and sharpened front and back, apparently so one could push it or pull it. Even if I had not deemed it too heavy for practical use, the $90 price tag would have put me off.

Entrance to Northwind Perennial garden--that's a red bird house at the top

Overall, though, it was a beautiful place. They had mayapples growing in a wooded area, but  none for sale. Jane bought some dill because she doesn’t have it coming up all over like I do. The purchase transactions were conducted in a small building to the side of the main path. It was the only new structure I saw. I was tempted by their vast selection of native plants but held off. I need to have a plan before I start buying.

Allium in bloom

Bleeding heart in front of an old outhouse

One of many gardens

Geraniums by an old barn



Former outhouse now displaying a cactus, a Mexican, a burro (only the back end is visible in the photo) and the Last Supper

In addition to cats and dogs, chickens roamed freely. I found the little black rooster fascinating. Such a scrawny little thing.



Free range chickens with tiny rooster on the left

We didn’t quite fill up all our time at the gardens. The Tuscan Bar and Grill was happy to seat us at 4:30, however. We were the only guests in the place at the time. We had a nice meal. Most of us chose soup over salad because we were still feeling chilled from the boat ride. We warmed up as we dined and sipped wine. I was sure to save room for dessert. My triple chocolate cake was delivered with a candle on top.

We were home early. Between the cold, the fresh air, and the wine, I was ready for bed at 7:30. I made myself stay up until 8:30 so I wouldn’t be wide awake at 3:00. It was a very fun birthday.

Chicks may safely graze

How fickle the heart is. In spite of my grief over the weekend, I find my chest swelling with joy and delight as I watch the antics of the new chicks. I mentioned in my last post that a few chicks were out of the coop by Saturday night.

Lizette and three Buff Orpingtons were among the first out of the coop

Monday most of them were out and about. They love to explore the vegetation. They alternate between being off on their own pecking at the grass, having little territorial tiffs that are quickly over, and spontaneously running like hell for no apparent reason. Lizette (the white one) seems quite partial to dill.

Lidia, who started out with very dark down, is now tan with black accents. Of our known hens, she and Lizette spend the most time outside. The Buff Orpingtons like to be outside more than the Welsummer.

Lidia

Nadia and Gracie like to hang out by the warmer. Perhaps they will spend more time outside when the weather gets more summer-like. Maybe their little heads get cold under their Mohawks.

Nadia and Gracie by the warmer (the underside of the platform is heated to simulate a mother hen)

Happy birthday to me! Last year I spent my birthday doing not fun things. Terry and I moved Coop 2 into position on the lawn, which was a long and exhausting process, and we moved the broilers and Jackie from the garage to the coop. I also put the drip irrigation on the garden. I mentioned recently how much I dislike that task. At the end of the day I promised myself that this birthday would be FUN.

I have already had a nice gift. It was raining when I got up. This not only provided much needed water for our garden but also got me off the hook for weeding before it was time for our Big Adventure of the day. I have spent a pleasant morning drinking tea and doing not much else.

Jane will be here at 11:00. After an early lunch of shrimp salad graciously provided by my mother, we will all go to Lake Geneva to take a boat tour. I have had this on my list of things to do for close to 30 years. Today is the day. The weather is cool and gray, but the rain has stopped here for the moment. Lake Geneva isn’t too far away, and I hope the rain has stopped there as well. In any case, the boat is not likely to be crowded, and the lower decks are completely enclosed in case it is wet.

After the cruise, we may go up to Northwind Perennial Farm. Jane has heard about it from several people. We have some time to kill before our 5:00 dinner reservations.

Stay tuned for more about my FUN day!