Penny's Obituary

 

Penny. If I'd known she was going to die, I would
have made a point of getting a better picture.

It is with great sadness that I have to report that I found Penny dead on the floor of the coop Friday morning. It was a shock. She seemed fine Thursday. That’s how chickens are. Sometimes they just drop over for no apparent reason. Birds in general are wussy that way. I have read that the first symptom you may see that a bird is sick is that it dies.

Penny would have laid blue eggs. Now we have 5 brown-egg layers and only 3 blue-egg layers. I may have to get over arranging the cartons I give away with alternating colors.

Penny was one of the pullets, just five and a half months old. She was so beautiful! Their feathers are lovely when they are young. Why couldn’t it have been ratty old Goldie? Perhaps Penny had trouble laying an egg. Eggs can get stuck, or break inside, or the oviduct can get twisted. Perhaps she ate something that she shouldn’t have, although I can’t imagine how that could have happened. The other chickens seem unaffected, so I am optimistically assuming that it wasn’t something contagious.

We do not suspect fowl play.

Gulls and honey

 It’s a dreary, drizzly day in Northern Illinois. I’ve been working on some exciting inside tasks, such as paying bills. I had a technological breakthrough when I figured out how to print photos on my new printer. Other than that, it’s been a low-key day, a good day to sit at my desk and drink tea. To that end, I made tea with perennial Roman chamomile. I planted both annual and perennial chamomile last year. The perennial did not bloom at the first summer. It has time. The annual chamomile’s flowers made a sweet, hay-like tea, which I enjoy. It reminds me of late summer, which is nice in the winter. The perennial tea, however, is truly vile. It tastes like turpentine on the front and becomes quite bitter on the back. Perhaps it has hidden health qualities. Isn’t that what they say about stuff that tastes nasty?

For years, I have wanted to get a picture of gulls during plowing. I have often seen them as I’ve been driving, and even if I could find a place to pull over, I wouldn’t have my good camera with me. I am trying to break myself of the habit of calling these birds “seagulls”. Serious birders are quick to tell you there’s no such thing. No, these are herring gulls, very far indeed from any herring that’s not salted or pickled. According to Sibley, we are in their winter range. And they are here by the hundreds.

Finally, the farmer across the road plowed when I was home to watch. The gulls are such a hoot! They must be after worms or grubs. They line the newly-plowed rows, flying up as the tractor approaches and landing behind as it moves forward. It’s quite a spectacle.

Gulls fly up in front of the tractor and down behind it

The farmer’s behavior mystifies me. Plowing puts the field at risk for topsoil erosion from rain or wind. I suppose once upon a time, farmers could count on the ground freezing solid and being covered by snow from November to spring. Not anymore. In addition, I often see farmers, like this one, spreading pelleted fertilizer or, worse, anhydrous ammonia in the fall. Anhydrous ammonia is highly leachable. Peg says that if the soil has a lot of clay it might hold onto some of it until spring, but still—seems like a colossal waste of money, not to mention a source of nitrogen runoff to the waterways. I expect the farmer thinks he’ll be that much further ahead come spring.

Terry and I have moved the beehive to its winter location, where it will hopefully stay cold enough to keep the bees balled up in their energy-saving configuration in the hive. We snuck out one of the frames to harvest a tiny bit of honey. I took a bee class two years ago, and from what I learned there, we are doing everything wrong. We should have harvested the honey in August and fed the bees in September so they could replace it. Instead, we pulled a frame last week and haven’t fed them at all. Terry and I are like Edison and Tesla. Tesla was all for book-learning, and Edison preferred to fly by the seat of his pants. Yet Terry does have some bee experience, having worked briefly as a bee inspector in North Dakota many years ago. So, Edison-like, we just keep trying things to see if they work. If the hive lives through the winter, that will be good. If not, we buy more bees (which is not a trivial expense).

Anyway, here’s the frame as it came into the house.

A frame partially full of honey

I used a chef knife to cut off the top of the cells and flipped it over onto a half-sheet pan. First I tried Terry’s method of heating it in the oven. It’s tricky, though, because it has to be warm enough to get the honey flowing, but not so hot that the wax melts. Terry suggested 100°F. My oven cannot be set lower than 170°. I turned the oven on and off, but had little success and drawing out any honey. Finally, I put foil on top of a heating pad and plopped the frame down on that.

The fuller side is flipped down on top of the foil on top of a heating pad

A significant issue was that the heating pad turned itself off every 40 minutes. I heated it up off and on most of the day, turning it on again when I remembered. Periodically, I scraped the honey into a strainer to remove the wax bits.

Filtering the honey

The waxy bits that got caught in the strainer

In summary, it was all a giant sticky mess that yielded a bit less than six ounces of honey. Plus this morning, I cut myself cleaning the wax off my chef knife. I think I’ll file for worker’s comp. It is exceptionally excellent honey, however. I look forward to having enough to rent a centrifuge and spin it out. Perhaps next year.

Not quite 6 precious ounces of honey

Happy Halloween!

Terry has been keeping the hens well supplied with pumpkins. He takes of the outermost layer and lets them carve out the rest.

Pumpkins in the chicken run a few days ago

We had a bit of snow overnight. The long pumpkin looked like this today. The trouble with the chickens is they don’t stay in the lines. The smallest of the pumpkins in the previous picture was mostly eaten up by this morning.

One of the pumpkins this morning

The chickens were not keen on going out in the snow. This is the first snow our pullets have seen. There were no chickens out when I ventured forth to do the chores. They were in the coop looking skeptically outside.

I'm not going out there. Are you?

They were curious about me, however, and came out to see if I had treats. I didn’t just then, but obliged them after getting my pictures.

What is this white stuff? It's cold on my feet!

In other news, shortly after Banjo mastered jumping to the top of the bookshelf, Bingo took on the balance beam. We hope he does not accidentally go off the wrong side and end up falling down the stairs. Silly cat.

A cat was on the bannister, and Bingo was his name-o

I am celebrating today. I could not care less about Halloween, but today I put away the canner until next summer. Here is a picture of everything I canned over the summer.

Left to right, top to bottom: grape juice, apple juice, applesauce, pickles, butternut squash (not canned), pickled beets, tomatoes, sauerkraut, tomato sauce.

I made seven batches of jam last week from pulp that I froze over the summer. This is the whole collection, including some red raspberry jam that I made fresh and two batches of apple butter that I’ve done since Terry picked the apples.

Top: red raspberry jam. Bottom, left to right, black raspberry jam, strawberry jam, apple butter

I still have 6 or 8 pounds of apples to do something with. Maybe applesauce, but I will freeze it. The one last task I have to do outside is planting the garlic. We are hoping it will warm up by the weekend so I can get that in the ground. It doesn’t take long, but the soil has to be dry enough that I don’t sink in and not (obviously) frozen.

Sign of the Times

 It has come to this. Sure-Jell has stopped including directions inside the box. At first I thought they gave no warning, but I realized that instead of “Quick & Easy Recipes Inside,” the box now says, “Quick & Easy Recipes Online.” While I applaud the manufacturers for saving paper and keeping costs down, I have some serious cognitive dissonance about this. Looking up instructions online is the antithesis of making your own jam. Jam making is a symbol of old-fashioned self-reliance, food security, resilience against the collapse of civilization. Women have done it for centuries to save fruit for the winter. These days, the assumption is that only little old ladies make jam. Young people don’t know how. Is it fair to think that little old ladies on fixed incomes have internet access? (I realize with chagrin that in 1950, someone my age (64) would be a little old lady.) Bottom line: if you decide to go off the grid, be sure to download the Sure-Jell recipes before you disconnect your internet. Alternatively, you could extract your own pectin from apples or citrus fruit. How do I know that? I Googled it.

Old Sure-Jell, top; new Sure-Jell, bottom

There are three other differences on the box: 1) the top banner is powder blue instead of red; 2) “for Homemade Jams & Jellies” has switched from the right to the left, and 3) the date of origin of Sure-Jell has been pushed back 7 years, from 1934 to 1927. Not sure how that last one happened.

If you are old like me, you might remember when the Peanuts comic strip featured Snoopy pretending to be a vulture. This week Banjo learned how to jump to the top of the bookshelf from my desk. Here he is in vulture pose.

Banjo, the bookshelf vulture

Bingo is coping with the chillier temperatures by crawling under Terry’s blanket.

Bingo's cozy spot

Sometimes they curl up in parallel. So cute!

Matching kitty croisants

Egg production continues to increase. This is a photo of the first time we got six eggs in one day. The pullet eggs are on the right. We still have not gotten more than one brown pullet egg on the same day, but I think they must all be laying by now.

Our first six-egg day with the new pullets. 3 Pullet eggs, right; three hen eggs, left

The giant primrose by the compost bin is living in its head. We had a couple of warm days last week, and it decided that winter is not coming after all! It is blooming its heart out.

Evening primrose living in its head--winter is so NOT coming!

On Sunday, October 22, a doe appeared at the far end of the field. Deer seem to have excellent eyesight. It happens more often than chance that they lift their head and stair as soon as I move to the window with my camera. 

Doe in the morning sun, staring at me.

We stared at each other for some time, then she went back to eating. 

Back to business

I was glad to have a nice nature moment to cheer me up on my mother’s birthday. She would have been 93.

Paperwork

 With the garden nearly wrapped up for the year, I have been spending a lot of time in the study, working through the stack of papers on my desk. I’m doing a little workshop on making and canning applesauce tomorrow, and I need to get a handout ready. Banjo wanted to help, so here he is lying on top of my Blue Book Guide to Home Canning. Thanks, Buddy.

Banjo helping in the study

Because I’m not doing physical work in the garden, I am trying to fit some exercise into my schedule. It is always easier to get out of shape than back in. I have resumed walking. We got 3.5” of rain over two days recently. Sadly, it was not enough to get us out of drought, but it was something. I could tell from the creek that a) reed canary grass had started to invade the former creek bed when it was dry all summer and b) the heavy rain had briefly restored the flow to the full width of the bed, but it had receded again.

The creek showing signs of both drought and flood

The goldenrods and New England asters, the last flowers to bloom, have all gone to seed now. If I put my ear up to the beehive, I can hear them buzzing, but there is little activity outside the hive. We will be moving it to its winter location soon.

Goldenrod seed heads, right, join purple coneflower and beebalm seed head formed earlier

At least one Ameraucana pullet other than Silvia is laying. On October 14, we had two blue pullet eggs. I have not seen Penny or Spot in a nest box, though.

Two blue pullet eggs, left--don't know if the second one is from Penny or Spot

At least one of the Golden Wyandottes is also laying. I don’t think we’ve had two brown pullet eggs in the same day yet.

The first brown pullet egg, top right

The girls have still not completely caught on to the nest boxes. We put fake eggs in there to tap into their instinct to lay where other eggs are, yet mistakes continue. Even one of the Silver Wyandotte hens lays on the floor now and then. Eggs on the floor get dirtier and are more likely to get broken from pecking and/or kicking than eggs in the nest boxes. Every time I rejoice that both brown hen eggs are in nest boxes, one of the pullets lays on the floor, and vice versa. I have explained the protocol several times to no avail. I don’t know who’s doing it, so I have to lecture everyone. If I could catch them in the act, I could move them to the nest boxes, but experience suggests they would just hop out, run from the coop, and come back to lay after I went into the house. Silly chickens.

First frost

 We had our first frost yesterday. It was 28°F when I got up. Ice crystals covered every blade of grass and the roofs, as can be seen in this picture of the coop.

Frost on the coop roof

The pullets had never seen frost before, but it didn’t seemto bother them. They were soon running around as usual.

Pullets with cold feed

And still Silvia is the only pullet laying. She’s a champion, though, giving us an egg every day or two. Today it seems like the others will never lay. I can tell when they are getting ready because they don’t dart away from me, but everyone but Silvia is as skittish as ever. Nothing to do but keep feeding them and hoping.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that only the Divino Brussels sprouts were developing. I harvested those three stalks. The jury is still out on the Long Island variety. As long as it doesn’t get into the low twenties for an extended period, they should continue to grow. Maybe we’ll have some eventually.

Meanwhile, I decided to make chicken stuffed with Brussels sprouts and salami. It’s based on a recipe from Marian Morash’s The Victory Garden Cookbook. It didn’t take me long to remember why I don’t make it very often. It’s a pain in the kiester. First, I have to clean all the Brussels sprouts and blanch them. Then I have to debone the chicken. Morash does one Cornish game hen for each person, which I have always done in the past. Now that we raise chickens, I am certainly not going to buy Cornish hens. Instead, I picked the smallest chicken in the freezer and boned that.

Morash suggests that once you get the hang of boning, you will never prepare small birds any other way. Good for her, I say. I’m never going to do it that often. Following her instructions, I slit the skin along the backbone and started cutting the muscle from the bones of the spine, ribs, and hips. I can cut up a whole chicken from the outside in five minutes, no problem. Finding the joints from the inside is an entirely different thing. I had to scrape all the meat and tendons from around the joint before I could see where the bones connected. God.

I had to make a few substitutions because I decided to do this on Sunday after I’d already done my shopping for the week. When you live in the country, you don’t just run to the grocery every time you’re missing something. I used cream cheese instead of ricotta, a blend of mozzarella and provolone for provolone, and summer sausage for salami. I stirred that with a pullet egg, since I was making half a recipe, and added the Brussels sprouts. I think I like the cream cheese better.

I stuffed it all into the boneless cavity of the chicken and—when was the last time I saw my trussing needle? A search of both kitchens ensued, to no avail. But wait! I can skewer it. I found my bamboo skewers and went at it.

Into the oven it went, and out it came looking like this.

Boned chicken stuffed with Brussels sprouts and summer sausage

The effort of boning paid off when I could neatly cut it in half to make two portions. Also, it was enough for two meals, cutting the prep time down to 45 min/meal.

Cut into portions and ready to serve

It tastes so good! That’s why I will make it again, but only once a year.

Pullet egg!

 We have been getting a little rain here and there. It’s enough that the chicken run isn’t bone dry. I have no desire to repeat last year’s leg mite fiasco, so I deployed the dust-bath-in-a-tub. At first, the chickens merely gathered around to peck out gravel for their gizzards. Eventually, Silvia hopped in to investigate. One of the Wyandottes hovered nearby, wondering what Silvia was up to.

Investingating the dust bath

It took a few minutes, but Silvia geared up for a vigorous bath. She began by ruffling here feathers.

Preliminary feather ruffling

Then she started kicking up the dust.

Kicking up dust

She really got into it, rolling around as the sand and diatomaceous earth flew.

Dust flies over her back

I’ve seen Goldie bathing as well. Other than that, most of the chickens prefer the dug-out spot underneath one of the shade shelters. As winter progresses, I expect that more will make use of the sand. We’ll see.

It was an exciting day yesterday. I’d seen Silvia displaying the beginnings of the “come hither” squat for a couple of days. Yesterday morning, she was firmly ensconced in a nest box when I went out to do the chores.

Silvia in a nest box

A few hours later, there was a cute blue pullet egg in the tray. I show it here next to Goldie’s full-sized egg.

Goldie's egg, left; Silvia's first egg, right

Silvia doesn’t have the color down just yet. The ends of the egg are splotched with bits of white showing through the blue overlay.

Uneven color deposition on the end of the egg (plus a tiny streak of blood--ouch)

Here is a picture of her egg in the egg carton. So cute!

Silvia's egg, top row, left, with hen's eggs

Silvia is the only pullet that is showing any interest in growing up. They should all be the same age, and we have two other Ameraucana pullets. Nothing to do by wait. They will start laying in their own time. By now, we are certain that we have no roosters.

It was supposed to get cold last night. We are generally colder than the forecasted temperature, so I hastened to harvest the last peppers. I hadn’t picked many bell peppers because I was hoping (in vain) that they would turn red. I had no more time to wait. Most of the peppers were small, even though they were all labeled “California Wonder” when I bought them at Farm and Fleet. You may recall that the rabbits bit off every last one of my carefully nurtured babies, and I had to replant. The plant on the north end outdid itself, producing four giant, thick-walled peppers. I put one of the ordinary peppers in front for size comparison.

Back row--four huge California Wonders from one plant.
Front row--puny pepper for comparison.

I cleaned out the high tunnel last week. I had planted some Daikon radish in early summer and forgot about them as they grew, flowered, and set seed. When I dug them up, many were carrot-sized (right in the picture), but two were enormous. Of those, one had split and rotted. So sad. I’m not sure what I will do with the other one. I saw a recipe for pickling Daikon in Hobby Farms, and I may try that.

Monstrous Daikon radish next to puny ones

The frantic rush of tomato canning is over. I’m taking next week off because I am so sick of washing jars and standing in steam. I need a rest. After that, the apples.