Cinderella's Farm Chores

The entire month of November has been spent in dress-up clothes for Miss Ivey.  Halloween opened her eyes to the sparkly dresses that were in her very own room.  Tinkerbell, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty... she has tromped around town in each one, much to the enjoyment of pretty much everyone who passes by.   She has even gone to her Play Pals class in costume on more than one occasion.  I told Miss Gina that there were two choices.... a happy Tinkerbell or an unhappy Ivey.  Happiness wins, of course.  I'll take Cinderella in galoshes, a huge smile, and a bounce to her walk any day.

Yesterday, Ivey was watching the intro to a Disney movie, where Tinkerbell flies up to the castle.  She said in her matter-of-fact way,  "That's me, Tinkerbell.  I was Tinkerbell first... when she was a bat."  Ahh, the three year old mind is a glorious thing!  The synapses of three year olds must fire in a completely unique way.  It's like the information must jump, skip, dance, and twirl across those little heads.  Ivey talks to herself a lot in the car.  I was listening in the other day and overheard her having a very serious conversation... with her toes.  "Hey!  We made a deal.  Now, zip it!"  I don't know what kind of deal the eleven of them made, but it sounded pretty serious.

The Sawmill

Since the purchase of our very own portable saw mill, Jeff and Randy have been hard at work cutting down trees and milling beams in Randy's backyard.  As a practice run in the post-and-beam technique, the two are constructing a simple trailer shed.

With the help of Asa, they have managed to get all of the beams cut and are now doing the joinery work.  It's a slow go, but this is the trial run for what will eventually be the process that builds my new home.

Part of me is really nervous about biting off such a major adventure as milling our own lumber and building our own post and beam home.  But, there's also something very exciting with the idea of being able to design, plan, and build an entire home from scratch.  Our ideas.  Our decisions.  Our wood.  Our plan.  As two highly independent individuals, I can see this fitting our personalities quite nicely.

I expect that in the Spring, once we have finished helping my parents on the renovation of my childhood home, our adventure in house making will really kick off.  We are just months away from ending phase 1, gaining a space of our own to call home for a few years, and entering phase 2 of our wacky plan!

Hay Day!

We had some seriously crummy luck with chickens this year.  Let's see... we bought some young pullets that ended up having MG (Mycoplasma gallisepticum), were stupid and didn't quarentine new recruits so we exposed most of our flock (so we had to cull them), had a fox or other critter get some, had horrible luck with hatching eggs, and ended up with no birds at all.  How depressing.

After a break from even trying to hatch again (I ran into some really bad luck on my hatches.  Humidity, maybe?), I'm giving it another shot.  The kids and I drove out to Garry Farm to pick up two dozen blue/black/splash maran eggs and a dozen lavender orpingtons ones.  We will be using these as a Life Cycle project for our class.  Hopefully, we will be able to candle them and track their development.  I put them into the incubator tonight, so technically there is a good chance some will begin hatching on a Thursday, November 3rd.  Back when my hatches were successful, we had a few that would start hatching on day 20.  The kids would love to watch as they hatch out!

 The farm visit was a good one.  It is always so nice to go to a working farm and be reminded... it's never the rolling fields and the red painted barn and matching silo.  It's real.  It's messy.  It's pieced together with what you have... and that is just fine.

As we begin working on our property and laying out what we would like to raise here, grow there, and where to put this pavilion or our home, I need to keep in mind that a farm can take on many shapes.  It can fill many different needs.  Martha Stewart does not have to design my layout.  She sure hasn't designed the vast majority of the farm scenes I have visited.  Why?  Because they are bustling and growing and changing and adapting and surviving.  And that, my friends, is a good thing.

Rebuilding the Flock: Take 6

We had some seriously crummy luck with chickens this year.  Let's see... we bought some young pullets that ended up having MG (Mycoplasma gallisepticum), were stupid and didn't quarentine new recruits so we exposed most of our flock (so we had to cull them), had a fox or other critter get some, had horrible luck with hatching eggs, and ended up with no birds at all.  How depressing. 

After a break from even trying to hatch again (I ran into some really bad luck on my hatches.  Humidity, maybe?), I'm giving it another shot.  The kids and I drove out to Garry Farm to pick up two dozen blue/black/splash maran eggs and a dozen lavender orpingtons ones.  We will be using these as a Life Cycle project for our class.  Hopefully, we will be able to candle them and track their development.  I put them into the incubator tonight, so technically there is a good chance some will begin hatching on a Thursday, November 3rd.  Back when my hatches were successful, we had a few that would start hatching on day 20.  The kids would love to watch as they hatch out!

 The farm visit was a good one.  It is always so nice to go to a working farm and be reminded... it's never the rolling fields and the red painted barn and matching silo.  It's real.  It's messy.  It's pieced together with what you have... and that is just fine. 

As we begin working on our property and laying out what we would like to raise here, grow there, and where to put this pavilion or our home, I need to keep in mind that a farm can take on many shapes.  It can fill many different needs.  Martha Stewart does not have to design my layout.  She sure hasn't designed the vast majority of the farm scenes I have visited.  Why?  Because they are bustling and growing and changing and adapting and surviving.  And that, my friends, is a good thing.

Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.

Although weekends are spent working here at the old house, trying to get it renovated for us to move into, weekday nights, and some weekend days when Roland cannot work, Jeff takes a boy or two over to our land to work... and fish. Addison is pretty much bored when he goes... spending time sitting around, reading his book.  Asa, on the other hand, takes his fishing pole, his minnow trap, and bucket... spending hours at the neighbor's pond.  

The shack that once stood as a major eye-sore at the front of the property is now gone. Well, it's not exactly "gone". Jeff took it apart, piece by piece, with nothing but a crowbar and a hammer. Seriously. No electricity.  No Saws.  Each and every piece is either stacked in piles to reuse or burned. The shack will be completely repurposed into a cabinish structure further back on the 25 acres. 

By removing the shack, Jeff has given me the ability to get a visual on how this whole thing will go down. Okay, so not the whole thing, but the driveway. The drive will be cut right through where the old house stood, across the creek and then run down the side property line. As someone who has an inability to grasp spatial relations, this visual was a must. Not only do I now see the driveway more clearly, but I see where this shack will be resurrected. I see the drives that will most likely cut across the property.... and I almost, ALMOST, can see where the house might be. 

The house is so distant a concept for me right now that I still cannot begin to grasp it. Of course, in typical Jeff/Holly fashion, we are not looking at this as much as a "dream house" idea.... It's more of a dream lifestyle idea. The goal is to work as hard as we can to have as much as we can, without going into any more debt. The goal to be mortgage-free, to live a life that will be a true example to our kids. Living simply. Working hard. Trusting God. Taking the road less traveled.  Jeff is most likely going to get a "portable" lumber mill, so that we can utilize the trees on our property for the lumber in our home.  You never know... we've done crazier things before.

While working in the yard with the animals recently, Asa asked me, "When will we have our farm and all of our animals?" I told him that you cannot just wish on a star for a dream. Dreams take a long time. They are hard work. Sometimes, you have to change them around a little to get them right. Now, I have to remind myself of this advice. Patience, grasshopper.

Homemade Rooster. From Scratch.

Some days start out with a plan, and those days at least resemble the idea that you had in your mind when you began them.  Some, the plans just fall through or get rearranged.  That leaves a small amount that fall in the last category.  Those days where you begin them as all other days, you have a plan and a general idea of your goings on, and then, all of the sudden, your day has been plucked up and plopped down in the middle of a crazed t.v. show, or an impossible cartoon, or outer space, or you just find yourself somehow, through a series of haphazard events, in a situation that you could have never imagined when you were brushing your teeth that morning.  Today, was one of the latter.

A few days ago, we bought 10 more hens and a rooster.  We needed a rooster to keep our ratio up.  Well, the Rhode Island Red that came to live with us was... borderline evil.  He never attacked us, but he was already pretty beaten up when he came here.  When introduced to another (larger) rooster, this guy went completely out of his mind- hungry for blood.  We;ve had roosters fight.  It's normal.  They fight, assume dominance, and then find a way to get along.  Not with Mr.  Rhode Island Red.  On more than one occasion I had to go save our other rooster from being innahilated.  Poor Andre would have his head shoved into a corner while Mr. Red was on his back, pecking and gnawling to blood.  I have no doubt in my mind that this rooster would kill any other roosters in his path.  We put him in a cage and fed him daily.  Not an ideal situation at all.

The other day, I was outside feeding this guy and complaining about his inability to get along with others when Asa looked up and said, "Well, let's eat 'em!"  I laughed.  But, Asa was serious.  He and Addison both agreed that something had to be done with this rooster.  I suggested letting him out of the fence so he could wander around and fend for himself.  Addison decided there were three options, kill him and eat him, kill him and sell him for someone else to eat, or just sell him.  Asa only had one option.  Dinner.

The rooster had gotten out of his cage and was terrorizing the chicken yard.  While Olive napped, the three of us ran around, sprinted around, the yard trying to catch him.  We tried to corner him, we tried to pounce on him, we tried to run him back into his cage.  At one point, the boys each had big limbs out of the burn pile and were waving them around on each side of themselves to try to help corral the ridiculous bird.  Finally, we got him into the cage.  Just in time to get Ivey from preschool.

I had talked to the boys a lot about how home raised meats are so much healthier for you than the bagged stuff you buy at the grocery store.  They know all of this.  On this day, they were trying to get me to take it to the next level.  As we left the house to pick up Ivey from preschool, I thought about the idea of doing this task.  I didn't know if I could, but I did know that it would be a great lesson in self-sustainability and in the importance of knowing where your food comes from.  Still, I didn't know if I could actually do it.

After we returned home and got Ivey down for a nap, we put Olive in her outdoor play yard and the three of us tried to make a decision.  I kept saying, "Boys, do you think we can do this?".  I said it so many times that Asa grew exasperated with me.  "Why do you keep saying that???  We can do it!!"  The decision was made.  We were going to actually kill this rooster, pluck it, gut it, and put it in a pot.  "Can we really do this?"

I found a traffic cone in the barn, widened the tip of it, and hung it in a tree.  I started a huge pot of boiling water on the outdoor gas range.  I took some rope, and the boys and I went to retrieve the villan.  Again, he bolted out of the cage.  We sprinted and dodged.  We ran and yelled and waved our arms.  We squatted.  We bolted.  At one point, I yelled to Addison, "This is P.E.!".  He yelled back, "This is FUN!".  Finally he was caught.  I think the racing around actually helped set the stage for the task at hand.  By the time we caught him, again, we were ready to kill him.  I just had to convince Addison that we couldn't "stone him to death" or shoot him.

I held the rooster by his feet.  As he hung upside down, he completely gave up any attempt to move.  The boys asked me how I had killed him already.  He did seem dead.  We decided that he knew that he was destined for the pot.  He is a chicken, afterall.  And, not a good one at that.  He never made a noise, never wiggled, he just knew he needed to be soup.  Before we got to any business, we thanked God for giving us the rooster to eat.  I think this was an important thing to do... It felt right.  Plus, I saw it in movies.

We placed the rooster into the upside down traffic cone until his head popped out the end.  Of course, I am an amateur at this killing cone business.  I had to widen the hole twice.  Finally, the head came out the end.  The boys and I had watched a YouTube clip of a man use this killing cone technique and chop off the chicken's head quite easily with hedge clippers.  I had hedge clippers, and an upside down rooster in a traffic cone... this should work!  With the boys standing behind me chanting things like "We eat chicken nuggets every day!" and "Just do it!", I finally snapped the clippers as hard as I could.  But, not hard enough.

It seems my ill prepared rooster killing left me with some fairly dull instruments of destruction.  I had to try again, and again, and again.  The rooster was most definitely dead (complete with the flopping around that you hear about, but in the cone, you don't see any of it except the neck/head), but the head was most definitely still attached.  After I realized that this approach was not working,  Asa found an axe (again, not the sharpest tool in the shed, I'm sure) and I laid the entire cone down, with the neck resting on a wooden block.  It took quite a few hacks (my aim is atrocious by the way), but the head did finally come off.  Any farmer who would have been unlucky enough to see this would have laughed his overalls off.  It was like if Lucille Ball tried to make a horror movie.

We disposed of the head, scalded the rooster, and I let the boys pluck the feathers.  Well, they both started out plucking feathers, but Addison ended up preferring Ivey and Olive duty.  I took over.  One this I noticed was that they came off way easier than you'd think.  The wings seemed like a huge waste of time and effort.  Lots of big feathers... very little meat.  So, I opted for chopping them off.  (Again, people who do this for real obviously have great knives and such!)  Towards the end, I realized that it would be very easy to just skin the thing.  So, I did.  Feet... removed.  Neck... removed.  Vent... Widened.  Innards... removed.  Asa tried to pick out the various organs and they were laid out on the freezer paper lining.  He hosed the bird off, remarking at how it now just looked like the ones at Publix.  We were done.

I cooked up the rooster in a pot with celery and onions, with the goal being to make soup.  However, we were so completely exhausted from the day of chicken chasing aerobics, adrenaline, running around looking for tools, and tending to little ones on the swingset, that it was now 7:30 and we were too tired to finish.  We went out for BBQ, and it was wonderful.

The outcome was not nearly as exciting as we had hoped.  My chopping and hacking job had left us with a 2 year old rooster, who likes to fight, who was not properly bled out.  I was terribly disappointed, but he wasn't really edible.  The good news is that Asa and Addison were very understanding when we explained that we had to have a "practice chicken"... and that a two year old rooster who likes to fight is the perfect practice bird.  Although we did not eat him for dinner, we learned some valuable lessons that will help us as we continue to homestead.... and help us as we are conscious of the connections that we have with our food.

And, the chicken yard is a quieter and more peaceful place...

The Timmies

A few weeks ago, a very nice woman saw my post on Craigslist looking for a white leghorn rooster.  She had a young one, and I met her to pick him up.  The white leghorns are smaller than our others, and very sweet and tame.  Addison named this little guy "Timmy".  Well, although Timmy seemed happy as can be, he must have been bullied by the others.  On the first night, he "flew the coop" and we never saw him again.  The next day, the kids spent hours out looking for Timmy.  I half thought we would find him hiding in the barn... but, no such luck.

I called the woman that gave us Timmy, and she did have two more.  I told her we would take both of them.  So, after a chicken deal in the parking lot of Haverties, we took the new little guys home.  This time, we kept them caged for a while.  Addison began referring to them as... "The Timmies".  So, now we have to "put up the Timmies" and make sure to feed "The Timmies".  They are super sweet and friendly.  I know we won't need two leghorn roosters, but for now, the kids are enjoying playing with the friendliest chickens in the yard.

First Hatch!

Much to the delight of my anxious kids, our chicks hatched last week!  Out of an initial 22 eggs, 19 hatched.  One of the chicks died after "zipping" (where they peck a long series of holes in the shell).  I'm not sure what happened to him, but he must have gotten stuck.  So, we ended up with 18 chicks!  That's a great success!  Within 24 hours, we had chosen 5 to keep and sold the other 13.  Now, we just sit back and wait to do it all over again in about two weeks!

It's been pretty exciting around her lately... I mean, even more so than usual.  The weather is finally beautiful, the kids can romp around outside, Asa has taken an interest in BMX and now has his very own bike to take to the track as soon as we get him a helmet, and the first clutch of eggs are starting to break through their shells!

When we reached 6 dozen eggs in the fridge, I knew I had to kick things into gear and start selling some eggs.  Last week, I sold 9 dozen.  This week, I decided that we need to sign up weekly deliveries, in order to help me calculate how many I have to sell.  So, starting next week I have four dozen claimed per week.  I have slots for 2 more dozen.  Eggs are collected, cleaned, put into cartons, and taken to the church when I pick Ivey up from school.  So far, so good!  In all the craziness, I even loaded Asa, Ivey, and Olive into the van and headed on a Craigslist run, bringing home 6 more laying hens to help meet the demand.  Now, we are getting a minimum of 12 per day.  Not too shabby.

Indoors, Jeff helped me make a homemade incubator out of a styrfoam cooler, a $10 water heater thermostat, an old computer fan, and ceramic light fixture with a 25watt bulb.  Add some hardware cloth and a thermometer/hydrometer and you're done... or done-ish.  You do have to sit and fiddle with the thermostat, light bulb combo for a good long while before you learn to make it work together.  What you have to realize is that the hot water heater thermostat is made to have a 6 degree swing.  It won't turn off or back on until the temp has changed by 6 degrees.  Well, that doesn't work in egg hatching.  So, after some trials and a bunch of brain power, I placed the thermostat directly above the light bulb... so that it is touching it.  Then, I positioned the fan to blow directly on to the bulb... which does circulate the air throughout the cooler, but also works to quickly cool that hot light bulb down.  The end result was that the light bulb comes on, heats the air in the box to a good temp, but the hot bulb is actually hotter than the air in the box.  So, the therostat registers that it is at the upper end and shuts off.  Then, that hot bulb cools off quickly from the fan, so although the rest of the boys if fluxing between 99.4 and 100.6, the light bulb has a much wider swing.  The thermostat was effectivly tricked, and we have a toasty incubator for $24.

We aren't using this one as a full blown incubator right now, it does not have an automatic egg turner. But during the last 3 days of the setting, the eggs are in "lock down".  They aren't turned at all, and they need a slightly higher humidity than before.  So, my homemade bator is now our hatching bator.  I just move over the eggs that are ready to go into lock down, clearing up the other bator for another set of eggs.  One day, I will most likely build a homemade bator that is big enough to hold a $30-$40  turner.  For now, I have my hands full.  We still have a brooder to make (I think I've figured this out... we'll see...) and we have to get our heads around who we sell and who we keep.  This sounds like work, but this is the fun stuff!

Jeff did make me a fabulous mobile chicken coop.  My "chick mobile" has roosts and a good door to hold them in at night.  Nesting boxes that open from the outside so no one has to actually go inside the thing unless you are the one laying the egg.  I need to paint it, but it already looks great to me!  As of now, we have 3 buff orpingtons, 2 barred rocks, 3 white leghorns, 4 Rhode Island Reds,  and 9 red stars.  We also have a lone Aracauna rooster and a Buff Orpington rooster.  In the next few weeks, I will be trying to get a setting together of straight buff orpingtons and straight white leghorns (assuming my white leghorn delivery comes through!).  Yes, I'm addicted.  It's just so fun!

Day 18 was on Friday, and I moved each egg from one incubator to our homemade hatching box.  The temp is still looking very steady, and tonight, we already have 5 little chick-a-dees cracking through!  It's so weird to hear peeping coming from inside an egg.  Everyone is totally excited to see what strides are made over night. 

In other non-chicken related news...

Asa is interested in BMX, so we found him a bike today!  It needs new tires and tubes, but it's in pretty good shape!  Hopefully, I can get him out there to practice this week... assuming I can get him a helmet... hmm... I need an assistant!

 Olive is walking a lot more now.  It's still not her primary mode of transportation, but she is trying to on her own more and more.  Whenever Ivey comes near her, Olive goes ahead and drops to her knees.  The poor girl knows she's about to get knocked over.  Those two are going to be quite the pair.  I see daily boxing matching in my future.

Egg Candling

Jeff is finishing up my new chicken coop, and I will post pictures soon!  I absolutely love it, and I love the 14 new hens that we have pecking around the yard!  On my birthday, I decided that the weather was just too fabulous to do our school work indoors.  So, we headed for the yard, with all of our books and a white board.  We did spelling lessons with sidewalk chalk, read out loud to each other in the grass, and enjoyed the preview of Spring!

We now have one barred rock, some buff orpingtons, white leghorns, and red stars.  We have one Americauna rooster and I just brought home a buff orpington rooster in hopes that we can make some little buff orpington chicks in the next hatch!  When the new rooster came here, our Americauna rooster kicked his little butt all across the yard.  It was an honest to goodness cock fight.  In the end, the new guy ran into the woods.  We couldn't find him that night and we were sure he was a goner.  The next day, we looked to no avail.  We went to run our errands and when we were driving home, we saw him!  He was pecking around the church next door.  I let the boys out and they corralled him back home.  After a night or two in a separate pen, the two roosters now live together pretty well!

Today was my first attempt at egg candling.  We are 4 days into our incubation, and I believe I can see the tell tale blood vessels in a few of the eggs.  Most of our eggs are brown, so I am having a hard time seeing through the shell.  We do have a light egg that I could actually see the little dark spot which is the developing embryo!  I'm not sure how many of these eggs are actually gestating, but I do know that at least one or two are!

Asa is completely excited about our first hatch, and he counts down to March 21st each day!  I'm hoping that my candling abilities will improve, and I hope that I can find a way to see more clearly through these brown shells!

Busy Beavers

Back Property Line

Yesterday, I was able to go out to the property and tromp back in the woods without a kid strapped to my back.  Jeff and the boys had ventured to the back corner and found where beavers had been hard at work on various dams at the mouth of the pond.  The mouth of the pond, and a small corner of it, is on our property.  It seems the boys traded the "beaver dam" at our last house for many real ones!

This new area that we found is absolutely beautiful!  I don't know if we would be able to cut a drive all the way back there, but it would be awesome.  I definitely want to keep these beautiful creeks free of large farm animals, so the kids can explore and play!

I also was able to check out all the work that my three boys have been up to lately. Sure enough, the kitchen is completely gone.  Jeff had stacks of wood that we will use to build a barn further back in the woods.  Getting rid of that house, building a barn, and cutting a driveway over the creek(s) are all things we can try to get done while we are in a holding period to build.  Jeff found culvert on Craigslist, so we have something like 47 feet of huge pipe just waiting to be used.

Newspaper Insulation - June 13, 1959