Wordless Wednesday #16

Come out, come out...

Night-time chicken wrangling, baby showers and other doins'

The temperatures have dropped off here this week. We had one day that was really windy. I didn't think about it until the daylight was fading, and I heard the chickens and guineas making more noise than usual. As anyone who has had guineas knows, they are noisy by nature. So at first it didn't really register, but after a bit I started wondering why they weren't in the coop since they like to head in when it starts getting a bit dusky. I realized the wind must have blown the door of the coop shut and sent Ivy out to open the coop for the chickens. Since it was still fairly light out, I figured they would all go in the coop. However, a little while later, Paul tells me that one of the chickens is out on the porch. So I went to get her and found another chicken perched on the steps to the porch and two on the porch. I grabbed the one from the steps and took her up the hill. The next one put up a bit of a chase, but I eventually nabbed her and her friend. During trips to the coop, I took a roll call of who was in the coop. It seemed there were at least four more not in the coop. I checked the goat barn because they hang out there a bunch during the day, I figured some might have decided to bunk there, but no luck. I walked all around the yard, flashlight in hand since it was all the way dark by now. Finally, I looked under the chicken coop and there were five chickens under there. I managed to get them all out with a bit of coaxing and poking and pulling and crawling on hands and knees. Thought I had them all safely in the coop and closed things up for the night. There is one chicken that likes to follow us around the yard and Finn has claimed her as his and named her Ticklish (don't ask--he is three.) I specifically checked to make sure she was in there, but I guess I mistook another for her in the dim light. She greeted me first thing in the morning when I went to feed the goats. Don't know where she spent the night, but thankfully she was okay and seemed to be fairly pleased with herself for being the only chicken up and about so early. Needless to say, the chicken coop door now gets propped every day to avoid a repeat.

On a completely different note, two friends recently had babies and another friend threw them a combined shower this week. It was kind of last minute for notice, but I managed to throw them together a few items from flannel in my stash. I have such a large collection of flannel because I have such low impulse control when Joann's has it marked down to under $2/yard on their Black Friday sales and through the year on clearance. So happily, I was able to find a couple girl prints and a couple boy prints and make some blankets and burp cloths. I tried following the directions for a receiving blanket that is supposed to be self-binding, but somehow I messed it up. It's still a little frustrating to think about because I wasn't able to figure out what I really did wrong. I just know the corners came out completely wrong, but because I had followed the directions which said to snip the excess fabric away, I had big chunks cut out of the corners when I ripped the wrong stitching out. I managed to fix the blanket in a bit of a different manner than the original blanket was supposed to be arranged. But I have a policy that I don't point out my mistakes. (At least I try not to.) I generally figure that I'm probably the only one who is going to realize that something is off. So I didn't tell anyone at the shower that I goofed and nobody is any the wiser. I'm counting on you guys to keep the trust. For the second gift, I just made two simple receiving blankets serged around the edges. Much quicker and easier and store bought receiving blankets are never really big enough for a decent swaddle.

I also made dolls from a Bit of Whimsy pattern that I've had a while, but not had the chance to make up. This pattern was so simple I could hardly believe it. Those dolls went together as quick as could be! And they were cute, and well received. Holly loved them at home, so I think I'm going to make her one next week when I can get into the sewing room for a few minutes. Thankfully, she slept through almost the whole shower, because I was a bit afraid that she might try to reclaim them when she saw them. Especially as each of the babies had big sisters just a little older than her and they both grabbed the babies and toted them around for quite a while. It was the Little Peanut pattern in case anyone is interested.

Paul has been working on our living room addition and is hoping to have it opened up to the house very soon. It will double the size of our living room area and the extra space will be very much appreciated as our family has grown considerably since we moved in here. It's further along than in these pictures, but I thought I'd share them anyhow. The windows are going to have a window seat in them, and the wall is no longer blank, but filled with floor to ceiling shelving. The pictures aren't great since I took them from inside the current living room window, but they show a bit of the work being done.

And lastly, I watched "Julie & Julia" this afternoon and really liked it. Some of the reviews were a bit hard on the Julie side of the story, but I liked both sides of the story. I haven't read the book, but I think I'll pick it up now and read it over. I actually think it's usually better that way anyhow since movies frequently disappoint if you've read the book first. But honestly, the book I most wanted after reading this was Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I stuck it on my wishlist on Amazon so I can get to it sometime. It's a two volume set and a bit pricey, but I think it would be kind of fun to have. Not that I'm going to cook my way through them in a year or anything. And I learned something from the movie about Julia Child. I always assumed she was French, but she's actually American. When she moved to France, she didn't even know how to speak French.

Where did summer go?

Here I am back to my woefully neglected blog. Last time I posted was the middle of summer. My husband wonders why I even have any followers left. Didn't bother explaining to him that it would probably take more effort to remove somebody than to let them just sit there doing nothing. But nevertheless, I'm happy to see that nobody removed me from their blogroll. So I'm back now and will try to make my posting more regular again.

Here's a quick (thought I could be quick, but turned out, I couldn't) re-cap. We did our first real garden this year, and it did surprisingly well! We canned potatoes, salsa, hot pepper butter, and pizza sauce--maybe some other things too, but that's all I can think of right off the top of my head. Oh, pickles! We had yummy fresh cucumbers for weeks. I miss them already. I have never loved a cucumber like I loved those! And my picky boy, Finn, would just gobble them up.

We sold Bambi's boys (above) and because of several issues, I didn't manage to ever get her milking. Hopefully next year. We kept Betty Bob's doeling, Star (on the right below). I am milking Betty Bob and Bella and getting a little over half a gallon most days just milking once a day. Plenty for our family, and it leaves us enough to try cheese making and plenty of puddings and yummy stuff.

We sold half a dozen of our pullets, but we are still getting around a dozen eggs a day. The guineas are all grown up, and I'm pretty sure they are both females. Kind of bummed about that as I was hoping we would get a pair so we could have little keets next year. We hatched a duck out over the summer that I called Uno because it was the only egg that hatched and Ivy called Sparkle because I think she wanted to embarrass it, but one day it just disappeared. (I think this may be the only picture I got of it because my camera apparently decided to take the summer off with my blog--see it right in the middle?) No clue what happened to it--just totally gone without a trace. Also down one chicken like that. I managed to convince myself we were down another chicken and spent a few days counting and recounting chickens until it finally dawned on me that the one I was looking for was one of the ones we sold. Feel free to share the long laugh I had at my own expense.

We have two pigs that are ready to head to market. I don't think I have any pictures of them. Sorry, will take the camera up there in the next couple days. Along the lines of not naming your food, these two never did acquire names. We put them far, far from the house because we had many, many people telling us how they would smell, but they really aren't that bad. Yeah, you can smell them when you stand outside their pen, but they weren't all that people made them out to be.

I've been doing a bit of sewing lately and have some things to share over the next few days. But here's a little peek at a pattern I was delighted to be given an opportunity to test for Whimsy Couture. I am really liking her patterns. This is the third one I have made up and have more to try. I'll post a bit more about this pattern in the next few days.

So to end things up, here's a shot of Holly and Finn that I really love. They were sitting together on the couch like this the other day, and I actually managed to get to the camera in time. Nobody told them to sit like that. I was doing things in the kitchen and looked over and there they were. So cute! Can't believe how big they are getting.

Wordless Wednesday #12

"At the 'goat-eo'"

Quick Chick Update

We wound up with five chicks hatching out yesterday. I had to help two out of the shells because they were taking so long the membrane around them had dried out and stuck them to the shell. It was a bit nerve-wracking, but I figured there was nothing to lose. The chicks would have died in the shells, but they are running around with the others now. It was so much fun watching the hatch, I wish I could just throw some more right in, but I can't reasonable fill my laundry room with chicks (can I?), so I have to wait just a little bit! Next time I'm going to get something to measure the humidity in the incubator which can be one cause of low hatches. But I'm not too disappointed with my first try at it. It's five more than we would have had, right?

These pictures are from yesterday. I will get some more today or tomorrow showing them fluffed up a bit more.

Our first chick that hatched out. The only one that is mostly yellow. Tried to climb back into its shell more than once!

Same chick a bit more fluffed up.

Encouraging #2 to hatch. The chicks in the shells did respond to the peeping of the other chicks ,and you could see more movement from them when the others would peep. The chicks in the shell would peep back, too.

This is number four, I think. One of the ones that needed a hand.

A couple group shots.

It appears #2 does sport a mohawk--I hope that isn't an early indication of rebellious tendencies!

Make Something Monday #14

So I can't take sole credit for "making" these, but I did raise the parents from couple day old chicks, and I did do all the regulating of the incubator. Today is hatch day for our eggs in the incubator. Last night two eggs had little cracks in them, and this morning we have a chick! The other egg is cracked open more, and there is another egg with a crack. You can see the chicks inside the eggs moving and hear them peeping to each other. So looks like we have at least three chicks! We'll see what the day brings. (I hopped up to check the eggs right before posting this and another chick has pipped through its egg--so that's four!)

You can see in the picture that the chick is still all wet from being inside the egg. We will leave the chicks in the incubator which is nice and toasty warm to dry off and fluff up before we move them to their brooder. I'm going to set them up on their own for about a week until they are a little bigger and then try putting all the chicks in together since they are about a week or so apart in age.

Bitten...

I couldn't take it anymore. Everyone posting pictures of their new chicks. Even though our eggs are due to hatch next Monday, I needed more instant gratification. It's a virus really--they call it chicken fever.

We got 12 chicks today. Four Rhode Island Reds, four Barred Rocks, and four assorted banties. We (read that as me) wanted to get the reds and rocks to breed together to get sex-linked chicks. That means as soon as the chicks are hatched, you can tell sex by the color of the chick. With a Barred Rock mother and a Rhode Island Red father, the girl chicks have black feathers with a red neck and the boy chicks look like Barred Rocks. This will be handy for knowing right away which ones we can sell as pullets and which ones to keep for butchering. We're not sure on the banties, but hoping for all hens. By comparing pictures on hatchery websites, it looks like we have a couple Old English Game Banties and a Cochin and a Japanese black banty. Ivy wanted banties so we let her pick them out. That's the one I think is the Japanese black--it's so little, about half the size of the others.

They are so cute and are just peeping away in the laundry room. They are only in that tote until tomorrow when I can swap them out to a bigger one. We took that to the feed store to buy them and the guy said, in 600 customers, you are the first to bring your own container for them. I laughed and wondered if the rest just carried them home in their pockets!

Waiting...

We've got eggs in the incubator now. They've actually been in about a week and a half. Which means we have about another week and a half to see how many chicks we get. I'm cautiously optimistic about our results. I put a dozen eggs in for a starter batch, and I only put green eggs in because I think they are prettiest! We started with 10 chicks last summer. So I think a dozen will do fine if we get a good hatch rate. We'll use roosters for the freezer and keep hens for eggs or sale. Paul is going to build a smaller chicken run for these so the big chickens won't pick on them and we can raise them up separately. He's also got to get some kind of brooder setup built this week. The last batch I raised in the laundry room in a couple big cardboard boxes scooted together, but it was summer and really warm. They were a couple days old when we got them, and we got away without keeping a light over them. This time with them being just hatched and the weather cooler, I think we need to get a light in there for them. We've still got one more rooster than we need around here, but we just haven't taken the time to send him to freezer camp.

And I keep trying to figure out if our goats are getting rounder, but unfortunately, they are quite round to start with! As long as breedings took for the goats, we are looking at some time close to the end of June for kids. I'm considering whether we will keep Bella once the others kid out. I'm not getting huge amounts of milk from her, but she's been good about letting me milk her. I usually get between 2.5-3 cups per morning. Since the baby is on her during the day time, I don't milk at night. And she really doesn't seem to be warming up to me any. She only comes willingly at feeding time. We also don't know any history on her. Even though she is a dairy breed and supposed to be registered, some goats are bred more for show lines and not milk lines. We don't know anything about her background and breeding. If you buy goats from a breeder who does dairy goats for milk, they should have records of milk production and be breeding their line to improve production. Betty Bob and Bambi were both from a breeder who has plans to try to get her dairy approved to sell milk. She also shows her goats and keeps careful records of how much milk they produce. So I'm hoping that Betty Bob and Bambi will be good milk producers, and if they are, I am leaning towards selling Bella. I'm going to keep milking her until then, though. Without the baby on her, I figure she should produce about a quart or a little more a day. That's not enough for our family, but might work well for other people's situation, and somebody might appreciate being able to buy a goat in milk already. Nothing is set, obviously, but those are some things I'm mulling over.

Goodbye Cowboy!

Remember Cowboy? That's Cowboy in the front with Bambi standing behind him. Today we bid farewell to Cowboy. He stayed with us four weeks, but hopefully we'll have a few reminders of him in about five months! (Now we just have to clean that stinky boy smell out of the barn!)

This also went with him. Well, not Cowboy, specifically, but his very kind owners who let us borrow Cowboy. It's another Bit of Whimsy doll. I just knew this goat would be the perfect thank you for the loan of Cowboy. And it was as good an excuse as any to buy another Bit of Whimsy pattern!

And just for the fun of it, here's some chicken shots. One of our hens was in the barn so she didn't make it into the group shot. We've had two 3-egg days this week. Guess the longer days are helping with egg productivity.