Yesterday, Grampa Tom drug me out of bed at 5am (in spite of severe weather warnings) to drive down to Silex for their Spring Poultry Expo. We didn't know if anyone would be there, but we went anyway. We were not the only ones who braved the rain. Plenty of producers showed up as well as quite a few buyers like us. They have a poultry expo twice a year. Sometimes we go set up ourselves, but we almost always show up at least to hang out and spend way to much money. Grampa Tom was telling our son that I had fun spending all of his money. My son told him it was his fault for waking me up at 5 am. He ought to know better than to wake me up that early and expect me to actually make good decisions!
Several years ago, Grampa Tom went to a small farm conference in Columbia, MO. While he was there, he met Kelly Klober and they hit it off. Kelly is an old farm boy who raises heritage breeds of livestock the old fashioned way. He has become a good friend and mentor. He is one of the leaders of the River Hills Farmer's Market in Silex and that is why we go there. This is Kelly with his bullhorn. He's low tech - another reason Grampa Tom loves him.
Kelly is a writer. One of the things they auctioned off at the end of the expo was a copy of Kelly's book Talking Chicken. Naturally, Grampa Tom had to have one. You can get one here: http://www.amazon.com/Talking-Chicken-Kelly-Klober/dp/B004IAAJOA
Kelly even autographed it. Grampa Tom is very pleased with his new treasure.
We also have an autographed copy of Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living. I wore out my first copy. It's pretty much a Bible for those of us who want to do things the old fashioned way. We saw Carla at the Small Farm Today Show in Columbia a few years back. She had an updated version and autographed it. We felt very blessed to have the chance to meet her and get her autograph. She passed away not long after we met her. Such a huge source of wisdom! You can get Carla's book here: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_30?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=encyclopedia+of+country+living+by+carla+emery&sprefix=encyclopedia+of+country+living%2Cstripbooks%2C492
So now we have a real library of famous autographed works.
There was a raffle. Grampa Tom bought 10 tickets. They had a drawing every 30 minutes. The first drawing after we got there was for this $20 gift certificate from Metzer Farms. Grampa Tom won. Then an hour later, he won again! That prize was the bag of chicken feed in the picture below. Kelly came by and told Grampa if he won again, there were people there threatening to rub him out!
We bought a few bedding plants. We got several types of tomatoes and some different mints. The cage there is pretty neat. It has a wooden tray that it sits in that is designed to catch the poo of whatever you put in there. It cost a mere $5. We intended to buy just a few chicks, but ended up only using it for plants, no poo ;)
We also bought some hatching eggs to put in our incubator. We didn't hatch any eggs last year, but since our grandkids are going to be around so much this year, we decided to get our incubator out. I cleaned it out this morning. We will need to let it run for a day or two before we load it just to make sure everything is running well. I'll blog more about that later. The blue eggs on the left are Araucana eggs. The dark brown eggs on the right are Cuckoo Marans.
And then there's the real reason we spent way to much money. Kelly offered us this box of 75 Welsummer chicks for only $150. 75 birds were just to many to put in the little cage we bought. It's really all Kelly's fault. We've been wanting some of these birds for such a long time. They are hard to get and that was a really great price. They lay a dark brown chocolate egg like the Cuckoo Marans, but we think they are a prettier bird. We've never aggressively pursued them because they aren't really good layers. To make money off of them you have to breed them to sell chicks and hatching eggs. We've hung back because we don't really have space to create a separate area for them. Now we will have to do it. That's basically how we do things. We weren't ready to have kids either!
Kelly told me that Welsummer male and female chicks are marked differently. The dark stripe down the middle of the back is broken on the males, but solid on the females. If you look closely, you can see the difference on these birds. It looks like we got more females than males. That's a good thing!
Well, I've got a lot more pictures to show you of stuff we didn't buy, but I can't get them to load so I'll have to make another post of it.
God Bless You All!
~Grama Sue
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