And We Have Fence!

 Go Grampa Tom! My hero!

Unfortunately there are still some very determined chickens.

Trespassers will be culled soon!

God Bless You All!

~Grama Sue

Got old birds? A pressure cooker will tenderize them in no time!

Silex River Hills Farmer's Market Poultry Expo

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 

Mighty Chicken Man

My grandson is learning how to handle chickens! Chickens like to peck. If kids don't know how to handle them they can get hurt. It's important to help kids understand how to handle them. Click on the link to watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNy0qn5s5Cs&context=C4ba8d89ADvjVQa1PpcFOMBthTENfgI7vX6R7oSsn4fuUiqL9kEto= 

Lots and Lots of Chickens!

Well, our egg shortage problem should be over soon. Today we bought 1000, one year old chickens. That's a lot of chickens! We can't keep them all, but we have already found homes for about 300 of them. We would like to sell 150 - 200 more. We have culled out most of our older hens that weren't producing well. These birds are Production Reds, a cross between Leg Horns and Rhode Island Reds. The are about a year old and were laying at a 90% rate before they were moved. 

We were advertising to find some young hens to buy. A man from Iowa called. He was selling 1000 chickens for an Amish farmer. They came out of a cage free operation so they will have to make some adjustments. They will probably slow down or even stop laying for a while. Hopefully it won't be to long. Grampa Tom has been busy picking up eggs all over the place today. It will take them a while to figure out where to lay and how to forage. 

We have already started feeding them hay, but we aren't actively pushing them out on the pasture yet. There's not a lot of grass out there yet and if they stay close they will be less like likely to lay out at the edges of the pasture! The one thing I don't like about them is that their beaks are clipped. But almost all confinement birds have clipped beaks. I'm looking at this as a sort of "rescue". Poor things! 

Once they get into the their spring laying flush, we will have way to many eggs. Last year we gave our excess eggs to the food pantry in Nauvoo. Hopefully we will be able to help 2 or 3 food pantries this year.

God Bless You All!

~Grama Sue

Mushrooms and Wings

We went mushroom hunting today. All we found was this lone mushroom and a stem ... Grampa found them. I'm not known for my mushroom hunting prowess, but Grampa usually finds a few. I don't know if we were to early or to late. Whenever I've been mushroom hunting, I've managed to find lots of toad stools and other non-edible mushrooms, but today we didn't see much of them either. For those of you that don't know, this is a morel mushroom. They are very easy to distinguish from other mushrooms so that makes them very popular here. You don't have to worry about accidentally cooking up a poisonous one!



We also gave all the chickens a haircut this week. We have 168 producing hens and 3 roosters. Yeah, I know, we tried to get rid of all the roosters, but then we were given some chickens with a couple of roosters and one of the pullet chicks turned out to be a boy. It is hard to sex those things when they are little. We decided it would probably be a good idea to keep a few roosters around just in case something happened that would keep us from being able to get chicks through mail order.



Apparently some animal rights groups think chicks shipped through the mail are starved in the process. Not true at all. Just before a chick hatches, the stomach muscles form around the yoke sack. This gives the baby chick a good three days worth of food and water. God created them this way because chickens tend to hatch over a period of 3 days. This way, the mother doesn't have to leave the nest until they are all hatched. She can keep the early hatchers there until everyone is ready to go out and find food. Chicks are shipped priority and generally arrive to their destination within 2 days, most of the time overnight. They do not starve!



Anyway .... rant over ... here's the mess from our barber work. We cut one wing so they can't fly over the fence and into the garden. It's like a haircut. It doesn't hurt the chickens, just keeps them at ground level. Some of you may think that chicken's can't fly. They actually do a little. They only go up around 5 or 6 feet, but they do fly.



My census job ended yesterday. It was supposed to last 14 weeks. They lied. There was no more work for anyone as of today. Oh well! It was fun while it lasted. The farmer's markets will be in full force in a couple of weeks. I'm planning to spend the summer baking and making noodles unless something else comes up.



We will have chives, lemon balm, radishes, eggs, noodles, some dried herbs and peppers from last year and banana bread to take to the farmer's market in Burlington this week - maybe some green onions and lettuce, but they are a little on the small side as of today. We'll see.



I sold all but 5 of my blown goose eggs. Would have sold them too, but I had hidden them and Grampa didn't see them when the last lady came to buy. Oh well, I need a few to decorate myself. I also have a bunch of blown guinea eggs. They are smaller than chicken eggs. You'd think they'd break easier, but those things are tough little critters. They should be really good for crafts.



I was looking at my herb garden today. I have some cilantro and basil coming up! I took my chicken guard off it a couple of weeks ago so I was wondering if they would devour the seedlings as they sprouted. So far the chickens don't seem to enthused about cilantro or basil. That's OK with me!



On a side note ... the birds are building a new nest in my stove vent. I guess we just have to keep chasing them out.



Well, as usual, the fonts on this post seem all messed up. I really need to take some time and figure out what I'm doing to them, but that's low on the priority list. You all will just have to put up with me.




God Bless You All!