Weeding the Garden

The rain last week did wonderful things for my garden. One of the best - it made pulling weeds a cinch.

I went out this morning and spent about half an hour pulling weeds. I got some before and after shots.
I left the one little fern looking weed. I'm not sure what it is.

This next section shows the Freckles lettuce going to seed. It is a romaine style or cos lettuce.

Much more tidy. The weeds take nutrients from the ground that would be used by my vegetables, so it is important to remove them.


There's my guard kitty, Miss Vicious. She's been keeping an eye on the gopher hole this morning.



I left some of the weeds because the gopher isn't bothering my plants - maybe it is eating the weeds?

After I gathered up all the weeds, I gave them to the fowl. They LOVE it when I bring them fresh greens from the garden.

See the duck? We have two. Dh bought them several months ago, to butcher for Christmas. Well, it turns out there was a male and a female; the female has started to lay eggs. The male is the one visible in the next photo. He's white. His wife is brown. I think the pair have received a pardon since they are "earning" their keep by producing eggs, and maybe more ducks in the future.


I wish we could let them free range, but our dogs would kill them in a heart beat. There are also flying predators that have tried to attack our chickens from the top of their cage.

Until next time.

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Baby Chicks

We went in on a shipment of baby chicks with a friend of mine and the chicks are due to arrive this coming week.

Dh decided to put some eggs into our incubator just about three weeks ago and has been turning the eggs faithfully each day.

I heard one cheeping yesterday, but dh didn't believe me until he turned the eggs again and found one is just starting to poke through its shell.

This morning the little guy still hasn't made much progress, and we will be leaving for church in an hour, so I won't be able to check in on him for a few more hours.

It's very important to let the little chick get out of the shell on his own. It's the way nature works. If the chick is not strong enough to get out of his own shell, he might not be healthy enough to make it in the big world.

I thought that I would post these pictures from 2005, when we hatched eggs one of the first times. Note the time on each photo so you can see how long it took for this one to break free from his egg.













Whew. It's hard work getting born!!

Until next time.

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Homemade Egg Noodles

I have been making homemade chicken soup since I got sick last Friday... well, three batches and I have one more chicken thawed out. I've been making chicken salad sandwiches with the extra chicken.

On the first night that I made chicken soup, I also made homemade egg noodles.

The recipe I followed was from my old La Leche League cookbook. Very simple and easy. I paid ds2 to milk, feed and water on Saturday night, while I stayed inside and made dinner. Chicken vegetable soup with egg noodles.

Especially since our hens are laying again. They were on strike again and didn't lay for about three weeks. We actually had to break down and buy eggs from the grocery store (four dozen).

Anyway, crack two eggs in a bowl, scramble well. Mix in 1 teaspoon salt. Now mix in some flour - between 1.5 to 2 cups until the dough is pliable. Don't knead, just mix it together well. Roll it out on a floured surface until the dough is about 1/8th of an inch thick (or thicker if you prefer a thicker, more dumpling-type noodle). Use a pizza slice cutter to cut the noodles to your preferred length and width.

I like to strain the broth from my soup temporarily, bringing the broth/stock to a boil to cook the noodles. They take seconds to cook. You can tell when they are done because they float. You can also remove a noodle from the pot and taste it for doneness.

Until next time.

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Pretty Young Rooster

Near the first of this month, on a post entitled Thinking and Not Crocheting, I mentioned a pretty young rooster doing something neat and cute.


I finally got a picture of him yesterday morning. He's less than a year old, but anxious to make room for himself in the flock, and especially to make himself attractive to the ladies. The "Big" rooster, our original, guards his girls very closely, and will attack a younger male for straying onto his turf. This guy is the grandson of our first "Pretty Rooster".

So the neat and cute thing I saw him do... I have heard that roosters do this, but have never seen it with my own eyes. Apparently roosters keep their eye out for yummy food and then cluck and call to the hens to come get some. I was emptying the watering buckets and rinsing them out. Bugs are always under the buckets, and as soon as I lift one they scurry for darkness. The young rooster snatched one of the bugs that was scurrying away, holding it securely in his beak he walked a few feet toward a group of hens. He tossed the bug down on the ground in front of them and started clucking to them about this dandy, delicious bug candy he had found. They flocked around him and started pecking at the bug.

It's neat to experience things firsthand that I've previously only read about.

Until next time.

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1 1/2 Day Old Chicks

Our newest baby chicks. Mutt chicks. We have a lot of mutt hens and most of them lay green eggs! A couple of years ago, our feed store sold me some Maran chicks. They lay chocolate brown/purple eggs. After a couple of weeks, I was pretty sure we'd been sold Ameraucanas. That's cool. We think the green eggs are pretty and unique. Only we already had 3 Easter Egger hens and I'd bought another six when I bought the six Marans. So now we have far more green eggs than brown eggs. Green eggs are -- like I said, "pretty" and "unique". It's weird enough when people get a couple of green eggs per dozen, but when they get 10 green eggs, a white egg and a brown egg, it is just too weird. So these two were hatched from green eggs. More Ameraucanas. ;-)

Until next time.

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oh dear!!!!! We love our worms...

I forgot the last straw to driving me to maniacal laughter.

I finally made a point to check the feed tags on the chicken feed, the stuff we've been giving to the chickens that produce our eggs, and that we are planning to eat... and the "plant protein" they use is SOY. Great, just great.

So I went onto the 'net to look for this one place Lions Grip which has chicken feed calculations, so I could see what we could give the chickens, to make our own feed for them.

I discovered that worms are very high in protein. Chickens need a lot of protein to produce their eggs; eggs are, after all, a source of protein.

So I have a couple of questions about worms. How many do the chickens need to eat? I read that they can live happily in rabbit manure. Goat manure is like rabbit manure, so could they live happily in goat berries? Also, what about when it gets hot? How to keep the worms alive?

So I found a Yahoo group and joined. I asked my questions in my introductory post and I kid you not, this was one of the responses:

"oh dear!!!!! We love our worms and would never feed them to animals. We use the worm compost to feed gardens. Your poor worms are on the wrong end of the feeding chain."

Come on, we're talking about WORMS! Hello?! Worms!? Worms, that birds eat?

Gimme a break!

Until next time.

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