We Know Why the Caged Bird Cackles

Every once in a while, one of the girls gets to cackling and screeching like something is trying to kill her. We think, "That must be one heck of an egg she's laying." Many times we are disappointed but not today! Today, Ramona laid a crazy egg and she did it with no anesthesia.

The Hair of the Hare

Having a bunch of animals leads to a great deal of animal-related chores. To be honest, Matt takes care of most of them, mostly because he is more patient and detail-oriented. One of those chores is firminating the rabbits. Firminating rabbits can be tricky because you have to settle the rabbit down in your lap or on a table, then run the firminator (a fur comb) over the rabbit to remove loose clumps of fur  Sometimes the rabbits find it soothing, but other times, they are very squirmy. Matt has perfected it so that both of our rabbits tolerate it grudgingly.

Whoopi usually does not shed nearly as much as Gussie. Gussie is a bulk fur producer. Sometimes Matt will hold a ball of Gussie's fur that is larger than Gussie is. Crasy! Anna has said in the past that she should spin Gussie's fur in order to make a sweater. Well, as you can see by the picture, Gussie is ready to produce a sweater's worth of fur!

The Cackling Countess

Summer has been a time for visits from friends and family, trips to a beach, the mountains and a lake, and a revolving door of chickens. You'll remember that in the early spring, Hazel was in need of being a mama. Well, she got her wish in the form of five little chicks. She raised them well for several weeks and then, fickle hen that she is, was through with them. Fortunately the chicks were well-integrated into the flock by that point and they blended in well, even without the protection of Hazel.

As time went on and the little ones grew, we wondered if any of them would be roosters. Well, one morning while letting them out, a little white puffball, Gigi's Bubby, let loose with a weak crow that sounded eerily reminiscent of Peter Brady's singing during the puberty episode of the Brady Bunch. Shocked by what I heard, I waited and sure enough, she (um, he) did it again. Uh oh, Gigi's Bubby would have to go! No roosters allowed in St. Louis.

A few days later, we heard another weak crow in the back of the yard. We all gathered around Gigi's Bubby to watch him crow, but unless he became a ventriloquist overnight, it wasn't him. Following the sound of the next weak crow, we slowly turned our heads to find Uncle Poodle in the corner of the yard with an "I can do this too" look on his face. He too would have to go. Our thirteen chickens would be downsized to nine with two hens going to our friend and colleague, Dawn Meyer, and the two roosters going to one of Anna's neighbors in Indiana. And then there were nine.

Our two adolescents, Countess Cora and Duke, are getting to the point where they should be laying eggs. With each passing day, we approach the next boxes half expecting to see a new kind of egg. Yesterday, we heard a long, drawn-out egg laying song from one of the hens. The egg, we thought, must have been a doozy because the hen went on and on. Eventually I walked back to the coop and saw Countess Cora standing in the doorway of the coop singing her little heart out. Could it be? Her first egg? Really? Matt looked in the box...nothing. Apparently Countess Cora does not understand how the egg laying song works; hens are supposed to trumpet their success after laying an egg, not announce that sometime in the future they will begin to lay. The beautiful Countess was faking us out.

Later that same day, Matt went to collect eggs from the next boxes. Because of various factors, molting being the most obvious, our hens' egg production has been down lately. We've only been getting between 1-3 eggs per day. We are hopeful that our younger tandem will begin laying and boosting that number. In any case, Matt found four eggs in the nest boxes, one of which was a pinkish tan. Odd, he could not identify which hen laid that one; it was not one of the usual suspects. Could it have been Cora? Could she have gotten the order backwards and announced the she will be laying within the next hour, gone into the nest box, and laid her egg? Can chickens be dyslexic about time?

Could this be photographic evidence of Countess Cora's accomplishment? We have pieced together the clues and are cautiously optimistic that she has started laying and that this will be her egg color. Matt wants to wait a few more days to make sure, which is a wise idea. If the Countess is now laying, then it begs the question: What say you, Duke?

To Crow or Not to Crow, That is the Question...

Mama Hazel's babies are getting all grown up.  She let them know after about 6 weeks that her first stint with motherhood had come to a close with some pecks to the hiney when they got too close to her scratch.   I know it's been a while since you've had an update about our little balls of fuzz, but it truly has been a busy summer.  Against my better judgement, since I know we will eventually have to get rid of some, if not all of them, we have given them all names (and those of you in the know have already figured out what happens to an animal at the Homestead once it gets named).  So, without further ado, I graciously announce the debuts of this seasons debutantes into Society...

Duke - The Golden Beauty

Countess Cora - Our Snow White

Persephone - A Ball of Energy

GiGi's Bubby - Clean Shaven

Uncle Poodle - Sportin' the Beard

They are about 14 weeks old now, and the burning question is how many are young ladies and how many are cockerels?  Duke is the gentlest.  "He" is a Buff Orpington, and the hands-down favorite.  A beautiful golden orange color and a very docile personality, he allows himself to be picked up and handled with only the minimum of feigned protests.  The Countess is second runner up.  We're not exactly sure what kind of chicken she is, but we think it is some kind of Brahma or Faverolle.  A lovely alabaster white with snowy feathered stockings, she will eat out of our hands and doesn't run when we reach for her.  Next comes Persephone, who we believe to be a Silver Laced Wyandotte.  Persephone is not only camera shy, she is also a firm believer of the benefits of avoiding "stranger danger."  However, the problem is that she considers EVERYTHING and EVERYONE that isn't covered in feathers a strangers, be it rabbit, dog, or person, including yours truly.  She is a terror to try and catch for any reason, and should one be so "lucky" enough to succeed in cornering her, she raises heck screaming bloody murder at the top of her lungs, even if your are just trying to put her in the coop for the night.  The twins (Uncle Poodle and GiGi's Bubby) are small, but what they lack in size, they make up for in fluff and attitude.  The only way to tell these five-toed fireballs apart is that Uncle Poodle sports a voluminous beard while GG prefers to keep it clean (shaven).  We think (with a fair degree of certainty) that these two are some variety of Silkie.  Though they are the smallest chickens in the coop, they will fight with the big girls for any bit of scratch or food they set their beady black eyes on, much to the dismay of Ramona and Ursula who are used to going unopposed when if comes to the tastiest and juiciest bugs.

The only question that remains before we have to go about the business of "down-sizing" is how many of these darlings will be hens, and how many will have to crow... I mean go. How many will have to go?

I have my suspicions that one, if not both of the Silkies, may be boys because they are always challenging not only each other, but anything else that moves (including sparrows and their own shadows).  Just the other day I walked out to find poor Countess Cora stuck in a Silkie tug-o-war, with her leg in Uncle Poodle's beak and her opposite wing in the clutches of GG.  I know, I know.  A picture was very tempting, but I was afraid they would pull the poor thing apart so I came to her rescue before running for the camera.  Here is a video of the twins' sibling rivalry in the form of a jousting match.  Did I not mention that they were both avid fencers???

So, the game is now afoot.  How many of Hazel's babies will stick around and join the ranks of the laying and how many will have to go is the question on everyone's mind here at the Hartford Homestead.  

(PS-If you are interested in buying one of these dears, feel free to let Don or myself know through the usual channels!) 

Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose

So having recently re-built our deck, we found ourselves in possession of a lot (LOT) of old boards.  We carried them 2 at a time (20+ trips) out back by the dumpster to be claimed by the neighborhood pickers or to await their fate on large item pick-up day, along with a rogue TV and a neighbor's chest of drawers sans drawers.  The next morning, however, when I went out to feed the chickens, I noticed that our "work table" in the garage (an amalgamation of two plastic sawhorses and a sheet of plywood) was beginning to sway and buckle under the weight of a few bales of hay, a 50 lb. bag of chicken feed, a random assortment of tools, stacks of newspapers (for rabbit litter boxes), and loads of other miscellany (picture the show "Hoarders," but confined to 3 feet by 6 feet of table space).  I got to wondering what it would take to buy a new table that would be able to bear the brunt of the weight of our little homestead on its shoulders.  The answer... more than we were willing to spend.  Then I remembered all of the wood that we had at our disposal.  Sure, it was old, weather-beaten, stained by years of walnuts hurled by guerrilla squirrels, moss growth, and foot traffic; but to build a table that would inevitably get beaten up in the garage, did we really need shiny new lumber???  You guessed it.  Time to put our "less waste" talk into practice.  Enter the old deck lumber.

We hauled some of the old 8 foot 2x6's BACK into the backyard and laid them out in the grass.  We cut them to sizes that we needed for the table we had in mind and with a little Palmolive and elbow grease, washed away years of abuse.  Although they weren't what I would call "good-as-new," they definitely got a little bit of a face lift.  Then, using some of the leftover screws we had from our deck project, we began assembly.  For good measure, we also re-purposed an old pallet we had leftover from a different project, and VOILA!!!

Not too shabby {chic} for a couple of weekend carpenters looking to save a few bucks here at the Hartford Homestead.

Deck Design on a Dime

When your deck goes from being a rustic and rugged backyard escape to being an obstacle course/death by 1,000 splinters torture device hybrid, you might want to consider an upgrade.  At least that's what we did.  Despite fancying ourselves rather tough and fearless (I mean, we've eaten Anna's cooking and lived to tell), we knew it was time for a new deck when every trip to the garage meant staring down the face of death (or at least its 4th cousin, twice removed--a sprained ankle).  But how can you help keep the costs of a project like this down when you are working on a tight budget?  D-I-Y, naturally.

While neither Don nor I are master carpenters, we are quick studies and since we were already feeling quite emboldened (coming off of our victory last summer in constructing a backyard chicken coop), we figured, "We can do this!"  Well, on second thought...

Our first step on this odyssey of woodworking discovery was to tear up all of the old lumber that was cracked, split, and treacherously uneven.  Heck, some of the boards weren't even nailed down anymore.  Okay, well I suppose that WAS a help to us in the long run.  This part of the process only took a few hours!!!

The next part of this construction project was to calculate exactly how much wood we would need to fit the dimensions of the deck we had in mind.  We wanted all of the boards to go in the same direction this time, unlike the last go-round.  Also, we came across a curve ball... in case you didn't know this, a 2x6 (the 2x4's more "robust" cousin) is not ACTUALLY 2 inches by 6 inches.  Rather, it is only 5 and a half inches wide. Math thinking caps on!  After we figured out how many 2x6s we would need (17-10 footers and 45-16 footers) it was off to the Home Depot and Lowe's to do some pricing.  Since this isn't a plug for one store over the other, I won't say which one we chose, but I will say that Home Depot charges $1 to make a single cut while Lowe's charges $.25 (or in our case, FREE!).

As tempting as it sounded to make 8+ trips back and forth to the store with no less than 5 feet of wood hanging out of the back of our Explorer, we opted to have it delivered.  It did cost $50 but it saved us a whole day spent loading and unloading our lumber and making right turns that would make a semi driver flinch.  So, bright and early (9 am), a very helpful gent showed up in our front yard driving a forklift with a pallet of wood just for us!

Our initial estimate of "This should only take around 3 hours" turned into 7 hours, 3 scraped up knuckles, and splinters galore.  The following pictures are pre- and post- renovation shots of the deck.   

             

             
 
At the end of the day, we stood back and admired our handiwork, thinking rather highly of ourselves, and contemplating the possibility of building our next house on our own.  HA! Got ya!  We still have a few more years to enjoy our new deck and the escape it provides here at the Hartford Homestead.

Chicken Rugby!

     For all of you soccer fans out there, the World Cup is finally here and you are glued to your TVs like a chocoholic staring through a Godiva storefront.  It's exciting!  It's exhilarating!  It's the WORLD CUP!  But...  The World Cup only comes around once every four years.  BUMMER!  What would you say if I told you that you could have the same excitement, the same fast-paced back-and-forth, and the same THIRST for victory every day in your own back yard?!  Impossible, you say?  Not if you have your very own Chicken Rugby team!  What?  How?  All you need is a flock of ever-hungering chickens and a little tidbit of their favorite morsel!  Heck, it doesn't even have to be their favorite.  It just has to be big enough that whoever gets first possession can't swallow it in one gulp during the scrum, and small enough that it can be carried around in front of the pursuing mob that forever wants whatever it is that the forward has!
     Here is a clip from the last scrimmage of the Hartford United All-Hen Rugby Team...