End of September

Our cats are cute. 

Gorgeous skies one night. Obviously the pool is still open. It is getting cold though.

Kevin tore down our playset that we acquired like 17 years ago. It was falling apart and not safe. Then he decided to construct some swings for our front yard. After figuring out everything including making diagrams and using geometry...

Voila!

Cogburn is still hanging around looking happy. He is also very loud but he is so adorable we don't mind. Much.

Rose played with the train set this week. It is funny; a toy will sit in a corner for literally months and I will think, hmmm, maybe we should get rid of it...

And then the kids get excited.

Kevin did a great job with the garden this year. We had a drought but he watered very faithfully so we got lots of squashes. We are also getting many green beans still which makes me SO happy!

After aforementioned drought, we finally have been getting rain, which is a huge relief. There were dangers of wildfires and now the ground is nicely wet and the water table is probably a lot better.

So we are thankful for that!

 

 

I Don't Miss the Chickens

I know this is random, but I don't miss our chickens.

That honestly surprises me. We had chickens for several years and they were charming. They clucked, they strutted, they pecked, they laid eggs. What's not to like?

Well, there were some negative things. They were dirty. They occasionally keeled over and died, or were attacked by predators.  Chickens are so STUPID that they more or less just die when a predator shows up, because they have no clue how to defend themselves or get away.

When Kevin got his new, challenging position at work, we decided it was time to simplify our lives and get rid of the chickens.

Once they were gone, it was surprising how many chores went away. I did relatively little with the chickens, but even I found mornings (in particular) more relaxing.  I no longer need to put eggs away in the morning. I no longer have to package them up for sale when we have too many. I no longer need to make sure nasty chicken byproducts are safely cleaned off the counters.

So yes, it was a good experience having chickens, but I don't miss them. Sometimes it is best to simplify.

Bye-bye Chickens

  So we made a momentous and difficult decision -- we decided to get rid of our chickens.

We've had laying hens for several years and they are many positive things about them. We got fresh eggs. We had a great place to use our food scraps.  We enjoyed watching them peck and jump around and do silly things.  We had some extra chores for our kids and they learned responsibility by caring for the hens.

 But...we have a new baby, and we're starting homeschooling soon, and Kevin has a new, exciting, more challenging job at work starting in a few weeks.  We felt it was wise to simplify our lives.  A local friend was interested in taking the hens and her husband came by and took them away in 2 batches this week.

  It is kind of sad to look out at the coop and the chicken yards and see both unoccupied.

 I find it hard to stop doing "good" things.  Chickens are good in some ways. I've come up with several positives about owning them. But sometimes it is wise to drop a "good" thing in favor of something better -- in this case, less stress and more time to relax instead of dealing with our chicken hobby.

  Chickens may be in our future someday. We still have the coop, though the fences will come down (which will allow for easy access for mowing.)  But for now, this is a wise decision.

Thursday

I'm not feeling very inspired to make this interesting but thought I'd post a quick update.

I had an OB appointment on Tuesday. Everything looks good.  I had my first non stress test and Little Miss was asleep or bored during the first 20 minutes, so she didn't move much.  So I was on that machine for a LONG time. She finally woke up and started thrashing around like the OB wanted to see.

Wednesday, Angela got some new purple glasses. That means we've gotten new glasses for all but the 2 littles, and theirs are on order.  This year, we made sure everyone got the ones that darken in sunlight, which is good as it means their eyes are more protected.

  Oh, the pool!  It's open. The kids have gone swimming. It is cold.

 

It was 68 when they went in the first time.  The first pic shows the kids nervously stepping into the pool.  As of today, the water was up to ... 70 degrees. That is still cold, in my book, but the kids love it.

 

  Kevin has shot 4 raccoons and 1 possum in the last 2 weeks, all when the offending animal was on our porch eating cat food. I have to admit it is shocking HOW many animals there have been!  We don't like such creatures near our chickens or our kids, but it isn't fun for Kevin having to shoot them and then deal with the corpses.

 

 

 

 

Like Gold!

It is funny the things that excite me these days:

Our chickens have been laying well and we've been low on egg containers.  Not any more!  :-)

TRULY Giant Egg

Scary.  Thankfully, no chicken died in the making of that egg.

Raccoon(s)!

A few days ago, I glanced out our front door and observed a raccoon eating our cat food, in broad daylight.

Well, THAT wasn't good. First of all, we don't want a raccoon eating our cat food. Secondly, we don't want a raccoon around at all, because raccoons love fresh chicken.  Thirdly, raccoons are supposed to be nocturnal and the fact that this one was wandering around during the day was unnerving.  It looked thin and odd, so rabies was a possibility.

So obviously the raccoon needed to die.  We put some food out in the grass and that evening, Kevin got a shot at it.  He thought he hit it but not right in the body, as it ran off and we never found the body. That was regrettable as of course we don't want any animal to suffer.  It is possible he missed it entirely because...

2 afternoons ago, I looked out on the porch and once again, a raccoon was eating our cat food!  It might have been the same one, maybe a different one.

Again, we put food out in the grass.  About 10:15 p.m., I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep when I realized I was ravenous (yep, that happens when I'm 8 months pregnant.)  So I went downstairs, glanced outside, and Mr. or Mrs. Raccoon was out eating cat food.

This time, Kevin got it right in the body.  It ran about 20 feet and died.  So, problem solved with that one.

We know that at least one raccoon was living under our deck and indeed there may be more.  So we're keeping a close eye on our cat food. 

Our chickens have been Ok, so far.  Thankfully. We lost 9 chickens a year ago to 2 marauding raccoons who figured out how to get into the chicken yard.  Raccoons are smart.

Random Thoughts and Pics

I've been participating in a Facebook Group called "40 Day Declutter".  There are 17 members, and we are encouraging one another to organize and declutter our homes.

I'm really good at "baby steps" where decluttering and organizing are concerned.  This week was super busy and I've been very tired, so I just did a few little things.

This probably looks small and unimportant, but it was a valuable "little thing" to do.  This tub holds kids' videos, 95% or more of which are Veggietales. Most mornings, our 2 youngest watch a Veggietales video on one of our computers. The advantage of doing it at the computer is that it is easier to contain Daniel that way; in the basement, with the fences down, he can roam freely and wreak all kinds of havoc.

So anyway, this bin of DVD's was a MESS.  People kept wandering off with the cases, and there were random DVD's just thrown into the bin or stuck in broken jewel cases from Sam's.  I went through them all, matched what I could, threw out broken jewel cases, exchanged some of the DVD's for less watched DVD's in the basement and voila, big improvement.

Here's another not so small project, and it happened last week but I forgot to mention it.  It was all Kevin's doing as he is the strong, capable guy who does most of the heavy lifting and hard physical work around here.  (And the older kids do the rest of the hard physical work -- I'm wimpy these days.)

So, explanation...way way way back when, 16 years ago, Kevin and I were married. And my parents offered to buy us a table as we didn't have one.  We chose this one, which was unfinished.  Kevin spent hard days in our garage finishing it, and it has served us very well.  It looks huge and it is...but it currently has 2 leaves in it. When we first were married with no children yet, we had it up without the leaves and it was large but not ridiculous.

Ok, so then we had a bunch of kids.  Obviously.  The table is now fairly crowded, and we found that children kept accidentally getting food stuck in the cracks where the leaves are inserted. So last week, Kevin glued it all together and filled in the cracks.  So now the table is essentially permanently huge, and the kids don't have to work to keep food out the cracks.  (They found it hard to be as careful as we wanted them to be, no surprise.)

This is really nice as it means we can distribute children along the table without thinking about where the cracks are.

At some point in the distant, distant future, our home will not be full of children and the table will be ridiculously large, but we will cross that bridge later.

What else happened this week?  Well it was busy and tiring for me, and I often felt rather unwell by the end of the day.  The big girls attended an American Heritage Girls meeting at another troop, which took care of a requirement for their badges.  I went to the dentist and the obstetrician.  We sold a bunch of eggs, which was good as our chickens have been laying furiously.  The children had a pretty good week of school in the middle of it all.  My current plan is to have a hard hitting next week, then a week to pull things together, then I'll have the children's year of work assessed by a certified State of Ohio teacher the following week.

May will include more art, more reading, more writing, and finishing up some math that needs completed.  But we're moving down to a more relaxed mode soon.

The baby keeps being very active.  She doesn't have a name yet, and we've not even discussed a name.  We'll get around to it sometime :-).

Possum on the Porch

  The days are getting longer, and the wildlife is coming out from hidey holes.

 This possum graced us with his/her presence yesterday. We were rather startled, as it was wandering around our porch like it owned the place. Maybe THAT'S why the cat food disappears rapidly some days!

 After we banged the door and yelled at it, it walked off the porch and picked its way daintily across a snow field. 

  It seemed huffy about getting its feet wet.

  So, what is the future of this possum?  If it persists in hanging around, a quick death.  We don't like possums.  They eat chickens and their eggs.  We know from experience that predators have remarkable abilities to find ways into chicken yards and coops, and chickens are just SO dumb. This isn't a big possum and indeed some of the chickens are close to its size (with feathers) but still...it could kill chickens.  No question.

  So run away, possum, run away from this place!

Giant Egg and Outdoor Cats

  Our chickens have had a recent uptick in egg production. Some were undoubtedly NOT laying before, and now are getting back into their normal routine. The result has been some incredibly large eggs; that's because when a chicken is starting to lay regularly again, she may produce some double yolk eggs.  You can see how enormous the one on the far left side is.  Poor chicken, pushing that thing out!  They don't seem to mind :-).

  Our outdoor cats have mostly done well this very cold and snowy winter. We have little Tupperware "huts" set up on the front porch, lined with blankets, and they pile in there on cold nights.  Of course we lost Sunny a couple of weeks ago, but that could have happened any time of year.

Good Chickens!

  I haven't mentioned our chickens in some time, but that's because they aren't causing any problems. They aren't dying of a plague, they aren't being killed by raccoons or dogs, they aren't breaking out of their fenced in area.

  What they ARE doing, is laying eggs. Good chickens!  We were getting an average of...about 12 for quite a while.  We have 21 or 22 chickens that so that was a bit wimpy, but we still have 6 or 7 older chickens (purchased the month before Daniel was born) who were molting. 

  Well, maybe our elderly ladies are coming back on track, but 2 days ago we got 15 eggs, and yesterday we got 16.

 The eggs are piling up!  We need to sell some!

And Another One Bites the Dust

Another chicken, that is. We've lost 2 in the last 3 weeks.  Which is sad.  And perplexing. And of some concern.  Do we have a hideous illness? I hope not!

So now we have 22 chickens, which are giving us about a dozen eggs per day. That's enough for our simple needs plus we do sell to a few friends on occasion.

Can I say here publicly HOW MUCH I appreciate my dear husband Kevin?  Dead animals totally freak me out, and in our long and illustrious marriage I have rarely had to deal with a dead animal. I am so thankful that Kevin deals with the dead possums, skunks, guinea pigs, raccoons, cats, and chickens.

New Egg Layer(s)?

Our chickens have experienced trauma these last couple of weeks.  The older ones, all 8 of them (reduced to their present number, you may remember, by massacring raccoons) had been calmly minding their own business, secure in their pecking order and satisfied with life.

And then suddenly, 15 new chickens were thrown into the coop.  Wow.  Talk about shock!  Talk about needing to adjust to a new environment. Talk about lots of clucking and indignant pecking.

A few days ago, we started getting weird eggs. 

The one in the middle looks...odd.  Small, dark, with a thick shell.

 

Maybe from a young chicken?

 

We've only gotten 5 eggs per day and we have 8 "old" chickens so...it seems odd we're not getting MORE eggs than usual if the young ones are starting to lay.

 

BUT, the trauma of throwing the chickens together may have resulted in some of the older ones no longer laying.

 

It is really hard to tell.  So we hope.  We exult.  We dream...of the day when we are getting 16 or 17 eggs a day again.

Chickens Together

We purchased 16 pullets a couple of months ago. We kept them separate from the old chickens so that the new chickens could eat "grower formula" and the older chickens could eat "layer formula."

 But last night, we put them together.  The new hens should start laying eggs soon so we decided they could start eating the same food.

  Moving them was quite an adventure.  Naomi and Lydia and Kevin handled it with aplomb.  Our children definitely have some SKILLS.  Of course, Kevin does too, but that doesn't surprise me.  He has lots of experience in many areas.  But our big kids?  Wow!  They catch and move chickens like a well oiled machine, like cogs in a wheel, like the dance of the stars on the spiral arms of the Milky Way Galaxy.

  Ok, my metaphors are lousy. I'm really tired.  See previous post.

  We chose to move them at night as all the chickens were (hypothetically) calmer than during the day.  I didn't get a picture, but Naomi nobly climbing INTO this coop and started catching chickens, which she handed to Kevin.


 

 

Kevin held them upside down until they calmed down, then Lydia took them and put them on a roost in the chicken coop.

 

 

Naomi put the last lady on the roost herself.  They fill up the roosts pretty well now.

 

Today was interesting.  Chickens naturally develop a pecking order and throwing the 2 flocks together caused much upheaval.  There was clucking and fussing, but it went fine.

 

We're hoping for many eggs soon.  Right now, we are getting 4 to 6 eggs a day which means (gasp) we have to buy eggs from the store too.  It'll be great when we start getting 20 a day!

 

 

Guinea Fowl Visit the Kendig Pullets

 

  I thought this was a funny interaction between the neighbors' guinea fowl and our young chickens this morning.  Our poor chickens, stuck in the coop. Those lucky guinea fowl, flying free.

  Guinea fowl DO fly, that's the important thing.  Our chickens can't, and the same neighbors who own the guinea fowl also own a chicken killing dog.  This dog is tiny. Cute. Adorable.  I had NO idea she was terror on chickens until the neighbor told me they USED to have 2 chickens of their own, and the dog killed them both.

  So sorry, Chickens.  You need to stay in your safe coop and just chat with the guineas through the fencing.

New Chickens!

  Kevin and I went back and forth about it...should we get more chickens?  If so, should we raise chicks?  Or buy adult chickens?  (This is of course in response to our great Chicken Massacre of 2 weeks ago.  See previous Chickens post  for details.)

 Chicks are fragile, and require a high and steady temperature.  They also need to be under cover and are VERY stinky.  Adult hens are great in that they are already laying or will lay soon -- but sometimes the transition in location and food type shakes them up, and they don't lay well for awhile.

  We decided to go in between.  On Wednesday, a local seller sold us 15 9 week old Golden Comet pullets.  Golden Comets are great layers. They are charming, though not amazingly interesting birds.  We considered buying some Auracaunas as they had some of those to sell too -- but the Auracaunas were only 4 weeks old, and they wouldn't have done well with much larger, 9 week old Golden Comets.  (Auracauanas are so called "Easter Egg" chickens -- they lay pretty colored eggs.)

  Kevin built a coop for our meat chickens last year, so we put the pullets into it for now.  Our adult laying hens would probably beat up the 9 week old pullets and we don't want that.

 So now we have 2 batches of chickens in our back yard, plus an amazing amount of color coordination.  (Check out the red barn, the red main coop, and the red small coop.)

  Here is a better view of our new flock.  Cute, aren't they?
 

Chicken Update

We've not had any additional raccoons, so just the 2 caught last week (so far.)

The trap is still out there.

Our remaining 8 chickens are still alive.  One chicken is looking a bit funny, with one eye shut. Was she injured by a raccoon?

Another possibility is that she was hurt by another chicken.  Chickens have a deep need to establish a pecking order.  They had it all figured out and then 9 chickens were killed. So they are reestablishing their pecking order now.

We are only getting 3 to 4 eggs a day now.  At least a couple of the remaining chickens are moulting, so aren't laying.  And they are probably still traumatized. So maybe 3 eggs from 8 is doing pretty well.

Kevin and I need to decide whether to raise laying hen chicks or not.  We still haven't decided.  It would be a fair amount of work, especially in the early days. But it would also be fun.  Chicks are so cute! 

If we DO get chicks, we will keep them in our garage the first couple of weeks. We raised meat chicks last year and had them inside for a couple of weeks. They were mind bogglingly smelly after a few days.  Never again :-).

And Then There Were Eight

It has been a sad week on the chicken front.

We bought 21 chickens a few weeks before Daniel was born.  We lost 4 chickens in the last year, 1 to unknown illness, 3 to a predator. So, 17 were left and were laying well and generally making us happy.

3 days ago, we found a dead chicken in the yard, partially eaten.  So, predator!  Kevin strengthened the fencing.

2 days ago, Naomi went out to feed the chickens and found EIGHT dead chickens in our yard.  Obviously, the predator was totally unimpressed with the reinforced fencing.

EIGHT!  Well, NINE, since we lost one the day before.  Nine of our beautiful chickens wiped out in 2 short days.  The sadness, the sadness!  And we were pretty mad too.  It is one thing when a predator kills to eat, but this predator just KILLED.  Well, 3 were partially eaten, but apparently it was killing just for the sheer pleasure of killing.  Or, as Naomi said, maybe it hoped to come back and eat the dead ones later?  That is a possibility.

Of course, the predator was just acting naturally, but it was still distressing and upsetting.

Kevin has a friend at work with a humane trap, and he lent it to us.  Kevin suspected a raccoon, and this friend said raccoons love fried chicken.

So the trap was baited with fried chicken bones and sure enough, yesterday morning we had caught...a raccoon!  Not a skunk.  Thank you, Lord. A skunk would have been...complicated.

So we were happy. Predator gone.  (And for those who are wondering, we shot the raccoon.  It is officially a nuisance animal and we weren't going to relocate it so it could attack someone else's chickens.)

Several people suggested we rebait the trap last night in case there was another one.  That seemed unlikely to me but, why not?

I wandered outside this morning and saw...

another raccoon!  Ok, that was good advice. The Great Chicken Slaughter makes more sense now.  There were at LEAST 2 involved.  We'll bait it again tonight, probably.

So we're gradually making the world safer for our chickens. And yes, the raccoon is cute, and yes, it is a little sad that it has to die, but we are killing this one too.  We're going to protect our sweet, innocent, stupid chickens.

Los Pollos

I  know it has been WAY too long since I've mentioned our wonderful chickens.

We obviously still have them. They are revelling in the change of weather. You can see in the picture above that they LOVE being out in their yard, pecking at dirt and any bugs daring enough to poke their snouts out.

During February and March, their egg production was down.  They were probably tired of the weather and of not having quite as much light as they wanted (though we do have an artificial light in their coop that goes on every morning while it is still night.)

The last couple of weeks have seen a substantial increase in egg production. We were getting 7 or 8 a day, and now get a dozen or more.  Hooray!

I'm thinking about raising more chicks this summer.  One option would be to raise 15 chickens for meat, and another 6 or 7 laying hens.  The latter could be introduced into the main flock in the fall.  By that time, they'd be close to laying and hopefully WOULD lay in the winter to increase our egg production during the cold, dark months.

We'll see.  It's something to think about.

Visitors

Our neighbor's guineas visited us this week for the first time in a couple of months. We only saw 2 birds, though. There used to be 4. I don't know if the other 2 were on walkabout somewhere else, or if those 2 are dead or gone. They are so cute in an ugly sort of way :-).