Prison Break

Official Bottom Cleaner

OK, so before I go any further, there are two things that you should know about me: I am neurotic and I do play favorites. Now that that is out of the way, let's move on.


Prior to the chicks' arrival, I read several blogs, books and attended one night classes to gain as much knowledge as I could about raising chickens. During the process, I found out that during the first two weeks of a chickens life, you need to occasionally clean their bottoms of otherwise the poop chute will become clogged and the chicken will not make it.



That said, the first thing I asked Andy when we woke up this morning was "Should I go down and clean their little bottoms?" At which he told me I was crazy and it could wait until I got home from work.


Of course, when I arrived down stairs to my happy ladies I noticed my favorite chick had a dirty butt. There is no way I am going to let my favorite not make it though the day. So I set out to cleaning chick bottoms. I can now safely say, the chicks made it though the day happily unclogged.

My Favorite Chick

Chicks Are Home!

Good Evening, Ladies and Gentlemen. My name is NorthernDaddy, and I will be your guest blogger today. Normally, I spend my time over at http://northernbaby.blogspot.com/, and only rarely make a behind-the-scenes appearance here as a proof reader and editor (you've noticed some grammatical errors here before? I leave them there on purpose - if I corrected them all, there would be no time left for eating ice cream!). I have been assigned tonight's guest spot because I'm "funnier" when it comes to talking about chickens.

I don't know if you, the reader, know how the chicks came to be in our home. It started two years ago when we 'discovered' a chicken coop attached to the side of our shed (we had a few weeds blocking the view). At that time, we were starting to try and live more consciously with regards to the environment and the 'green' lifestyle (meaning that we would stop pouring our used motor oil on the grass out back!)(Just kidding - probably not real funny with the current BP/Oops, we spilled some oil situation....) As we learned more about 'green' living and the modern homesteading movement, one member of the family started to think that we should put that old coop to use. (The other voting member of the family disagreed strongly!) Well, the extremely persistent, pain-in-the-@**, I-want-chickens member of the family started to wear the dissenting member down, bit by bit. The final straw can be attributed to the young lady over at http://coldantlerfarm.blogspot.com/. We had been following her blog for a while, and eventually bought her book (Made From Scratch). It turned out to be a good read, and she made keeping chickens sound so easy, that I was finally turned to give in to the Chicken Lady in my own home. (Thanks a lot, Jenna - if we ever meet, you owe me a beer.)

Below is a picture of a Buff Orpington chick. After some setbacks and an interesting ride home from the farm store, there are currently seven of these fuzzballs raising a ruckus in my kitchen. Seven chicks inside a large box (copy paper size) have a lot of room to slide around when the car makes a turn or stop. When they weren't bouncing off the sides of the box, they were chirping loudly (about my lack of driving skills, I guess!). Little man was riding next to them in his rocket seat, and I kept trying to have a conversation about the chicks with him:

Me: "What are those things in the box?"

Little Man: "Chishins!"

Me: "What are we going to do with the chishins? Sorry, let me say it right - chickens?"

Little Man: " EAT THEM!!"

Me: "Noooo, we're going to take good care of them and get some eggs from them, right?"

Little Man: " WE EAT THEM!"

And so on - the whole way home.

Little Man has an extreme interest in the chicks living in our kitchen. He would like to pick them up and just looove the stuffing out of them. We have embarked on an intensive program to teach him to handle the birds gently, not squeeze them flat. He's a slow learner in this area. The chicks are very fast learners in this area - they run and hide out of his reach when his footsteps come clomping across the floor!

Cute, right?

Little Man had the idea to give truck rides to the chicks. Tell me, when's the last time you saw a baby chicken riding around in the back of a dump truck?!!

Stay tuned for periodic updates on our chicks, and what we learn about raising laying/meat birds in a sustainable way.

In Bloom Now

May 25th

For those of you who do not live in Vermont, May 25th is the day that they have officially deemed as frost-free and safe to plant your vegetables. However, I learned that there are a few cold weather plants that you can plant early. Until tomorrow, here is my wonderful garden......

Lettuce

Peas

Carrots

Toddler Exploration

I recently read a post by Inadvertent Farmer, talking about getting children outside and enjoying the dirt and sun. http://sweetgrace.typepad.com/the_inadvertent_farmer/ I love it and agree with it wholeheartedly. Here are some of our explorations from the past week (I'll admit there was some trauma involved in some of these.

Sadly these are not our chickens (still waiting), but thankfully Shelburne Farms has several chickens for toddlers to chase around the farm yard.
A newt from the pond we were fishing in. Of course anything slimy we are promptly told to put back into the water. This coming from the child who will not touch worms but will pick up a centipede and hand it to me. Our favorite past time.
Not slimy, we are good.

Traumatizing the toddler. Yes the frog jumped onto his back. He screamed and the poor traumatized frog jumped back into the ditch at which point we were promptly told it was time to go.


Little man's idea of gardening.


My son contemplating if he should follow grandma's instructions and show me how he waters the plants (this is a full watering can).

Work in Progress

This is what our refrigerator currently looks like......Maybe I should explain.

On the left we have our jar of milk from the farm. We had to eat this entire jar of pickles in order to obtain a glass jar for the milk. Let's just say we are set for pickles for the year. The milk has been pasteurized, and little man will probably drink most of it. I have taken a temporary break from experimenting with cheese, yogurt and butter until school is out for the year. Although I do know what I am doing wrong with the yogurt: You actually have to pasteurize it because there can be bacteria in the raw stuff that can work against you, which is why it worked once but not the other times I tried it.

In the middle is feta I made from raw goats milk in a class I took this Tuesday. It was taught by the wife of one of the guys I coach with. They have a goat farm and vegetable CSA http://trilliumhillfarm.com/. I have heard all about the goats and farm during cross-country season and thought it would be a fun class. I met a lot of really neat people and learned a ton about making cheese. For those who have never made cheese, it is actually pretty easy and you can experiment a little with the flavor. For example, the container you see in our refrigerator, I used red wine vinegar for the brine instead of white and it has a much smoother flavor then your typical feta. It's pretty good if I do say so myself.

To the right is Andy's weekly bowl of bread dough. He makes it once a week and then comes back to it throughout the week for our daily dose of fresh bread. It is wonderful! And it makes the house smell great.

For anyone who read Friday's blog post, I have not given up hope yet. Other than Friday's chick mishap, it turned out to be a pretty good weekend. My garden consultation happened on Saturday, Andy and I managed to get a lot of gardening done, and little man went fishing for the first time.

For starters, the consultation was overwhelming, liberating and somewhat encouraging. Honestly, my biggest fear was that someone would come in and tell me that there was no hope at all and that I need to mow it all down. I am not going to say that there are not parts that didn't need to be mowed down. I have an insane Bishop's Weed problem and would strongly advise anyone against using it as a ground cover EVER. There were a few parts that needed to be mowed down, one of them turning out to be the perfect place for raised beds, since our current spot is not ideal on the sunlight side, however, it would be the perfect plot for berry bushes. Score one for us!

In the end I had a list of things to do and we were ready to go. Andy slightly sadistically mowed down the part that needed to go. And I spent some time weeding out invasive stuff from the main garden. We still have a long list of things to do, but I feel like we at least made a dent in the garden.

The part that needed to be mowed down.

After Andy got his hands on it (we have to keep a tarp over it this year to kill the Bishop's Weed).

Little Man's new playground!

Is Mother Nature Trying to Ruin My Spring?

This spring started out wonderfully. We had warm weather early on and the sun was shining. Now, I grew up in Northern New England: I am very much aware of the fact that snow can come late in the spring. But the warmth was so nice........ and I have to admit I became hopeful.



Then came April break. It started out wonderfully; mulching the gardens, getting our garden ready, starting to acclimate the seedlings to the great outdoors, etc. Then Tuesday dropped 2 feet of wet snow on top of us. Granted it was gone in three days, but it sent me into a mild depression.



I was determined not to let it ruin what was going to be a good spring. So I hopefully started watching my cherry tree, who apparently also had gotten excited about the warmer weather and cheered up a little bit. I love my cherry tree, it is beautiful in the spring. For those of you who have gone into DC when the cherry blossoms are in bloom you understand. And then yes, the first week of May, we receive an inch of snow. It was gone overnight, but it was enough to make my wonderful cherry blossoms turn a slight brownish color.



I prevailed still, determined to enjoy my spring, I had more wonderful things to look forward to. Back in November our cross-country ski team held a silent auction and I won a garden consult. For those of you who don't know, the house we moved into a little under two years ago had a severely overgrown but wonderful perennial garden. I have been looking forward to the consultation all winter, and so has the person I run with, because she is thinking about doing the same thing herself. So last Saturday what happens? It pours all day and the consult was canceled. Granted, it was rescheduled for tomorrow, but I am not letting myself get excited about anything at this point.



And that brings us to today. When I dropped little man off this morning,I reminded him we were going to go and pick up our chicks this afternoon (one more thing we have been looking forward to all winter)(One thing that only two of you have been looking forward to - #%^! chickens! -AC). While I know the lady on the phone said to call before we come (and they left a message at our house this morning), I forgot to call after I picked up little man. We drive into the garden place, watch all the other moms and their children excitedly carrying their chicks out, grab our box and head inside where there are bins of the cute fluffy chicks waiting to be picked up (all of which little man is asking to hold). I walk proudly up to the table and when the man looks at our order, he very nicely lets me know that the breed we ordered did not get delivered today. They did not hatch on time and the ones that did hatch were roosters. I don't know who was more depressed leaving the store, me or little man. As I carried the not-so-happy toddler out of the store, he kept sternly telling me "chicken in there" and pointing to the box and proceeded to tell me this all the way home. I assured him all the way home that we will have chicks, just not today because they are still in the egg.



Should Mother Nature decide to send rain on my garden consultation tomorrow, I'll see you in the summer because I'll be giving up on spring!

Not All Roses

This would be the not-so-fun part of buying your milk raw. Don't get me wrong, I love the fact that I know the farmer, know what the cows are fed and that my son knows that his milk comes from a cow and not the grocery store. We have also had fun experimenting, even with the butter that I still haven't gotten right. The actual pasteurization does not take long at all, however, once you have heated the milk up, you need to cool it down in a cold water bath, while stirring to speed up the process. Not so much fun-and more time consuming than I would like it to be (although, honestly, it only takes about 15 minutes). I will admit it is still worth it though; and sometime this week I may try my hand at making mozzarella.