War

So far, our resident fox has taken out three of our chickens and one of the wild rabbits that used to frolic happily around our back yard. I went away for a few days, and came back to discover this in the mud room.

Apparently my husband is tired of cleaning up dead animals.

Sly Fox

I now truly understand why people refer to a fox as sly. This afternoon the chickens were all happily pecking at the ground that Andy had just spent the past two hours outside mowing, when disaster struck. Andy came in the house for 5 minutes to get a drink and trade off toddler duty, when we noticed our chickens crossing the road to the neighbors yard (they have never wandered out of our yard before!). Of course you can imagine the scene of us trying to grab our chickens out of the middle of the road before they are hit by passing cars and throwing them in the coop to go back for more. One of the of the nice passers-by kindly informed us that there was a fox in our backyard.

When we arrived in the backyard there was a mass of chicken feathers and a trail through the weeds behind the house. Andy followed the trail and found one dead chicken among the weeds and kindly disposed of it. There are still two chickens unaccounted for; we are hoping that they are in hiding and will return, but as the day has come to an end with no chickens in sight we have a feeling they have become a fox feast.

The four chickens we saved appear to have no interest in leaving the coop anytime soon and we are happy to oblige as we keep a close vigil over the coop.

Autumn and The Stupid Chickens

Before I introduce you to the new bunny, I need to tell you about the stupid chickens. I have some friends following the blog who eventually want to get chickens, so I figure I might as well share all the stupid stories.

Anyway, Andy had planned on making a ladder for the chickens this weekend, because over the past week or so their roosting instinct has kicked in and apparently the two roosts in there are too high for them, so they have been roosting on their nesting box. Not a place we want them to be roosting, since we eventually hope they will be laying eggs there. So, last night Andy comes in the house and tells me I need to come outside and help him with one of the chickens. Just having lost a bunny, I was initially a bit freaked out! (Of course I also freaked out this afternoon when one of them laid down to stretch this afternoon as well, something it has done since it was a chick.) Thankfully it was not a dead chicken, just a stupid chicken, that had managed to get itself stuck in the small space between the nesting box and the wall.

My wonderful husband spent his morning covering up the hole and making a ladder for them to roost on. He did not have enough wood from the bottom rung, so he used a branch that fell down in one of our big storms this week.

I even was able to get two of the chickens to humor me and sit on it for a picture.

OK, now for the moment you have all been waiting for........ Autumn our new bunny (Levi wanted to call her Guy, but I objected to naming the bunny after our recently deceased bunny).

For those of you ever looking to buy a bunny, there is a huge difference between people who know what they are doing and people who really do not.

1. They know the sex of the bunny you are buying (Autumn is a doe)


2. They give you some of their food to mix in with your food to help the bunny's digestive tract adjust.


3. They have advice for raising the bunny


4. And the place we went to had over 100 rabbits (OK, so there is a good chance that if did not buy Autumn, she would have been table bound). Of course now the new joke is that if she ends up being an aggressive bunny at least we know she will taste good :)

Autumn is shy but fairly playful. As you can see from the picture above, we put a box in her hutch, so she could hide from the crazy toddler in the house. She is more content flipping the box over and playing with it; of course she will hid behind it when the toddler comes screaming into the room. When the boys went to farm store to buy more food for the chickens this afternoon, they also bought a tube for her to play in.

I couldn't resist

Blueberry Picking

One of our favorite summer traditions is to go blueberry picking, at Owl's Head Farm with our friends. We always pick a night in which the Swing Peepers (Children's Music) are playing and join a few other families with toddlers for a night of blueberry picking and picnicking. A great time is had by all.

This year we choose a night with perfect weather, and oh I should mention that the farm is in a gorgeous location, down a dirt road and nestled on a hill in the woods.

We started out by laying our blankets and picnic down in an optimal location and then headed deep into the blueberry bushes. OK, so the toddlers ran up and down the aisles, but they had fun and believe it or not they have enough of an attention span to pick one quart with some help.

One of my friends asked if they weighed the toddlers before and after they leave. I think little man ate a whole quart before he actually filled his own bucket. And I should mention it was all he would eat today until we went to a baseball game and he saw the hot dogs.

My little free loader

We did manage to fill up our box and settle in for a wonderful night of picnicking and listening to music. I should also mention that between the little toddler climbing up on the counter to eat more blueberries, the blueberry grunt he made with mommy and the jam I made while he was sleeping, we have already managed to use up half of these. I would have made pie also, but we did not have enough shortening for me to make the crust. I'll do that tomorrow after we go and check out bunnies. Yes, little man and daddy are going to get a new bunny to replace Guy!

Poor Bunny

We came home tonight to find that bunny had passed away while we were out.

Bunny Update

We think the culprit is diet, although I am waiting for the final word for my cousin who is a vet. Apparently, a bunny can eat too much grass and should never eat lettuce. Although, I could have sworn we fed my bunnies lettuce when I was growing up. Apparently a domesticated bunnies digestive track is a bit different than a wild bunny and all those trips outside to munch on grass were not always a good thing. Who would have thought?



Anyway, the Guy is now on a diet of grain and hay and doing much better. The boys also finished assembling the rabbit hutch. Though, I thought Daddy would kill little man who wanted to be in there helping and right on top of him during the whole process, in addition to the Guy who was hopping around the kitchen checking things out. He really is quiet the social bunny. It was quiet the scene.

Bunny Problems

Our poor little bunny has been experiencing diarrhea the past day or so and it has not been pretty. Except for blow drying his little butt after I clean it, that has been kind of fun......

We are not sure what is wrong at this point, but we have pinned it down to heat or being weened to soon from his mom. I am hoping it is the heat, because we can and are controlling that one and there is a greater chance for survival. The second option is a little more bleak. I should have know better, than not to have asked how old the bunny was when we got it (I had two bunnies growing up and had to wait until they were ready before I was able to bring them home). My brain told me that anyone giving away bunnies would not give them away before they were ready. Stupid me, however, I could and hope I am wrong about that one.

I'll keep you posted and mean while, will hopefully be nursing the poor little guy back to health.

Plan Before You Garden

If there is one thing I have learned living in this house, it is planning skills. You see I am a jump in head first kind of gal, and I am I quickly finding that in the world of gardening this may not be the best approach. I have weeded an overgrown garden without putting ground cover down, just to have all the weeds come back in full force. I have transplanted flowers in hot weather, only to stress them out and make them look horrible for the rest of the summer. And now, I have chosen a not so great patch of land for my skimpy garden. You see I looked around the yard in the morning and said: "That looks like a good spot." The problem with this, is that the spot I choose only gets morning sun and it is close to the swampy area in our back yard, making the soil pretty dense. Last year we attributed the soil to hand tilling the ground and tilled(with a power tiller) in top soil and compost. It is still a pretty sad looking garden. Oh, and did I mention it is about as far away from a water source as you can get on our land? During the recent hot spell, having to carry bucket loads of water back and forth was less then desirable.



Thankfully this year (after we had already planted this years garden), I had a lady come in and do a garden consultation, for all of my gardens. What did she tell me "move the garden." Thankfully there was an area that had been overcome with Bishops Weed that she pointed out would be the perfect spot for raised beds and is wonderfully close to a water source.



And all that work Andy did on fencing in the garden was not done in vain, it is the perfect spot for berry bushes. We also have some vegetables, it is just not a flourishing garden.



So what did I learn?

1. Plan before you leap

2. Get a soil test (we will be doing this before we plant the berry bushes)

3. Don't hand till

4. Watch the garden all day to make sure you really have a sunny area (of course I should have known this because

5. Consider how far away from the water source you are.

Flowers With Spirit

I have to admit, my favorite flowers are the ones with spirit, even though they are hard to photograph and neither of these pictures do my flowers justice. If anyone can think of any other spunky flowers that grow in zone 4 let me know.

Bee Balm

Blessed Thistle

Hot Chickens

For those of you who do not live on the East Coast and do watch the news. It was HOT here last week. OK, maybe not as hot as it was for our southern friends and family, but you guys have air conditioning to hang out in.

In the heat and lack of movement, I learned a few things about my chickens. They will do anything they can to cool off, they love cucumbers, and chickens when they are hot pant like dogs. They will also come right up to you and pant, just to make sure you know that they are hot. They even managed to dig a hole under their chicken coop. Andy has since reinforced the coop side of the run so I don't have to try and lure chickens out from under the coop again.

Excuse me, it is hot in here!

Little man searching for the chickens in the knotweed. Poor things don't stand a chance with a toddler around who always wants to know what they are up to.

Slightly Impulsive

I may possibly be a tad impulsive, however, it gets worse when I am with family members who don't try and stop me from being impulsive, hence the latest addition to our family.

It all started out when little man and I went to the fish hatchery with my Aunt and stopped for ice cream and to pet the animals. In front of the store there was a crate with three free bunnies. What can I say, I am a sucker for a cute face and we were thinking about getting one for little man's birthday in March anyway. I just expedited the process (sorry Daddy). That, and there is a little man running around the house who loooves his new bunny.

Let me introduce you to Guy (named by the toddler in the household).

Whimsical Shops

While I have to admit I am not as adventurous as I would like to think I am, I am willing to take the advice of Vermont Life and Vermont magazines and step outside of my comfort zone to check out places I would not ordinarily go. Along the way, I have gone into some pretty neat places in Vermont and found some neat whimsical shops along the way.

The shop below is in Glover, Vermont. Had I not been looking for it, I would have driven right by and never even known it was there.

It was great. It had several homemade local products like salsa and apple cider doughnuts, which Little Man and I enjoyed on the Adirondack chairs they had out front by the river. They also had neat little whimsical gifts. The barn was totally open - no one manning it - and on a honor system. You wrote down what you took and put the money in a jar. It made for a nice relaxing morning followed by a good day with my extended family to follow.

Pick Your Own

I am a huge fan of eating locally, especially when it comes from my back yard. But when I am on the road, I don't always have access to my raspberry bushes for a fresh fruity snack. So, why not sample the local fare and support the local economy in the places we are traveling though? So imagine how happy I was when I saw this.....



Andy was not as happy about this as I was. However, it was pretty easy to get little man pumped up for cherry picking and on my side, and to annoy daddy into submission, and we stopped.

We actually learned quite a bit about cherry picking in the process (I'll let Andy have educational rights in his blog), and were highly encouraged by the nice lady who owns the place to test the cherries as we went along. We, of course, happily took her up on this one.

When we were finished, we had an ample supply of cherries to get us though the rest of our road trip.

Finally Got It Right!

I had pretty much given up on the whole yogurt thing; I just could not seem to get it right. And then the Burlington Free Press printed an article on making your own yogurt at home. The recipe was just slightly different than the one I had been using. I decided to give it one more try, and woke up in the morning to a beautiful jar of homemade yogurt.

Just add a little jelly and honey (I am not a big fan of plain yogurt and didn't have any fresh berries on hand) and enjoy.

OK, so it does not look as pretty as it tastes, but trust me - it was good.

Chicken Update:

Where should I start?.... The last update was a few weeks ago, and a lot has changed in the lives of our chickens. We waited to move the chickens outside until after our vacation (one of the local teenagers chickensat for us). When we left, our chickens were going through a funky adolescent phase. They looked horrible: half chick/half chicken. Poor things looked like they were having a really bad hair day. When we returned, not only were we happy they were still alive, but they actually looked like chickens again. Of course,being sick and tired of them in our kitchen and also feeling bad that they appeared to be cramped in the brooder, we immediately moved them outside to their coop. We are all much happier. And my wonderful husband even created a run for them for when we are working and don't want them free-ranging unsupervised. When they are free-ranging, they apparently find me ripping weeds out of the garden very fascinating.

So what have we learned so far?

1. While chicks may be cute, as they get bigger they stink and it is highly recommended that you keep them in a garage, mud room , or basement; basically any place other than the kitchen.

2. If you clean their butts, don't even tell chicken people that you are doing so; you will be laughed at, even if you heard it in a class and verified it by looking it up online.

3. When cleaning up the space the brooder was in, expect to find a million little chick feathers (that are incredibly hard to get rid of) and dust all over the place. Once again, I wouldn't recommend keeping them in the kitchen, it took me forever to clean this weekend.

4. The best form of entertainment can be gotten from dropping a cherry on the ground. They love them and will chase each other all over the place for the stupid thing.

5. Everyone that tells you that chickens won't wonder far from the coop if you wait until 1:30 to free range them is right. So far they have not gone much more than 5 feet from the coop.

6. They are still a lot of fun to have, and toddlers can actually be taught to play nicely with them, most of the time.......