Chix Pix

The broilers were 3 weeks old Wednesday. They look a bit disheveled at this point. Adolescent. This was them just a week ago. This was them just 3 weeks ago.

Tomorrow is moving day, out to pasture. It's so fun to watch them on pasture the first time. Chicken bliss. Fresh air, green grass, bugs and worms.

The pullets and roos are feathering out nicely, too. This was them just 3-1/2 weeks ago.


Buff-laced Polish roo. His "hat" looks like dandelion fluff.


Partridge Cochin pullet. Such pretty coloring, love the feathers on her legs.


Golden Polish pullet. Such a fancy girl.


Salmon Faverolle roo. The 5-toed bird. He also has feathers on his legs.


An Araucana pullet showing off her perching skills. I can't believe how huge the Araucanas are!

Today I Am...

Working...which gets harder as the weather gets nicer. One more month of full-time and then I get to work part-time for the summer. My boss is cool.

Farming...
The scale inspector wasn't able to come today, so it will probably be the week after next. The chix are ready to move out to pasture this weekend, but it's been so cold here lately I'm not sure. Then again I remember having this same worry last spring and they were just fine. Still waiting on Wild Thing to have her calf.

Making...a huge list for our trip to the "big city" tomorrow night. We even got a babysitter! So it's a big date night to Fleet Farm for us!

Listening...to "What I Got" by Sublime . Love this song, I've downloaded 3 different versions of it. And the part that really cracks me up is:

I don't get angry when my mom smokes pot
Hits the bottle and goes right to the rock

I guess because the picture of my mom doing that is just, well, not her. Lucky for me!

Snacking...Planter's Dry Roasted Pistachios. They're heart healthy! But I wake up in the night worrying that the squirrel who lives in our attic is going to somehow find his way into my office and raid my stash.

Thinking...about this quote, taken from a speech by Anna Quindlen.

"Nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great ever came out of imitations. The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself...

Set aside what your friends expect, what your parents demand, what your acquaintances require... Then look, every day, at the choices you are making, and when you ask yourself why you are making them, find this answer: for me, for me. Because they are who and what I am, and mean to be...

If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all...

If you can bring to your children the self that you truly are, as opposed to some amalgam of manners and mannerisms, expectations and fears that you have acquired as a carapace along the way, you will give them, too, a great gift. You will teach them by example not to be terrorized by the narrow and parsimonious expectations of the world, a world that often likes to color within the lines when a spray of paint, a scrawl of crayon, is what is truly wanted."

You can read the full text of this speech here.

Virginia Bluebells

Mertensia virginica
Borage family (Boraginaceae)


Each spring the Virginia bluebells wash a certain hill over at my parents' farm in blue. It's become an annual tradition to take the kids' picture on "bluebell hill".


The farm I grew up on is one of the prettiest farms around. Nestled amongst the bluffs of the Big Cedar River it is surrounded by 4 different landscapes: the river directly across the road to the south; corn fields to the west; prairie-like pasture on top of the bluff to the north; and wooded hills to the east.

My brother and I spent summers playing in the river, building tree houses and forts in the woods, following the deer paths, hunting mushrooms, riding our 3-wheeler on the gravel road, and exploring little caves in the bluff. I loved to go up to the pasture and recreate that opening scene from Little House on the Prairie - bounding like Melissa Gilbert in a long dress through the tall grass. Really :) I could write a whole post on my love of all things Laura Ingalls Wilder.

My mom would send me to school with bluebells for my teacher. And, a little later in spring, lilacs - cut ends wrapped in a wet paper towel and surrounded by tinfoil.

More pictures from Sunday...

Holy Moly

as Rafe would say. Yesterday afternoon I headed out for a walk around the farm, camera in hand. The first scene I came upon was a hen running about with a mouse dangling from her beak. The other 26 hens were in hot pursuit, trying to steal this tasty morsel from her. Before I could point and shoot she swallowed the mouse whole in 3 gulps! I'd never seen anything like it.

I would have waited another week or two to let the cows out to pasture. But I guess they begged and begged and talked Matt into it. He's a pushover. They were so happy to be on fresh grass again.


With the cows out Matt got to work cleaning up their winter area. These lovely piles of cornstalks, hay and manure are removed from the lot, piled up along the east side of our property, and allowed to compost. Come fall we'll spread the compost on the garden.


Our Canada geese pair had some friends stop by.


The stockers getting their daily buckets of corn.

Another Step

This process of getting our farm business going is like putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes I can't believe it will ever happen. My "feet" feel like lead, like I can barely make the next step. And then we do take one more little baby step. And we're that much closer to getting there.

Today I spoke with the Iowa Bureau of Weights and Measures about getting our scale inspected and certified. Can I just say I was "wowed" by the service? Within 15 minutes of emailing them an inspector called me and we talked for 1/2 an hour. I learned a lot. He will be up next Wednesday to do the inspection.

One more step down. How many more to go? Not sure. But the next one is to develop some labels so that I can attach them to the application for our food warehouse permit, which I want to mail in at the end of next week. That will take some time at the computer, a meeting with our processor. Baby steps.

Overheard...

The cookies are ready to go in the oven.

Cookies?! This is a cooking show? I thought this was an evil plan!

Yes, right! My cookies...er, evil plan...is ready to hatch!

(set timer for 8 minutes)

Behold my beautiful cookies...er, evil plan! It is ready! Mu-wah-ha-ha-ha-ha!

...Madeline's 1-girl skit while baking chocolate chip cookies after school today. The things she comes up with! I'm always asking, "Where did you hear that?", because it sounds like something she's heard on TV. But she makes all this stuff up. Gotta dig her imagination!

Lined Up at the Buffet

The broiler chicks are 2 weeks old now. They're newly-sprouted wing feathers shine bright and white against the yellow baby down that still covers their bodies. Another 9 days in my garage, and then they'll have enough feathers to be put out in the pasture.

I hope to put up some current pics of our other breeds of chicks soon. It requires a team effort because they're much flightier than the broilers.

It's rained off and on the past 3 days, and the temperatures are considerably cooler. Tomorrow night they're talking 30 degrees for a low, so after work tomorrow we'll need to cover the delicate new strawberry plants.

Happiness is...

Rain, right after you've put seeds in the ground

Beef Stew in the crockpot and Seven Grain Bread in the bread machine

Two new pairs of shoes: these cuz I needed them and these cuz I didn't.

Monday

A crazy day, but a good one nonetheless.

After work our carpenter showed up and we talked about the porches some more.

While I was getting supper together Matt planted 50 feet of onion sets.

After supper Olivia and I planted 2 kinds of carrots and a mixture of radishes.

It was nice to have some one-on-one time with each other. We talked about the tooth fairy and whether or not she "recycles" teeth to new babies. We talked about tornados. We talked about whether we'd rather be a chicken, who has no teeth but only lives 9 weeks, or a person, who gets to live a long time but has teeth and cavities. Can you tell we had a trip to the dentist today and Olivia had a couple of cavities? "Mom, if you tell me to brush my teeth and I don't do it, ground me for a week, okay?"

So with all of the things we've planted in the past 4 days, I hope we get the rain they're predicting!

Now I've hauled 6 or 7 loads of laundry up 2 flights of stairs and I'm off to get it all folded and put away before I collapse for the night. Night!

Welcome, Art and Socks!

2 more calves this week, only 1 to go. As we'd hoped, these older cows have this birthing thing down pat. No problems.

Art - because his face looks like it was done with a paint brush.


Socks - because he has white "socks" on his rear feet. Not terribly original, but then again it's usually a cat or horse name.


This afternoon we did some planting - 200 potatoes, 85 strawberries, mesclun mix, 4 apple trees and 3 raspberry bushes. Madeline was our big helper today, planting most of those strawberries behind Matt digging the holes.

Rafe has been banished from the garden after he un-planted the peas and trampled the spinach bed. He now has his own garden to dig in, outside of the main garden.

The eagles are still around. Matt was within 2 fence posts of one today. At this point I'm wishing they'd move on. We'll be moving our little chicks outside in just 2 weeks and I don't want any of them being carried off.

A beautiful, productive, and tiring day. Time for something cold to drink. With alcohol in it.

A Good Day

Today was one of those days where everything was just right with the world.

As Rafe and I were leaving to take him to the babysitter this morning, a train was going by. We just stopped to watch it. There was no freaking out about getting in the car right now we are late! Lately "living in the moment" has been difficult for me, but there it was this morning.

Then I had my car serviced, and when I picked it up the dealership guys had vacuumed it. Anyone who regularly transports 3 kidlets in their automobile can attest to what a treat this is. I'm thrilled whenever I manage to clean the stuff out of it - sippy cups, discarded sucker sticks, articles of clothing that have been stripped en route (how do they do that while strapped into a carseat?). But to have it vacuumed...ahh, pure bliss.

On my way home with newly-vacuumed car, I stopped at the mailbox and there was a piece of mail addressed to Sugar Creek Farm. Cool! It somehow makes us more official, to actually have people acknowledging our existence on an envelope.

Mid-afternoon our carpenter stopped to discuss what projects we're wanting him to do. He told me we're at the top of his list and our projects will come before everyone else's this year. How often do you hear that?

When Matt got off work he and Troy gave the garden its first tilling. Wow. The soil was like butter. Soft and fluffy, with a nice amount of moisture.

I made pizza for supper, which is something I usually do on Friday nights. But this time of year, with all the busyness, we too often end up resorting to carryout pizza. I perservered and came through with the homemade pizza.

After supper I actually got to put some seeds in the ground. This is at least 2 - if not 6 - weeks earlier than we got to last year. It was so much fun, so restorative to get my hands in the dirt. Got the first succession of garden and snap peas sown, and the first of the spinach.

Once it got dark we all sat around the living room, eating ice cream, and watched the end of Sixteen Candles.

A really good day.

Eat, Drink and Be Married

Tonight I got together with a group of friends I've been part of for I think eleven years now. We meet once a month and play Bunko, taking turns hosting in our homes.

We decided to do something special for our final get-together until fall, so we had a Do-It-Yourself Murder Mystery at the fabulous Blue Belle Inn Bed & Breakfast in St. Ansgar, Iowa. The setting of the mystery surrounded two young lovers - Virgen White & E.Z. Ryder - who have eloped to the "Love Me Tender" wedding chapel in Las Vegas. The bride's father objects, crashes the wedding, and winds up dead on the floor with a bullet in his heart. But who fired the shot?



We had wonderful food and a lot of laughs. This may become an annual tradition!

Today I Am...

Working...trying to make AcuCOBOL and the Excel object library work together. A strange union, exciting when it works, ultra-frustrating when it doesn't.

Listening...to selected songs from Heart's Greatest Hits. What can I say, I dig chicks that rock. How about that keyboard solo in Magic Man? I've gotta sit down and learn that one of these days. For current chicks that rock, check out The Donna's. But the girls stole my CD and I can't find where they've hid it.

Farming...I thought I was going to be helping Matt build a bull pen tonight, but he just about got it done himself last night. I hope this one holds - in the 3 years we've had a bull on the farm we've not been successful at keeping one contained yet. I need to give the chicks some more bedding, and work on the garden layout, too.

Taking...Claritin-D. Ah, allergy season!

Cooking...Broiled wild salmon, steamed broccoli, and rice au gratin for supper.

Missing...
my friend Susan. I'm the one with the small hair. Dig our matching shades?


Thinking...about choices.

"Choice by choice, moment by moment, I build the necklace of my day, stringing together the choices that form artful living." ~ Julia Cameron

"It's when we're given choice that we sit with the gods and design ourselves." ~ Dorothy Gilman

"Be unafraid to take a chance. Our lives are woven from the choices we make." ~ Flavia

"I shouldn't precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can't very well get out of it." ~ Vincent van Gogh

"Life is a sum of all your choices." ~ Albert Camus

"There are always two choices, two paths to take. One is easy. And its only reward is that it's easy." ~ unknown

"Choice. The problem is choice." ~ Neo, from The Matrix Reloaded

Flarp

What do you get when you send 2 girls to Fleet Farm to buy cattle panels with their father? A can of Flarp and a whole lotta fun.

I think this is Matt's strategy for keeping the boys away when the girls are older. Make them as well-versed in the fine art of disgusting noises as possible. He won't have to drive the boys away with a gun. The girls themselves will drive the boys away with their flatulance skills.

So far, though, it doesn't seem to be working. Madeline has her first "real" boyfriend this year. It's not like there's much to having a boyfriend when you're in the 4th grade. There's no dating, no kissing, no hand-holding even. You buy each other candy. You might sit together at lunch sometimes.

It's not working with Olivia, either. Last year - in kindergarten - the teacher had to have a talk with one of Olivia's suitors who insisted on holding her hand in the lunch line and sitting beside her with his arm around her shoulders at circle time. Even though she's our loudest child at home, at school she's very very quiet. So her teacher intervened on her behalf and gave the boy a lesson in "personal space".

I wonder if this will be one of the things they remember about their childhood - making their dad laugh out loud and their mom roll her eyes with a can of Flarp.

Our New Friend Troy

Friday the garden was in good shape for discing so Matt and Rafe did a little farming.

Saturday as soon as I got home from class we went to Tractor Supply and bought a 6.0HP Troy-Bilt rear tine tiller with counter rotating tines. A long longed-for addition to the farm. Matt says, "Soon it will be me and Troy in the garden."

Today Matt and I spent three and a half hours putting up cattle panel trellis for the peas and cukes, and surrounding the garden with chicken wire. Then the hens had to be booted out of the garden, so we recruited the girls to round them up.



I caught 2 and Olivia caught the rest. She's quite the farmhand. Madeline just didn't have any luck at it.

By then it was suppertime, so we didn't get so far as to plant anything.

The hens eat less and less of the feed I put out, now that bugs and worms are more plentiful again. I only put out a pound today. And they're laying more eggs again - 24 eggs today out of the 27 hens. Now to get some egg sales!

Happy Trails

Yesterday we sold Kickapoo, aka "the watch horse". It was a sad day. Olivia cried. I cried. But I know he'll be happier with his new owners.

The plan when we got him was to let him hang with the cows. Unfortunately he wasn't down with that plan. He wouldn't let the cows up to the bale feeder to eat hay. He chased the calves right through the fence and out of the pasture. He failed at plays well with others.

So he was relegated to his own little fenced-off piece of the pasture. He wasn't able to go out in the main pasture to graze. We don't have enough acres here to keep him separated. It just wasn't the happiest life for a horse, which isn't in keeping with our philosophy about raising animals.

He was also very aware of the fact that we don't know what we're doing when it comes to horses. This was made obvious when his future owners came to have a look at him. They saddled him up and rode him right down the driveway. When I had tried that he'd only go so far, then turn on a dime and back to the barn at a dead run.

But he served his purpose in the months he was here. He was a kind and gentle old guy who loved kids. Perfect for the girls to learn how to be safe around horses. I saw this yesterday as Olivia was brushing him one last time. He started to walk away from her and she moved away from his backend. It is instinctive for her now, something she learned in her time with him. Now the girls know how much work is involved in taking care of a horse. And they'll really know when Matt has them muck out Kickapoo's old stall!

He's going to a 15-year-old girl who will be working him and training him for the 4-H horse show. So we'll be able to go and watch him at the county fair this summer, which will be cool.

Happy Trails, Kickapoo.

~

When I went out to check on the chicks before bed last night they were all asleep, in an almost perfect figure 8.

Peeps Galore

Drove down to Hoovers this morning and picked up the broiler chicks - 102 of them.

Box-o-chicks


When I get chicks home I take them out of the box one-by-one, counting as I go, and dip each one's beak in water to get it started. Within minutes they're running around as if, well, as if the sky is falling. And they are loud! Between the running about and the constant, loud cheeping it's like a chick enactment of the floor of the NYSE.

As I predicted, I'm obsessively checking on them every hour. Good thing, too. Just now - after only one hour - I found two that somehow had half their bodies in the drinking water, wet and cold and shivering. Several others were also partially wet and shivering. Chicks do not handle cold and wet well at all. I took the two worst ones and put them under the lamp in the pullets' brooder where they'll have less competition for the heat. At this point I don't know if they'll make it or not. The others I moved underneath the lamp in their own brooder to warm up again.

Broilers are one of the few types of livestock where the term hybrid vigor doesn't seem to apply. Usually crossbred animals (and vegetables, for that matter) are heartier than purebred stock, less prone to illness and disease. Cornish Cross broilers, on the other hand, are delicate. They'll die over the littlest thing. Too hot, too cold, too drafty, too wet, too dry, not enough feed, too much feed. Things really have to be just right for them.

So for the rest of today - and probably tomorrow, too - I'll be adjusting the height of the brooder lamps, checking feed and water levels, and just observing for signs of trouble.

Bellied up to the bar

Practicality

I'm wishing I had something philosophical, something poetic, something thought-provoking to write tonight. But this time of year my thoughts and activities are necessarily directed towards the practical, the execution of plans made. The class is focusing now on accounting, and budgeting. I imagine there are CPA's who might disagree but in my mind there's not much poetry in accounting. (However I do happen to think there can be poetry in computer programming :)

Today I got the broilers scheduled for butchering on June 8th. I feel a bit sad when I think that their deaths have been arranged before they've even hatched. But while they're with us they will experience the happiest, most chickeny life we can manage to give them.

My main goal with the chickens this year is to decrease death loss in the broilers. I'm trying to get it down to 10% or less. Last year was the first year we raised chickens. We raised 2 batches of one hundred broilers, and will do so again this year. Last year's death loss was 20% on the first batch, mostly in the brooder phase. I made some adjustments to the feed and feeding schedule and lost zero in the brooder phase with the second batch. Most of the death loss in that batch came in a single day, which we will forevermore refer to as Black Tuesday.

I've been significantly more relaxed with the 25 chicks we received Monday than I was with any of the chicks last year. But the pullets and roosters are just for fun. The broilers are the money birds, so we'll see if I revert to obsessively monitoring their every waking hour after they arrive on Thursday.

Happy and Blue 2's comment about the chicks being airmailed reminded me of a story. The Amish around here don't bother to meet the mail truck in town to pick up their chicks. My dad is a rural mail carrier. He carries the chirping box around the route in his car and delivers the chicks to the Amish at their homes with the rest of their mail. They take them right in the house and put them by the stove to warm up. I wonder how long they keep them in the house.

I did receive a bit of poetry yesterday in the mail. (Delivered by my dad, of course!) Poetry in a soap, via Natural Impulse. Yummy, yummy! Not only is Karen a talented soapmaker, she is also a gifted writer and photographer. Her blog is my daily dose of poetry.

Peeps

Matt went to town before 7:00 this morning and met the truck that brings the mail into Osage from Mason City. The chicks survived the trip A-OK. It's an amazing journey - hatched Friday at McMurray Hatchery in Webster City, Iowa. Air mailed on Saturday. Arrived in Mason City, Iowa Sunday morning. Trucked to Osage Monday morning.

There is something hypnotizing about them. I can sit for hours listening to the quiet chirping, watching them, already knowing to "scratch" in the dirt for food, running as fast as their little legs will carry them (which is really fast!).

A group pic


Matt has some kind of power over chicks. They fall asleep in his hands.


Columbian Wyandotte - these will grow up to be white birds with gray/black speckled tail feathers and wingtips.


Bufflaced Polish - one of my roosters. He will turn a golden color. You can already see his "hat".


White Crested Black Polish - a freebie from McMurray's. He will be black with a white hat.


Salmon Faverolle - another rooster. He has 5 toes instead of 4, and feathers on his legs.


Golden Polish - another "hatted" breed.

Rock-n-Roll Baby

And I'm one proud rock mama :)

Function = Beauty

Things that are simply made, yet their function makes them worth their weight in gold. This is art, this is beauty to me. Yes, I'm in love with my new seed starting rack.



The cabbages, brussels sprouts, and early tomatoes are germinating.



Today started on a sad note. Sarah laid on one of the piglets and killed him. Now we're down to 7.

After church and lunch, Matt and the girls and the neighbor girl built fence and separated the piglets from Sarah for weaning. I worked on sanitizing chick feeders & waters, and seed starting trays & cell packs. This is an activity I'm going to reevaluate - it took a long time. While it's nice not to have to spend money on new seed starting supplies each year, there comes a point where your time becomes more valuable than the cost of new supplies. So next winter I'll research my options.

After that we set the broiler and pullet brooders up. We got a call from the Mason City post office at 8:00 this morning saying the chicks were there. We could come get them if we were there by 10:00, or they'd be at the Osage post office at 7:00 Monday morning. With the price of gas what it is we opted to wait and pick them up here tomorrow morning.

All of this in between taking loads of laundry to dry at my parents' house because our dryer broke down last week. Hopefully the fix-it guy will be here in the a.m.

I'm so tired I don't think I'm even typing coherent sentences. Better get off to bed, need to get up early to unpack chicks before the girls go to school and I start my workday.

Expect to see pics of the peeps tomorrow!

Preparation

We're heading for The Big City tonight. Need to get stocked up on chick brooding supplies - 200 pounds of "meat maker" feed for the broilers, 50 pounds of chick starter for the pullets. 8 bales of wood chips, 3 red brooder bulbs, and maybe some extra chicken wire. The cardboard brooder guard came in the mail today. That should carry us until we can make another city trip in 4 weeks. The pullets should come in the mail Monday, and I'll drive down to Hoover's Hatchery on Thursday to pick up the broilers.

Petey and her Mama - Petey is such a pretty girl!


Happy Weekend!