Cow and chickens

Olivia and I went to Iowa City yesterday for another followup on her new eardrum. It ended up feeling like a real waste of 6 hours of driving. The doctor took a look in her ear, declared she had an ear infection, and sent us home with an augmentin prescription and some ear drops. We're to go back in 6 weeks.

Her ear troubles have not slowed her down any at learning the piano. She played two Christmas hymns in church Sunday for the offertory music and did a wonderful job! Then she came home and figured out Jingle Bells and Silent Night by ear.

Posting may be scarce this week as I'm spending time on the gifts I'm making and on cookie making and bread baking. I have to say that despite the crazy busyness of the season I am truly enjoying almost every minute of it, and managing to just be in the moment and not let things done or undone stress me out. Creating gifts and making food for people are two things that bring me a lot of joy.

I'm still ruminating on a post about Matt's coral. It's a difficult thing to capture in a picture, unless you happen to have a helicopter to get you a birdseye view. I may just have to draw a picture of it instead. Also still in the works is a post about the corncrib, to give us a chance to pick the brains of Christian and any other engineer-types reading this little blog about how to renovate it.

Hazy shade of winter

Last week ice was forming on Sugar Creek. Being a spring-fed creek, it's slow to happen. Some local history texts talk about a large spring on this farm, and tell that it was a stop for travelers to refresh themselves. I don't know the spring's location. It's no longer here, perhaps tiled away in the modern way of things.

Other texts suggest travelers not only stopped, but stayed. Our attached garage was once the summer kitchen, and there was a staircase that led up to the second story. That upper room was once divided into 3 tiny rooms - perhaps for boarders?

This week there's no sign of ice, with daytime temperatures pushing 50. The ducks are enjoying the open water, swimming, splashing and bathing despite the certain frigidity of the water. It's a blessing to be able to do chores wearing fewer layers this time of year. And yet the accompanying mud is maybe worse than the cold. At least we've not had any snow to speak of, to be melting and making matters worse.

I'm hoping we don't have a green Christmas.

Collie

This is one of our tomcats, Collie. (Named because he had the markings of a Border Collie when he was a kitten.)

All three of our one-year-old tomcats like to hang out in the chicken coop. It's relatively warm in there, there's fresh water, and mice. The chickens ignore the cats but the ducks don't care much for them so far, hissing and snapping when the cats come near.

I let the baby ducks out of the coop today. They hung out in and around the corn crib all day. When it was time to go back in for the night I could only get half of them to brave the ramp into the coop (by sprinkling feed up the ramp.) Hopefully the rest will follow suit tomorrow. For tonight they're bedded down in the alley of the crib.

Because Matt doesn't think the cattle get enough airtime...



I was actually taking pictures of the chickens hanging out with the calves, but this little panda-looking calf in the next picture is awful cute.

Duck tricks

Muscovey ducklings - so pretty!

Patti & Eric kindly gifted us with 14 partly-grown Moscovey ducklings and 3 adults (a male and 2 females) on Saturday. I shut the adults in our portable broiler chicken shed, so they wouldn't try and fly home right away. I put the babies in the chicken coop. The portable shed will be needed in a couple of months for Madeline's 4-H feeder pig project, and I didn't want to have to retrain the baby ducks on where to roost at night.

This is seriously inconveniencing the chickens, having the coop shut up 24/7 for a few days, and they're sure to let me know about it every chance they get.

Yesterday afternoon when I went out to check on the ducks, I opened the door to the shed holding the adult ducks and counted one...two... ... ... where is the third duck? How does a duck escape a locked building? I crawled around inside the shed, accusing the 2 ducks remaining of playing a trick on me. But there was no third duck hiding in the straw, ready to jump out and yell, Boo! Or, Hiss! (Muscovies hiss rather than quack.)

There are small vent holes at the top of each end of the shed, and I can only figure that she managed to fly up there and squeeze through. I went looking for her, and she was hanging out at the creek with our original 2 ducks. Acts like she's been here forever.

I'm finding out that ducks are much messier than chickens. I can't wait until their confinement is up and I can let the coop dry out - they've made such a mess with the water! But they're so beautiful, and quiet, and the way they "wag" their tail feathers is just way cute. They're easily forgiven for being messy.

Weekend Dog Blogging

This post is part of Weekend Dog Blogging hosted by Sweetnicks. Check there for the roundup later tonight.

We tried to include the dogs in the Christmas picture, but in the end this one didn't make the cut.



Ava's ears really do stand up straight like the Shepherd that she is, but for some reason whenever I point the camera at her she thinks she's in trouble and flattens her ears. Of course usually she gets in trouble for being on this couch. Ike (the Pyrenees), on the other hand, loves to pose for the camera. And he thinks he's a lap dog.

The outtake...

Wish list

Matt: So what would you like for Christmas?

Kelli: World Peace, and a fiddle

Matt:

Matt:

Matt:

Matt: Sounds easy enough

Our Layer Hens, Part 3

As promised, more chicken pictures!


Chickens on a roost. Like chicken-on-a-stick at the state fair, but without the deep fat frying.


A Partridge Cochin with her head tucked beneath her wing. A big round ball of feathers, and such pretty coloring!


A Buff Orpington roo all puffed out in the cold. He's got some frostbite on his comb and wattle. That's the disadvantage of breeds with larger combs and wattles, but he's one of those holdouts that refuses to roost inside the coop.


Chickens in the corncrib. I tend to pick breeds based on prettiness, not productivity. That's the whole reason I got layers in the first place - because they look pretty milling about the farm. The fact they lay eggs is just gravy, and if they lay enough extra that I can sell some is just gravy on gravy. Matt likes how they help clean up spilled hog and cattle feed, though I think the ducks are more adept at that.

If I were to get serious about egg production and making an income from it, I'd go with a whole flock of Gold Stars. They start to lay earlier than other breeds, are prolific layers of nice-sized brown eggs, have excellent feed conversion, nice tempered, handle the cold well, and are the best foragers of them all.

Next, at Peter's request, I'll show the corral design Matt came up with so that his wife (who does not get cows) will not get trampled. (Or, more often the case, he can run a steer into the trailer all by himself.)

Our Layer Hens, Part 2

So let's step inside the coop.



To one side of the room is the nest boxes, and the waters (sitting on heated bases right now). Also a black feed pan on the floor (in the lower right corner of the photo.)

Once in a while that pan gets flipped over. Imagine how loud I screamed and how high I jumped one time when I went to flip it upright and a rooster went running out from under it.

We were given this nice trough feeder on a stand


but they seem to prefer to eat out of the pan feeder on the floor. I suppose it's more natural, more like pecking the ground for food.

On the other side of the room is the roosting area


That tarp is supposed to be covering the ceiling, not hanging down in the middle of the roost. We tarped the ceiling last year, when we rounded them all up and shut them in for a few days to remind them where to lay eggs. But some little smarty-pants chickens had been getting on top of the tarp and laying eggs up there.

This fall when I went to clean out the coop Matt pulled that tarp down and can you guess what happened? Rotten eggs rained down on us and holy cow the smell! So now it's awaiting Matt to put it back up. In the meantime the chickens just roost around and under it.

Some of the chickens prefer to roost in the rafters of the crib.
How many chickens do you count in this picture?


As the weather gets colder some are forced to roost inside the coop, but there are always a few holdouts and I can't believe I've never found a frozen chickenball out there.

And then there are what I've taken to calling the separatists, who insist on roosting in the cattle shed with the pigs. (Yeah, we're multi-purpose around here.)

Tomorrow, Part 3! Which will probably just be some random gratuitous chicken pictures. Because we can never get enough chicken pictures, right?

Our Layer Hens, Part 1

It seems like most days lately I go to sleep thinking about farm stuff and wake up thinking about farm stuff. And some nights I spend half the night thinking about farm stuff instead of sleeping. I think it's just the time of year. A break from some of the more intense physical tasks gives the brain a chance to churn.

So this morning I woke up thinking that the outbuildings on this farm are like the slums, the ghettos of farm buildings. Every single one of them needs a bulldozer and a match. The insurance company refuses to cover them.

And then Christian left a comment in an earlier post asking for details of our laying hen setup.

And I thought, why not? It will at least be good for a few laughs.

Our layers are totally free range. Their homebase is supposed to be the corncrib:


This building appears to be reasonably sound. The cribbing holds it relatively square. But the cribbing also makes it difficult to do much useful with it. We had a carpenter out this spring thinking we could take out the cribbing and brace it from the top for support, then turn it into a decent farrowing/finishing building for the hogs. But his opinion was that it would also have to be braced from the bottom, which would then mean having some sort of floor, and we didn't want a floor in a hog building. (Any of you engineer types have an idea?)


Here's a look down the alley of the corncrib. You can see Matt's built a divider down the middle. This makes a useful chute for running cattle into the trailer, or into a headgate when doing vet work. Someday I'll show the pen and corral setup he designed for the cattle. It's made working cattle much easier.


In cold or wet weather the chickens like to hang out on this side of the crib during the day.

Their actual coop is the old grainery room at the southwest end of the crib. It was originally used for storing animal feed. This room has solid walls rather than the spaced out cribbing boards, giving it a little more protection from the elements, but is open at the top allowing good ventilation without being too drafty. Matt built a ramp up for the chickens, and cut a pop door at the bottom of the grainery door. This allows us to shut them in if needed, but we hardly ever do. During the winter I keep the big door shut and they use the pop door for in-and-out access.


So there's Part 1 of our laying hen setup. Are you laughing, or crying? Tomorrow I'll show you the inside of the coop.

Here are some pictures I took of a totally anonymous baby.
(Said for her father's benefit.)


Nobody can decide who she looks like, so I've taken to telling people that she looks like her auntie.
Might as well, none of my own kids look like me.







I wish I'd had this camera when my own kids were tiny.

Cold

Cold seems to be the recurring theme with bloggers here in the upper midwest. I think today's high was around 14, but worse than the cold was the wind at 20-25 mph. This picture shows the ice chunks that Matt breaks out of the pigs' water each day so that he can give them fresh water.

But overall everyone is taking the cold well. I take hot water out and make a mash for the chickens and ducks. Egg production has actually picked up just a little - from 2 to 4 to now 6 a day. Still, I should be getting way more than that. But in this bitter cold I don't hold it against them.