Gardening, Inspired by Gloria

I've been embracing my inner Gloria Dump lately. ( In case that name doesn't ring a bell for you, she's a character in one of my favorite children's books, "Because of Winn-Dixie" by Kate DiCamillo.  If you haven't read it or even watched the movie, I highly recommend it.  Anyway, Gloria Dump is a lady who has a wild overgrown garden full of everything.)  A few Sundays ago, we were working in the yard (one of my favorite things), tilling up some rough spots and planting grass seed.  While we had the tiller out, I asked Matt to please make a pass along the edge of the chicken coop.  The ground is so packed from foot traffic right there and its too shady for grass to grow, so on a whim, I made a little shade garden.

My masterpiece

It's really not much, but to me it was a really big deal.  Not because I divided some shade perennials that were already growing and moved them, but because I, by my own self, used power tools to make a wooden border around my little bed.  Yep, I made three cuts with a circular saw.  My first ever.  Turns out it's not so hard or scary.  Matt may regret teaching me how to work this particular device at some point in the future, Lord knows what I'll come up with...

So, anyway, it's just a little three sided box made out of some old rough sawed pine (leftover siding boards from our house) that I cut and screwed together to keep feet of all sizes away from the edge of the chicken coop.  It is filled with hostas, bleeding hearts and violets.  The plants are a bit droopy in the picture because I had just moved them and because the bleeding hearts are already done for the year.  I found the top to an old chicken waterer and felt that it needed to take up residence in my chicken coop garden.  The other thing in there is a white metal dishpan/shallow bucket thing with some big rocks in it.  All this stuff was just laying around, so I spent zero dollars to make my chicken coop just a little jazzier.  Someday, I'd love to have it be all spiffed up with flowers and art and neat stuff like that.  I feel like I'm one step closer to the coop of my dreams.  (I know, cough crazy lady cough).

The ladies wondering what all the commotion is.

My other project of the day was to do something with this great old enamelware dishpan I got for my birthday.  I love old enamelware.  It reminds me of my grandma.  This dishpan looked like the perfect vessel for growing something in.  That's the beauty of containers, I can either cook in them or grow something in them.  My two favorite things. :)

A good place for a gnome nap.

As it happens I was also working on spiffing up another container garden I have next to my clotheslines.  This little dishpan fits just perfect right underneath it.  Being a shallow container, I wanted it to go somewhere shady so I don't have to water it every 30 minutes.  So, I needed more shade plants.  Small shade plants.  Out came my trusty trowel.  We went around the hosta beds to see what was growing in with them.  I found a really neat vine, which I'm sure is some kind of weed, but I think it's pretty.  There were also violets and some red clover.  Oh and some moss.  Matt hates moss.  His dad hates violets.  They think they're a pain and they ruin the lawn.  I think violets are pretty and moss is so soft to walk on.  So, I was a renegade and purposely cultivated moss and violets.  To some, my little  container probably looks like a rusty old bucket of weeds.  To my inner Gloria Dump, it is just right.  Besides, if the plants freeze out this winter, I'm not out anything.

Now that you've seen my creations and inspirations, what makes your garden grow?

"Weeds are flowers too...Once you get to know them"  -AA Milne

The Runaway Rooster

Friday night I went to shut the chicken coop and noticed that our rooster was missing.  I looked all over thinking that he was accidentally locked up in the garage or something. When I couldn't find him, I started to feel guilty that I left the door open too long and turned my  chickens into a drive through meal for a hungry critter.  Thinking that he had come to an untimely end, I went to bed feeling a bit sad.

I woke up Saturday morning hoping to see him pecking around in the yard.  I didn't see him, but I did hear him.   Looking like some kind of vagrant, I set out in yesterday's clothes rattling a bucket of corn.   I walked down the road and came up our back trail and still hadn't seen him.  Then I heard him again and followed the sound to the neighbor's boat shed.  With the T-Roy the rooster located and safe, I headed home to get Matt and some tools.

A bit later, we set off down the road.  Natalie on her bike, Joey wearing his "fire tiger" boots (Natalie's old neon rainbow cheetah print rubber boots which he is positive are really boys boots), me pulling the wagon with a cat carrier and a fishing net in it and Matt walking along beside me with his big gloves on, we really were a sight to behold.  It was a regular parade.

It felt a bit like being in a Ray Stevens song.  "So there I was" with a fish net in my hands, chasin' a runaway rooster around the neighbor's yard.  Two adults and two small children running around in circles after a ten pound chicken for the better part of an hour.  At one point, he hid under the porch and needed the persuasion of a water hose to come out.  I bet the neighbor felt like he got front row seats at the circus.

In the end, we gave a wet rooster a wagon ride home and returned him to his coop full of waiting hens.  The story has a happy ending, but I have to say that this really not how I expected to start my long weekend.

Hello Sunshine!

As I mentioned in my last post, we've been spending more time outside now that the weather is nice.  These mild, sunny days seem like a reward for making it through the long snowy winter.

The seeds Natalie and I planted a few months ago have done remarkably well.  As in, they GREW!  This has never happened for me before.  A few days ago, I moved them out to a makeshift cold frame to harden off.  Some of the biggest ones were ready to plant, so they went into Natalie's little barrel garden.  The big garden isn't ready yet.

Natalie's little barrel garden with grape tomatoes,
cucumbers, peppers, nasturtiums , zinnias and creeping  jenny (on the left).

The chicks are completely feathered out and have moved into the coop with the big chickens.  Egg production is up.  Probably as high as we've ever had.  We've been getting about  6-8 eggs every day and we have twelve adult hens.  I'm pretty sure that my dear little Peg doesn't lay anymore, so I figure eleven layers.  Some of them are pretty old too. So, not too bad.

Our little ladies peeking out into the yard.  The one in front is a Rhode Island  Red
and the stripey one is a Marans.  They are roughly half grown.

The flowers are coming up.   A cluster of yellow mini daffodils bloomed all last week, and the regular daffodils are in bloom at the moment and I think there will be bleeding hearts very soon.  The real treat is going to be when the crab apples and lilacs bloom.  They make the whole neighborhood smell wonderful.

I even found ants already hard at work on peony buds this morning.  I love peonies.  Maybe even as much as  Matt loves them, and I'm so happy to have them again after so long.  (We used to have peonies growing all along the side of the house and they got ruined by a careless contractor).

If you look closely, you can see tiny red ants working their way around the bud.  Yay, peonies!

Spring at Last

I think I can safely say that it is finally Spring.  Since I last posted, a few feet of snow have melted, fallen, and melted again.  We have lots of bare ground in our yard and experienced our first rainfall of the Spring this morning.  The birds are slowly returning.  I saw this confused looking robin from our living room window last week.  I like to think it was asking the red squirrel what's going on.

In my head, their conversation goes something like this:
Robin says to squirrel "What's with the snow?  I heard it was all melted?"
Squirrel says to Robin "That was last week.  You missed it."

We've been busy during this time of waiting for green grass and sunshine.  We got an invite from some friends of my Dad's to go see their newborn calves.  A visit to a farm is always fun for us. We met a day old calf and her ornery mama, two big dogs, some bunnies, a flock of chickens and a duck.  The kids had a blast!  And, I asked them a million questions about their chicken and rabbit setups.

The General leads Matt and the kids into the birthing pen.

She does not look happy to see us.

We celebrated Easter.  The kids dyed eggs, we went to Easter Mass and out to brunch with Matt's family.

We've had a few birthdays in the family.  Joey turned 4 and had a party at the local bowling alley the same weekend as Matt's sister, Tina celebrated her birthday.  Their birthdays are two days apart and both of them were born on Good Friday.

We got our spring chicks. We added five Rhode Island Red pullets, five Marans pullets, one Buff Orpington, and one Brown Leghorn to the flock this year.  I am especially excited for the Marans because we've never had them before and they lay eggs that are very dark brown.  We've lost a few hens since the last time we bought chicks and a few more are getting pretty old and rickety and may not make the year, so its time to add some new ones.  I hope to add two more chicks this year also.  If I can get to L&M when they have them, I'd like to get a couple of Buckeye pullets.  They are a reddish brown chicken that looks much like a Rhode Island Red, but they were developed in Ohio and have a "propensity for catching mice."  I'm all for anything that eats mice.

One little Rhode Island struck a pose for me.  She kind of looks like Paris Hilton.

We have begun cleaning up from the winter both indoors and out.  Matt finally took down the deer bones that have been making our front yard look like a scene from a horror movie and I've been organizing.  We've finally taken down the Christmas/winter decorations from the porch and replaced them with more colorful cheery warm weather things.

Thrifted buckets, crate and flower art.  The chicken and silk flowers are from Walmart.
The red thing is a piece of sidewalk chalk that happened to be laying there.

  

The spring flowers are starting to peek up through their blanket of leaf mulch.  Seeing the peonies coming up always makes me smile.

I see a few more crowns than last year.  This is promising!

I've tried several new recipes.  Cinnamon Roll Cake is heavenly.  The recipe says to serve it warm, but I think it tastes better the next day.  Chicken and Dumpling Casserole got mixed reviews.  We'll see how the Rutabaga and Carrot Mash goes over tonight.  It looks tasty and Joey informed me this morning that he just loves rutabagases, they're from Canaba you know.

I've been doing some thrifting.  In my travels, I've found some clothes for the kids, a few more vintage bowls for me,  toss pillows for the living room, some metal and ceramic containers to serve as planters and several books for me to read.  I also picked up a family size George Foreman grill and a waffle iron for very reasonable prices.

I hosted my card swap group over the weekend. There are five of us in the group and we meet every other month to share cards.  We each take a turn hosting, have a potluck lunch, stamp and gab.  Its nice relaxing girl time.  And, the cards are always beautiful.  I'm very happy with this last bunch.

We've also checked out the new Cherry Berry frozen yogurt place in town, (it was ok, but over priced and not enough tables), been to the public library, had some play dates and a sleepover with the neighbor kids.  

Springtime is getting off to a good start.  I just hope it doesn't decide to be winter again until about mid-December.

Here's to Sunshine! :)

A Chicken in a People House

Last Monday afternoon I went out to check on the chickens and found one of our ladies in rough shape.  She was huddled up in the corner and her beak was open with a piece of ice in her mouth.  After a second look, I realized that her mouth was stuck open and that piece of ice was keeping her from closing her beak.

With no other warm place to put her, I brought her in the house.  She spent the rest of the day in a clear rubbermaid tote lined with straw guzzling water and having stare downs with the cat.  By the time bedtime came, she had drank nearly 6 cups of water.  

When she came in, she could not stand and was definitely in distress.  My first thought was that she had an egg broken inside of her, as we have lost hens that way in the past.  But first I had to address the ice in her beak which went away pretty quickly when I offered her a bowl of lukewarm water.  I was surprised at just how much water she drank.  

The next thing I did was examine her vent.  The feathers around her "area" were all clumped up so I cleaned them as best I could with a soft cloth and warm water with a few drops of dish soap in it.  At first she didn't seem to mind my hand being back there, but after a few minutes she had had enough and wanted me away from her nether region.  I did get her cleaned up enough to see that her vent was open and healthy looking.

She spent the night in her makeshift nest by the stove and never tried to escape.  By mid morning on Tuesday, she was standing up and looking pretty good, so I gave her some oats.  She pecked at them a bit, but when offered some of Joey's soggy raisin bran, she perked right up.

Hoping that she was recovered enough to re-join her flock, we put her back in the coop before leaving for work.  She seemed fine when I checked on her later that day and this morning again when I went out.

I am left wondering what caused the distress.  The obvious culprit is the weather.  The cold was brutal for several days.  I have put dishpans full of snow in the coop since it is impossible to keep water in its liquid form out there and have tried adding a bit of water to their mash to keep them hydrated.  Whatever the cause, at least the story has a happy ending.

The Farm News Report

It is hard to believe that it has been SEVEN weeks since I sat down and wrote on my poor neglected blog.  As I think about what to write, I smile to myself thinking that our daily goings on sound like the Farm & News Report at Noon that I used to watch with my Grandma.

Two days after my last post, we were surprised with a litter of baby bunnies.  The biggest part of the surprise was that we thought we had two female rabbits.  Clearly we were mistaken.  I have never had rabbits as pets until this past summer when we got them for the kids.  I panicked.  I Googled everything I could think of to get information about how to tell who was who and what to do with these bunnies.  I was trying to find homes for six of the seven babies, knowing we couldn't keep all these rabbits.  Sadly, finding them homes became a non-issue when they all died four days later.  We still don't know what happened.  We do know that the mother rabbit is young, there were in fact TWELVE babies (!!)  And that she probably became stressed when we removed the male from the hutch. (Did you know female rabbits can breed again the same day they give birth?!)

Baby bunnies, one day old.

In another case of mistaken gender  (Man, I'm bad at this stuff), our little Pippy the peeper grew up to be a rooster.  Over a few weeks, she got really tall.  She was far leggier than the other females of the same breed, though no other features of a rooster were evident.  Then she started growing sickle feathers and saddle hackles, you know, rooster feathers.  So much for adding another laying hen to the flock.  So now my Pippy is just Pip.  

l-r: Pip with T-Roy (the daddy rooster) and two hens

We also have been getting some projects off of our never-ending to do list.  We finally finished in the inside of our chicken coop.  It is now all insulated and the walls are covered with OSB.  Matt also fixed up the roof with some tar paper and shingles we had left over from when we did the roof on the house.  It is now all ship shape and ready for winter.

Freshly re-vamped chicken quarters

Last week, a deer got into our vegetable garden and from the looks of it, had a heck of a time getting out.  When I went out to feed the rabbits on Friday morning, the whole south end of the fence was laying on the ground and the center post was broken.  Matt and I talked about what to do with it and decided that we are going to move the garden to a new location next year, so he took the fence down on Saturday.  That side of the yard certainly does look different.

Chickens pecking in the old garden

Yesterday, Joey and I let the chickens out to feast on the remains of the garden.  We have had frost most nights and several light snowfalls, so nothing is growing anymore, but  the cool weather plants are in the ground to use as treats for the critters.  Joey and I were out digging around to see what was still there and we found a few nice radishes for the rabbits and a handful of carrots for us.  The chickens seemed most delighted with the remnants of the lettuces and rutabagas.  Oh and they all took the opportunity to get in one last nice dust bath before winter.

Joey with his "nice fat carrot"

We have also had a two birthdays, grouse hunting, trick or treating, deer season, a school conference, and a bit more canning in this time.  More on those in my next few posts.  If I wrote it all in one sitting, it would take an hour to read. :)

Sunday Afternoon on the Homestead

Rose Geranium

I hope this doesn't sound too brag-ey, but we had a really good day.  Natalie and I went to church this morning and out for lunch with Matt's parents after.  Then we came home and had my favorite kind of afternoon.  We were just at home.  The four of us, puttering, playing, working, sometimes talking, sometimes not. It was a perfect end to an otherwise crazy week. 

Matt spent some time in his garage doing some tidying up and I was in the garden pulling a record amount of weeds.  I'm a little embarrassed to admit this, but I hauled three wheelbarrow loads of weeds out of our veggie patch today.  Wonder if I'll get that many vegetables by the time its all said and done...  The kids went back and forth and helped us both along the way and still played their games and got some of their projects done.  Natalie was a help and picked peas for me.  Joey yanked weeds and reminded me not to pick the tomatoes and peppers, they're not ready yet.

We accomplished quite a bit in our afternoon/evening home and outdoors.  I like that.  The homestead looks much nicer.  Speaking of the homestead, I have been reading a lot of other blogs lately that talk about homesteading.  A few people have referred to our little homestead as a farm. I'm flattered by this, but having been to actual working farms and seeing the work that goes into farming, it seems silly to call myself a farmer.    Maybe if we ever got a pig or a goat and our apple trees start producing, then just maybe.  I think I like the term homestead.  Homesteads have kitchen gardens and flocks of chickens and cats sleeping on the porch.  Homesteads have small houses and clotheslines and casual flower gardens.  Yep, I think we're a homestead.

Here's some pictures that I snapped this afternoon while roaming around our little homestead.

Meow napping on the porch.

My hen & chicks plant I picked up at the farmer's market.

Natalie's Strawberries

Grape tomatoes just starting to set fruit.

T-Roy.  I think he's saying "You Tawkin to Me? Huh?"

Pippy our little peeper is getting big!

On of our Barred Plymouth Rock hens.  My favorite birds.

Tiger Lilies in bloom my friend Mary Jane

Mallow descended from Matt's Grandma's plants

Gaillardia (blanket flower) blossoms from Dennis

Natalie snuggling Rosie, Joey's bunny.

The fall of the T-Rex.  History according to Joey.

Chalk animals. Clockwise from top, sheep, turtle, cow, and your guess is as good as mine.
I do like the udders on the cow though.

And back around to the porch to find Papa Stray lounging.

Lots of photos to share tonight.  This is pretty much a lap around our backyard with the camera.  A fine little homestead indeed.

A Chicken Post

We have a new baby at our house!  One fluffy little Araucana chick was hatched a about two weeks ago now. We think its a baby girl chick.  Yay!  This little one is the first one we have ever had hatch at our house.  We usually go into the local fleet supply store in the spring and pick out a few new babies to add to the flock.  This year, we have both a rooster and a broody hen, so we thought we'd give it a shot and see what we came up with.  We've had chickens for years, but never a broody hen while we had a rooster around.  The only other time we had a broody hen, she almost starved to death trying to hatch a golf ball.  (You don't raise chickens 'cause they're smart.)  The kids are very excited to show their friends the new little peeper, and ok, the grownups are too.  Which might be why I feel compelled to blog about it...

She is starting to get her first grownup feathers along her wings.  I can't wait to see what color she's going to be.  The fun thing about Araucanas is that they are all different colors.  They aren't a "true" breed, so they don't have definite characteristics other than that they lay colored eggs.  They are sometimes called Easter Eggers because they lay eggs in pastel colors.  Each hen will always lay the same color eggs, but if you have 2 or more in the same flock, they may all lay different colors of eggs.  Ours are mostly shades of soft green, but some are more blue and one is a bit on the creamy almost pink side.  Cool huh?  Ok, chicken class dismissed.