Pomp and Feather

This morning we all awoke to a wonderful message left by the post office on our machine. The baby chicks had arrived, and were ready for pick up! That was music to all of our ears. The sooner we could get the baby chicks home, the quicker they could receive their first meal. Two baggies of dry cereal and one bottle later, we hopped into the car to pick up our 10 clients who had flown in from New Jersey.

The baby chicks received as much fanfare from the children as from the post office crew. Everyone had to take a peek into the small white box that housed some very loud peeping chickies. I was thankful to witness that all chickies were alive and accounted for, but it wasn't until we got home and began inspecting closer that Grace announced, "Mom, we have twelve chicks, not ten." Despite my request for no extra chicks (in order avoid the "males for warmth" additions) we had two more chicks. But the news was good, as I realized that one of the extras was another Silkie, reserved for pet chicken status. Quite the bonus considering they cost three times as much as the other chickens.


After inspecting all bottoms for "pasting" and dipping each beak into the sugar water, the Knucker Hatch Twelve expolored a significantly bigger box. I made their first brooder out of an extended Sterilite bin from Walmart. For an hour we watched intently over the crew making sure all were drinking and eating properly, while taking in the musical chorus of peeping. It is a joyful sound. After one more hour, the children were allowed to hold the chicks.

Each visit with each client involved much inspection, nuzzling, and naming.


Below is Jack holding his personal favorite which he decided to name "Gosling". It makes no difference to him that goslings refer to baby ducks. This girl will be Gosling nonetheless. Nobody seems to be going for the grown ups idea of naming the chickens after food with chicken in them. (We still might get our way...how can you NOT name a baby chicken Fajita?)


As of this evening, everyone is doing lovely except our Black Australop who, I confess, was bopped on the head by Faith's hand while I was holding her. I'm not sure what came first, the bop to the noggin or her not feeling the best, but she just doesn't seem to be behaving as lively as the others, and we have a bit of pasting issues beginning, however, I am hopeful that another 24 hours and she'll be feeling better.

I am really thrilled with how much the children have taken to The Knucker Hatch Twelve. It should be a fascinating experience for all of us, and hopefully, a productive one.

In A Nutshell

Computer is in the shop.
So hating being without a computer.
Interior decorator has been put on hold.
Knee deep in painting walls (actually enjoying it).
Neck deep in moving boxes.
Baby chickens come today or tomorrow.
Baby Hope is doing lovely inutero.
ALL HORSES are GONE. (that is a blog post in an of itself)

There Are Good Layers and Bad Layers

I'll admit, that when I decided we should start out our farm with chickens, I didn't know a thing about chickens. I was in the department of thinking that in order to have a chicken lay an egg, you needed to have a rooster. How many of you non-chicken people knew that wasn't true? Thankfully, no roos are needed. Mrs. Layer does all the work herself. That's the good news.

The bad news is that Mrs. Layer is only really good at egg production for the first 1-3 years of life, despite the fact that she can live into the teen years. And really, after two years, you are better off...ehem....culling them. Which means that if I'm a smart farmer, I'll be slaughtering my chickens in two years, and starting again. I wasn't ready for that news.

I am practical in things, so I agree that it is not worth the price in chicken feed to keep a chicken around who is down to laying an egg a month. I've just never killed anything before purposely, especially where it is necessary for the animal to "bleed out". But I decided that at least I would know our chicken had a good life free ranging on a farm, as opposed to the anonymous headless chicken I buy at the grocery store that someone killed for me. But there is also the children factor. The children needed to know before they started holding baby chickies that one day, the mama hens wouldn't lay eggs very well, and we'd need to kill the mamas for the meat. BUT we'd get to have baby chickies again. Jack, my softie, wasn't liking that news much at all.

So I compromised. I ordered 10 baby chicks...nine of which are excellent layers and most of which can be used for meat production. And then I ordered a baby pet chicken. Kid you not they are the silliest chickens I have ever seen. More of an ornamental chicken really. And known for their unusual docile pet like behavior. Behold, an example of a White Silkie Chicken:


She looks like Elvis in a white polyester suit, doesn't she? What a hoot. I hope and pray that the Silkie chicken will survive and thrive, as she will be the one who is allowed to maintain her coop beyond her two year internship at Knucker Hatch Farms. Personally, I am excited about my rainbow of egg layers, who should be gearing up for their first laid egg in late fall/early winter. The funny thing is, aside from cooking with them, I rarely eat an egg. It just sounded like a good and easy place to start with our farm on the cusp.

Now, one more thing I bet you didn't know about lady chickens. You can usually tell on someone's farm who the good layer girls are. Why? Because they look worn out. In fact they go through a bleaching process in their skin that moves throughout their body depending on how many eggs they have laid. A pretty chicken, is probably not a dependable layer.

And something about that whole life analogy really works for me right now. Lately, I feel like the lady chicken who continues to lay the eggs, and to show for it, I'm looking pretty frumpy. Not much pizzazz going on in the feathers, but in the chicken world, that is a sign of a hard worker. There is something reassuring about that --- if only I were a chicken. However, I do admit that I am looking forward to a decade from now, when I might just have a little more time to turn it up a knotch and strut my stuff with the decked out Silkies!

Cluck, Cluck, Neigh

I should have been focused on the arrival of our baby chickens in two weeks. And I was to a degree. The makeshift Rubbermaid brooder still needs to be fully assembled, but I'm close. Nothing a pair of tinsnips and a few screws won't take care of. The feed, feeders, heat lamp and shavings are on standby. The only animal I should be losing sleep over right now are chickens. But I'm not. Prepare for a raging rant...

Instead, it's horses. I've mentioned before how we have given the horse boarders (who were boarding their horses with the previous owners residing here in March), the notice that we would not be boarding on the farm. All of them have heeded that notice and the last boarder left two weeks ago. We should have no animals left on the farm right? Nope. Two horses are still left. Five deadlines have been made and broken, by none other than the lousy owner herself.

Not anybody earns the name "lousy" from me. But this lady is down right LOUSY. Never returns a phone call. This week topped it all for me. Follow me carefully: The last boarder to leave (I'll call her Mrs. Sweet), actually was the one who fed Mrs. Lousy's horses for her. Mrs. Lousy has only shown up once in the last three months to see her own horses, and that was because of a deep wound one of her horses had incurred on the farm (lot of blood) and the vet had to work with the horse quite a bit. That's it. ONCE.

So...when Mrs. Sweet left, there was no one to feed the remaining horses. Mrs. Lousy, knew Mrs. Sweet had left. But Mrs. Lousy never came by to feed her own horses. For FOUR days. And for THREE days I called her six times letting her know that I was growing concerned that her horses were not being fed and there was no alfalfa hay available at all. Now, of course, I'm not going to watch horses starve on my own property, so I fed them with the remaining grain and pellets. But she didn't know that. Never once did she call back. Until today.

All of a sudden, she leaves a message on the machine that someone is coming over to look at the horses, and by the way, she was feeding the horses. A bald faced lie. But to be sure, I made sure to be down at the barn when she came by. We chatted for forty minutes after the man decided that he wasn't interested in a sixteen year old flat footed thoroughbred and a spitfire mean miniature stallion for his wife. After some warming up, I apologized for all of my repeated calls that she never answered regarding the welfare of her horses, and then lined up the bait and switch. "We must have been just missing each other. You must have been coming by in the afternoons." (I had been at the house almost constantly all week, but for the last four afternoons we had been on the property outside). "Yes...(her eyes dodged), in the afternoons sometimes and also at night I'd park on the street and walk down to the barn."

Two minutes later, as she walks down to the barn to "feed" the horses, she asks, "So how are we doing on our grain level?" And I watch as she checks the four garbage cans where the horse food is stored. She sifts around, "We still have some senior equine in there, and enough beet pulp..." For a person who has been feeding her horses for the last four days, she sure did a lot of checking, and asked some odd questions. I could tell you with my eyes closed and hands tied behind my back how much of everything there was in those bins. My blood was boiling.

So here's the kicker. She moved her other horses off of our property to next door over a month ago, but she doesn't want to pay for the last two to go over there. So we are stuck with two horses, the owner neglects, and who rarely you can get a hold of, because she doesn't want to pay for boarding all of her horses somewhere. And we walk this fine line tight rope of what in the world do we do? We can't charge her boarding fees, because then we become a horse business and insurance must get involved. So she sits here for free. I am a finger dial away from calling a horse rescue place, but then their web site has a blip about how they are looking for more available stall space and has over twenty horses already listed. And I just don't know if we can call them truly abandoned yet.

How do you make someone take their animals off of your property when they weigh hundreds of pounds? It is the most frustrating situation I have ever been in with someone. And we're dealing with an unreachable bluthering idiot who is prone to lie badly. Tom Builder keeps telling me that he is two weeks ahead of me in frustration and anger. He still thinks the best solution is to park the remaining two horses in the parking lot of her town home. If I didn't have a heart, I'd do it.

Oh Sheesh It's June Already

ACK! I hate it when I do this. I go AWOL on the blog for a few weeks, and then I feel overwhelmed about trying to get all of the stuff I went AWOL on, blogged about, which turns into a vicious cycle of avoiding the blog.

Then there is this weird anxiety over it. I tell myself that I started the blog for our family, to log in on life and capture memories that my mind would normally dismiss over time. But there is a bit of high school mentality left somewhere inside me that worries that an extended absence will discourage readers and they'll stop visiting. Not that the place is hopping with comments. And that was never what this blog was about in the first place, but suddenly it begins to matter. And then I scold myself for being ridiculously childish, and remind myself that if I don't want to blog, than I shouldn't blog that day. WHAT IS THAT???

There were many factors in my latest absence including the never ending move, exhaustion, exciting travels and celebrations, chicken research, and my latest debacle...cheerios. I will be addressing all of this at my leisure in the coming week, but I do stress "leisure". More of a forced leisure.

I so unwisely decided to bring my laptop to the breakfast table to look up some chicken stuff. And then Grace became enthralled with the chicken stuff and managed to drop a giant sloppy spoonful of cheerios and milk onto the keyboard. An hour after that...the computer has gone on strike. No computer for me. I feel like I have lost a limb. The laptop is an extension of my body for at least three hours a day. It is my cookbook, my library, my mailbox, my photo album, my news, my homeschooling tracker, my blog.

But I leave you with good news...The chickens are coming! Which is why I am up to my neck in chicken research and books. Ten one day old baby chickens will be arriving in the mail (YES...in the mail) at the end of this month. Isn't the Internet amazing?Every single one, a different breed. And hopefully, as ordered, every single one a female. No roos please! We'll have a rainbow of chicken ladies and eggs on the farm. How fun is that?

But again more on that later...