I was thinking I had this whole week yet before those little beaks started popping open those eggshells but apparently my mental calendar isn't the same as the actual calendar so hatching day is any day. Sure it could still be a week but it's likely sooner. (I'll keep you updated on that.)
But Hatching Day almost didn't have a chance. Last night we had a pretty strong thunderstorm roll through and dumped 1 inch of water on us in about 20 minutes. I guess the lightening and thunder were pretty impressive and the wind blew REALLY hard but this exhausted mom slept through every flash and boom and howl and downpoured raindrop so I can't vouch for that. I'm just going off of what the husband and my mother in law said.
Anyway, said storm dumped some much needed rain on the area but it also dumped some trees which landed on power lines and we were without electricity for almost 5 hours as a result. I slept through the storm but woke around 4 to a pitch black bedroom and my first thought after I realized the power was out wasn't 'I wonder if a tree fell on the line' or 'I hope my greenhouse isn't halfway down the driveway' or anything so mundane. No, my very first thought is as follows.
"Hmmm. Power is out so that means no lights, no electricity, no power to my incubator which means the temperature has dropped WHICH MEANS MY NEARLY READY TO HATCH CHICKS MAY BE DEAD!" *cue frantic search for a flashlight or cellphone so I could check the temperature* (the flashlight was oh so nicely provided by the half asleep husband.)
The temperature had dropped by about 20 degrees over the course of 4 hours and my stomach sank but I did my best to keep what heat was in there staying in there. I wrapped my heavy cozy robe around the incubator, dug out some of those hand warmer packets to hopefully keep the temperature from dropping more, and crawled back into bed with little hope left.
Much to my surprise, a quick check this morning showed there's still live baby chicks in those eggs and I'm still hopeful that my egg-speriment will be a success.
So here's to hoping my eight little eggs reveal eight little chicks soon.
Thursday, August 13, 2015
Monday, July 27, 2015
Egg-scellent Experiment
For quite a while now, I've been wanting to add to my puny 3-hens-1-rooster sized flock and about a month ago, I thought my wish had come true when one said hens went broody. Broody hens are amazing for farm wives who want more chickens on the cheap (or is it 'cheep'?) with little to no effort on their part. Only trouble was my broody hen who looked oh so comfy on her little nest set inside an old car tire also looked oh so yummy to a hungry predator (maybe time to have the coon hunters come pay a night-time visit again...) and while she escaped with a few less feathers, she abandoned her nest only a few days after she'd started a-settin' on it. I was able to borrow an incubator from my mother-in-law though and I figured if I could find where my chickens are laying their eggs right now (it's definitely not in the coop much to my dismay), I could hatch them on my own. But no amount of hunting high and low (well, mostly low) has yielded the location of said nest(s) so I decided to order eggs instead and started researching hatcheries.
Then I stumbled on a link that gave me an idea. Apparently, some people have had luck hatching store bought eggs. That sounded easy and cheap-both of which appeal to me very much.
Now it's not like you can try hatching any old eggs from the grocery store. Most eggs in the average carton are from laying barns and there aren't roosters running around doing their 'duty' so the eggs aren't fertilized. But if you can find eggs labeled 'free range' and from a more local source (think farmer's markets), there's a chance the facility won't have taken the roosters out of the hen house. There's an easy way to check for fertilization-crack a few eggs open and look for a little yellow bulls-eye blob in the yolk-and if you are lucky, you'll have a nice hatchable bunch of eggs.
Egg-cited by this prospect and in possession of not only an empty incubator but 3 dozen free-range eggs purchased just a few hours prior at my organic and local food grocery store, I decided to try it out. After all, if it doesn't work, I could chalk it up to test run and order incubating eggs from a hatchery.
So here we are. Day 5 of the grand Incubating Eggs-periment, a newly purchased automatic egg turner (that just arrived today) all set up and running, and a quick candling of a few eggs last night showed promising results so far. We'll likely have a few duds in the bunch but if all goes well (and with a healthy dose of luck), in about 16 days I'll have several little yellow fluff balls peeping around.
I just hope that they aren't all roosters...
Then I stumbled on a link that gave me an idea. Apparently, some people have had luck hatching store bought eggs. That sounded easy and cheap-both of which appeal to me very much.
Now it's not like you can try hatching any old eggs from the grocery store. Most eggs in the average carton are from laying barns and there aren't roosters running around doing their 'duty' so the eggs aren't fertilized. But if you can find eggs labeled 'free range' and from a more local source (think farmer's markets), there's a chance the facility won't have taken the roosters out of the hen house. There's an easy way to check for fertilization-crack a few eggs open and look for a little yellow bulls-eye blob in the yolk-and if you are lucky, you'll have a nice hatchable bunch of eggs.
Egg-cited by this prospect and in possession of not only an empty incubator but 3 dozen free-range eggs purchased just a few hours prior at my organic and local food grocery store, I decided to try it out. After all, if it doesn't work, I could chalk it up to test run and order incubating eggs from a hatchery.
So here we are. Day 5 of the grand Incubating Eggs-periment, a newly purchased automatic egg turner (that just arrived today) all set up and running, and a quick candling of a few eggs last night showed promising results so far. We'll likely have a few duds in the bunch but if all goes well (and with a healthy dose of luck), in about 16 days I'll have several little yellow fluff balls peeping around.
I just hope that they aren't all roosters...
Friday, April 17, 2015
Ahhh....Spring Breezes
I love these sunny warm days. The grass is growing, the trees are budding out, and the air smells so new and fresh. (AAHHHCCHHOOO...Pardon me. I get spring allergies and I've been a touch sneezy the last few weeks...)
But best of all, the days are warm enough to do something I absolutely love. (Well, I love it for the first few weeks and then it's like 'meh...') So what is it that I adore doing this time of year?
Hint: It's something you do outside on gorgeous sunshiney days. And it's not gardening-which I can't do even if I wanted to...Usually my garden is a mudpit this time of year but thanks to the dryness outside, my poor garden is mostly dust right now.
Answer: Hanging clothes on the clothesline.
Yes, I actually like hanging clothes outside. For one, who doesn't love the scent of line-dried clothes? Best. Smell. EVER. Second, it gets me out of the house for a few minutes. Even on the days when I have a counter full of dishes, a heap of clothes to wash, and a pile of bookkeeping to tend to, I know I can sneak outside for a few moments and catch some sunshine because there's clothes to hang. Third, I get my Vitamin D dose for the day because I'm out in the sun. Can't argue with that, right?
Since it's sunny & warm with just enough of a breeze to keep the air flowing through the open doors and windows, my clotheslines are set up, and I've got a load of clothes in the washer, I'm off to get my Vitamin D for the day.
But best of all, the days are warm enough to do something I absolutely love. (Well, I love it for the first few weeks and then it's like 'meh...') So what is it that I adore doing this time of year?
Hint: It's something you do outside on gorgeous sunshiney days. And it's not gardening-which I can't do even if I wanted to...Usually my garden is a mudpit this time of year but thanks to the dryness outside, my poor garden is mostly dust right now.
Answer: Hanging clothes on the clothesline.
Yes, I actually like hanging clothes outside. For one, who doesn't love the scent of line-dried clothes? Best. Smell. EVER. Second, it gets me out of the house for a few minutes. Even on the days when I have a counter full of dishes, a heap of clothes to wash, and a pile of bookkeeping to tend to, I know I can sneak outside for a few moments and catch some sunshine because there's clothes to hang. Third, I get my Vitamin D dose for the day because I'm out in the sun. Can't argue with that, right?
Since it's sunny & warm with just enough of a breeze to keep the air flowing through the open doors and windows, my clotheslines are set up, and I've got a load of clothes in the washer, I'm off to get my Vitamin D for the day.
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
April Showers bring May Flowers...Hopefully...
Usually, this time of year we are knee deep (or so it seems) in mud and muck. My driveway is notorious for becoming a quarter mile mud run with the spring thaw and my usual footwear is a pair of rubber boots for the entire month of April. However, this year that is not the case. No overflowing ditches, no mud puddles masquerading as ponds, no sloppy slippery sticky muck everywhere. Sure we had a few days of mush but nothing like normal.
So no mud. No muck. No slop. You are probably asking why I'm complaining about this then if it's nothing like usual. Well, here's the reason. If it's not muddy right now, it means everything is dry as d.u.s.t. and when everything is dry as dust it means there's probably alot of it in the air...especially when a vehicle drives by or the wind starts whippin'.
Now I live in the country and as such, I know to expect a certain amount of dust on everything. My vehicles all have the ubiquitous two tone paint job you see on cars and trucks that spend lots of time driving down dirt roads...You know what I mean-dirt brown over halfway up the sides and dust sliding down the back window. Interiors covered in a film of what looks like cocoa powder. (When your kids tell you they just look for the dirtiest van in the parking lot at the store, you understand how dusty it is.) I don't wash the outside of my windows because I know in less than a day, they'll be back to dusty/unwashed looking. A light covering of dust settles on everything in the house and no matter how often you sweep/vaccuum, there's always more of the stuff hiding in the cracks. So I get it. Country life is dusty.
BUT that doesn't mean I like seeing dust in APRIL. May through October? Sure. It's expected because it's usually warm enough to keep the roads dry most of the time. But April is not supposed to be an arid month. (August, yes. April, nuh-uh.) And all this dryness has an impact on our fieldwork too. Do me a favor. Take a butter knife, go outside and try dragging it through that parched dry dirt. Doesn't really go through all that well, right? Now, give that dirt patch a good soaking with a hose, wait a few hours, and try it again. It's alot easier, isn't it? That's because moisture is necessary to loosen the soil. Now imagine a plow trying to do what your butter knife did in that dry hard dirt and you'll see where I was going with that. On another note, what's usually the first thing you do after you plant your garden seeds? Give them a good long drink of water. Fertilizers often need moisture to help break them down/dissolve them enough to work them into the soil. So moist soil is must right now and we don't have it. We didn't have the snow cover to help insulate the fields and later melt into much needed water. Winter is a very drying season so that pulled water from the soil for months. We haven't had rain hardly at all yet so things have remained bone dry.
We do have a fair number of fields under irrigation now but not all of them are and some of them desperately need some rain in order to even start working in them.
It's not easy farming because you are so dependent on the weather for your livelihood. We have to hope for rain in the amounts we need and that it comes when we could use it the most while not interfering with the planting/tending/harvesting of our crops. We have to hope for an equal balance of warm sunny days and humid hot days so differing crops can grow to their highest yields. We have to hope for a lack of damaging hail and high winds. And this month is certainly one of those months that we're hoping for the right weather when we need it.
So while I usually spend the month of April bemoaning the mess outside and how sloppy it is, this year I'm trying something new. Pardon me. I need to go look up 'rain dancing'...
So no mud. No muck. No slop. You are probably asking why I'm complaining about this then if it's nothing like usual. Well, here's the reason. If it's not muddy right now, it means everything is dry as d.u.s.t. and when everything is dry as dust it means there's probably alot of it in the air...especially when a vehicle drives by or the wind starts whippin'.
Now I live in the country and as such, I know to expect a certain amount of dust on everything. My vehicles all have the ubiquitous two tone paint job you see on cars and trucks that spend lots of time driving down dirt roads...You know what I mean-dirt brown over halfway up the sides and dust sliding down the back window. Interiors covered in a film of what looks like cocoa powder. (When your kids tell you they just look for the dirtiest van in the parking lot at the store, you understand how dusty it is.) I don't wash the outside of my windows because I know in less than a day, they'll be back to dusty/unwashed looking. A light covering of dust settles on everything in the house and no matter how often you sweep/vaccuum, there's always more of the stuff hiding in the cracks. So I get it. Country life is dusty.
BUT that doesn't mean I like seeing dust in APRIL. May through October? Sure. It's expected because it's usually warm enough to keep the roads dry most of the time. But April is not supposed to be an arid month. (August, yes. April, nuh-uh.) And all this dryness has an impact on our fieldwork too. Do me a favor. Take a butter knife, go outside and try dragging it through that parched dry dirt. Doesn't really go through all that well, right? Now, give that dirt patch a good soaking with a hose, wait a few hours, and try it again. It's alot easier, isn't it? That's because moisture is necessary to loosen the soil. Now imagine a plow trying to do what your butter knife did in that dry hard dirt and you'll see where I was going with that. On another note, what's usually the first thing you do after you plant your garden seeds? Give them a good long drink of water. Fertilizers often need moisture to help break them down/dissolve them enough to work them into the soil. So moist soil is must right now and we don't have it. We didn't have the snow cover to help insulate the fields and later melt into much needed water. Winter is a very drying season so that pulled water from the soil for months. We haven't had rain hardly at all yet so things have remained bone dry.
We do have a fair number of fields under irrigation now but not all of them are and some of them desperately need some rain in order to even start working in them.
It's not easy farming because you are so dependent on the weather for your livelihood. We have to hope for rain in the amounts we need and that it comes when we could use it the most while not interfering with the planting/tending/harvesting of our crops. We have to hope for an equal balance of warm sunny days and humid hot days so differing crops can grow to their highest yields. We have to hope for a lack of damaging hail and high winds. And this month is certainly one of those months that we're hoping for the right weather when we need it.
So while I usually spend the month of April bemoaning the mess outside and how sloppy it is, this year I'm trying something new. Pardon me. I need to go look up 'rain dancing'...
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