The Homestead Lady, In the Barn, With a Pipe

I walked out to the barn the other night to give Tricia a hand with the animals.  We have a real rodeo going on right now with two cows in milk, one bred cow, three goats, a five day old doeling, Ninety-something laying hens, one broody hen that has a week old baby chick she's taking care of.  Not to mention the 47 meat birds that are approaching six weeks old and Belle, our four month old Great Pyrenees puppy, that has recently begun to play too rough with the laying hens and killed them.  It keeps us on our toes, for sure.  It keeps us young, I like to tell myself.

As I walked in the barn, Tricia had just dispensed with a baby possum that was in the barn, presumably to kill and eat the defenseless baby chick.  All Tricia could find was a pipe in the corner of the barn for her weapon of choice, but that did the trick.  The next day I killed another one in the barn and the day following, one drowned in the water bucket in the barn.  Where there are baby possums, there's a momma and daddy possum.  I need to set a trap in the woods behind the hen house.


Chickens Checking out the Dead Baby Possum

Predators come and go and at times, trying to get to our chickens.  Hawks give them fits in the wintertime.  Possums get after 'em in the spring and summer.  Chicken Snakes (rat snakes)eat the chickens' eggs in the spring and summer.  We've killed numerous chicken snakes here lately and so far, three ceramic eggs are missing.  That means 3 chicken snakes have a fatal case of constipation and will die.

But like in the game of Clue, and to to solve the mystery of the dead baby possum in the photo above, I know who did it.   It was the Homestead Lady, In the Barn, With a Pipe!  I win.