Johnny "Mulberry Seed"

I grew up hearing the folk legend about Johnny Appleseed, a man who traveled across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and even into Canada planting apple trees.  I like to plant trees.  In fact, I dug up a bunch of live oak trees that were growing in the flower beds and put them in pots.  We'll plant them strategically after they've grown bigger.  

In the late afternoon, we've been over the fence on the property that borders ours.  There's a little patch of woods and I've been checking out the dewberries growing along the woods.  Dewberries, in my opinion, are even better than blackberries.  They are sweeter and more plump.  

Dewberries in almost every stage, from green to almost ripe

Dewberries, when ripened are soft and can burst in your hand, staining your fingers purple.  

We like to go out to the woods with cups and pick dewberries, eating a few, but bringing most inside.  I've been thinking about how good a warm dewberry cobbler with ice cream on top would taste!  We've been enjoying them for breakfast blended with bananas and honey in a goatmilk kefir smoothie.

But back to Johnny Appleseed.  While walking in the woods picking dewberries, a young tree caught my eye.  I had been watching it for a couple of years.  It is the tree you see below leaning over our fence from the neighboring property.  It is leaning way over to try to get some sunlight.  The privet, Chinaberry, and Chinese tallow trees all compete for sunlight in that little stretch of woods.

I had my suspicions of this tree for a while now.  The leaves almost confirmed its identity, but I needed one more thing to confirm my suspicions - fruit.  And there it was.  Mulberries!  You can see the ripening berries below.

So here is the story behind the mulberry tree.  A few years ago, a milk customer would always bring us big bowls of blackberries that he picked.  They were delicious.  He would even bring some to a friend of his in Oberlin that made Blackberry wine.  Well, one day he brought me a tall cup full of mulberries.  He instructed me not to eat them, but instead, to go back in the woods and scatter them so that they would grow.  That's exactly what I did.  (Well, I DID eat a few of them.)

I remember as a kid, my grandma and grandpa had a big mulberry tree that bordered their property.  We would eat those mulberries until we couldn't eat any more.  Our hands were stained purple and so were our shirts and lips and tongue.  The birds loved mulberries, too, and they would make quite a mess around the mulberry tree.  

Anyway, the mulberry tree that is now growing is in the general location of where I scattered them several years ago.  I was happy to see success in the mulberry propagation project.  

There's a nice, ripe, purple one.  I'm gonna get it before the birds have a chance to eat it.  There aren't very many mulberries on the little tree yet, but we look forward to future years as the little tree continues to grow.  I'm so glad that I didn't eat that cup of mulberries, but planted most of them.  Good things come to those who wait, I guess.  Johnny Appleseed would be proud.

2024 Meat Birds - 4 Weeks Old

What's changed in the last week since the last weigh in?  Well, for one thing, their feed trough.  I moved out the small feeders because they kept getting their heads stuck in it.  They're growing.  I replaced the little chick feeders with what we always use - a 10 foot PVC gutter.  It works perfectly.  Now all the chicks can gather around and eat to their hearts' content.  

We still have them on 18% (unmedicated) chick grower.  We keep feed in front of them all day long.  At night, I pull the feed away from them.  In the morning, they're presented with breakfast and kept with food in the gutter all day.  I can tell they are growing and still, no deaths.  0% mortality rate.  Let's see if we can keep that up.

I still feed them bugs at night, but we've had a string of cool nights and that's kept the nightly bug population down.  Although tonight, it's warmed up and so far they've eaten 60 fat beetles.  On my last beetle feeding trip to the chicken tractor, I grabbed an average looking bird and brought him back to the scale in the garage.  He plopped right down.

Surprisingly, the bird is calm and only made some slight noise when I picked him up.

I made sure to zero out the scale before we began.  Here's where ol' boy measures up on the scale for the week 4 weigh in.

The day we got them, they weighed 3 ounces

• Week 1, they weighed 6.5 ounces
• Week 2, they weighed 18 ounces
• Week 3, they weighed 29 ounces
• Week 4, they weighed 44 ounces

That's a weight gain of 15 ounces over last week.  As I look at prior years' figures, we are still right where we need to be as far as growth is concerned.  We'll check in next week to see how they continue to progress.  Remember, our goal is a 6 pound bird at eight weeks.  We're still within range of hitting that target.

Copper for the Goats

So we noticed that the goats' coats started getting wiry and dry and also they've had problems with foot rot.  When your copper levels are right, you don't have all these problems.  It's been a year and four months since our last copper treatments, so it's time to do it again.

We ordered copper boluses off the Internet.  Ultra Cruz Goat Copper Bolus for Adults.  (Adult goats, that is).   The bolus is simply a gelatin capsule with copper oxide "shavings".  Each bolus is 4 grams and is a slow release form of copper.  If the goat is > 50 lbs. and > 3 months, they can get a 4 gram bolus.

We've stuck it in a banana and fed it to them or stuck it in a slice of balled up bread.  Sometimes they spit it up, though.  We opted to give it with a de-worming pill syringe.  We put some peanut butter in the plunger and then put the copper bolus so that it sticks in there and won't fall out.  Then we put some more peanut butter on top.  The goats like peanut butter, and it helps them to swallow the bolus.

Copper pill popper

The little tool is long and enables you to get the bolus in.

Past the lips and over the gums, lookout stomach, here it comes!

You grab the goat and lift its head up and use your fingers to open the mouth.  The syringe goes in and you try to push it down a bit and then hit the plunger.  The goat will taste the peanut butter and swallow it down.

Crocks with socks (very stylish!)

Except sometimes, even as hard as you try, they spit it up.  We don't give up.  We keep trying until we get the copper down them.  The bolus will last from 8 months to a year.  In the past, we've seen the health and vitality of their coats get better along with a reduction in their susceptibility of foot rot.  Hopefully, we'll see the same results with this dose.

Feeling Motherly

It happens every year.  You go to gather eggs in the afternoon and there is a hen sitting on eggs.  You reach underneath her to grab the eggs and she pecks your hand, "bushes" up her feathers to make herself look twice the size she is, and she makes some weird, threatening noises.  What's going on with her?  

She's broody.  That means she's decided she wants to sit on a clutch of eggs and hatch them out.  Her biological clock is ticking and she wants to be a mother.

Right now we have four of them (out of 31) that are broody.  If you take the eggs out from underneath them, they'll still sit there.  They will sit atop a ceramic egg or an unfertilized egg.  Poor girl.  She wants to be a momma so bad, she'll do anything.  Here's another broody hen:

And here's yet another.  She is in full "fluff" mode, here.  She's very protective of the eggs she's sitting on.

Tricia and I decided to let one of them set.  We gathered 10 eggs and put them underneath her in this little cage.  This way, we can lock it up at night so that she isn't eaten by the minks.  As cunning as they are, they haven't figured a way to make it through hardware cloth.

Today when I went to feed all the chickens, this broody hen got off her nest to eat.  There were only 5 eggs remaining.  I don't know what happened to the other 5.  We suspect she ate them.  Hopefully, she'll stick it out for another 3 weeks and hatch out 5 biddies.  We'll wait and see if her motherly wishes come to fruition.

Just Kidding Around

My wife has the due dates for all the animals written down in a calendar.  It is kidding season and so far Callie has had a little spotted doeling named Betty, and Mocha has had a little solid black doeling (with the exception of about 3 white hairs on her forehead) named Blackie.  It was Agnes' turn.  Tricia went out to the barn thinking that it was getting close and sure enough, Agnes was in labor.  You can see the little hooves poking out.

It was a particularly hard labor for Agnes.  She hollered like nobody's business to push this little baby out.  Finally, here she came...

Yes, another doeling.  This one is a completely new color, leading us to believe that the father is Popcorn and not Buckwheat.  Buckwheat is the daddy of all the other goats out here, yielding offspring that is black or spotted.  This little girl is light tan with a white head.  She was up on her feet in 15 minutes after being born and Agnes licking her clean.

She has long legs and is a spunky little critter.  All the other animals are curious about this new addition to the barnyard family, and they come up to sniff her.  She has no fear and it is quite a task to keep her safely away from the cows who could easily step on her if she got up under their feet.

I was just calling her "Brownie," but she got a name change the other day.  I was asked by a family member to name the baby after her, so absolutely, Brownie's name is now Abby.  Meet Abby, everyone:

Tricia loves her little goats, but we are getting too many for our pasture to hold.  Tillie is expecting any day now and we think she's carrying more than one.  Tricia has been milking Agnes and the milk is good and sweet.  She is a dairy goat (1/2 Nubian and 1/2 La Mancha) and is making quite a bit. 

There is a lot of cutting up and playfulness out on the pasture right now with all the little ones.  Kidding time is a fun time!

Rot

Therefore, as a tongue of fire consumes stubble And dry grass collapses into the flame, So their root will become like rot and their blossom blow away as dust; For they have rejected the law of the Lord of hosts  And despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.  Isaiah 5:24

A little over a week ago, we had strong a strong storm that blew through from the west, bringing with it 80 mph straight-line winds that caused lots of damage and blew down a pretty decent sized pecan tree in our pasture next to the barn that provided nice shade in the sweltering heat of the summer.  The animals would sit under its shade in the heat of the day, chewing their cud.  Those days are gone.  The cows and goats are going to miss that tree.  We will miss that tree.

The funny thing is, the pecan tree, being the last tree to bud out in the spring, didn't have many leaves yet.  There wasn't a lot of resistance to cause it to topple over.  It seems like the wind would blow right past it with no leaves to buffet against.  It was a mystery to me how it could have fallen.

And then I took a closer look.  Although the outside of the tree looked fine, the inside of the tree was rotten.  It was dying from the inside out.  Just by looking at the exterior of the tree, you would have never known that it had a terminal illness.  Probably an arborist could have identified symptoms, but to anyone else, the rottenness inside was hidden from sight.  But it was only a matter of time.  The clock was ticking.  On April 10th, as strong winds blew, the pecan tree's last grain of sand dropped through the hour glass.  Crash!

Overly dramatic, I know, but this malady isn't only restricted to trees, it is present and prevalent in nations and in people.  Our country, that once stood strong, is rotting from within.  We can stick our heads in the sand or we can face it.  Our Judeo-Christian heritage and values that once set us apart and put our feet on a strong foundation, has been under attack.  The family structure is falling.  Church attendance dropping precipitously.  We're deconstructing every norm, questioning every standard of truth, incentivizing all that's immoral and punishing all that's good, and right, and pure.  We've left God behind and if Jesus is mentioned, it is in a swear word.  Meanwhile, we're steadily rotting from within.

As people, we may look good from the outside.  We can put up a nice façade and put a new coat of paint on our barn that makes bystanders think all is well, but within, things aren't what they seem.  It's sinister and nefarious.  We can hide it for a little bit, whistling past the graveyard, but there are storm clouds brewing.  When the metaphorical strong winds begin to blow, the rot hidden inside our nation and inside the heart of man will have weakened us so that we cannot stand.  Try as we might with all our strength, we will not be able to withstand by human force or will.  We will topple and oh, what great destruction will occur.

The rotten pecan tree fell on another tree seen in the photo below, snapping it in half.  See, that's the thing.  There will be people who are faithful and virtuous, but they'll be caught in the wind, too, and won't be immune to the cataclysmic fall when the rottenness around them negatively affects them too, snapping them in half.  The Bible tells us that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

As I was looking at the rotten tree, something caught my eye that was imbedded in the dirt in the very center of the tree.  In the place that it was, it had to have been there for, I'm guessing 50 years or more.  It was a stick of welder's chalk, still pointed!  

Welder's chalk is made of soapstone and welders use it to mark steel plate that they've measured for cutting.  We live at the border of what used to be a rice field, and I assume that half a century ago, a farmer's implement broke down.  He pulled his implement to the edge of the field, got some metal plate perhaps to weld reinforcement on the tongue of a plow.  He measured and marked it for cutting with his welder's chalk and, when the repairs were done, threw the chalk next to a little pecan tree sapling that was growing on the fence line.

Fifty years later, here we are.  Oh, that we as a nation might repent and turn to Jesus.  Oh that we'd get some welder's chalk and mark the reinforcement of God's Word to apply to our weakened core and fix what's broken.  I used that half a century old chalk to commemorate the strong winds that knocked down the pecan tree on the wall of our hen house.

There's more strong winds coming.  Will we be able to stand?

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.  1 Corinthians 15:58

2024 Meat Birds - 3 Weeks Old

Three weeks are in the books for the meat birds.  I'm not a superstitious person, so I'll go ahead and say it:  We haven't lost a single bird.  We started with 32 and 32 are still upright and vertical.  That's good.  Real good.  We've been feeding them an 18% protein Chick Starter with no medication or antibiotics.  We keep the feeders full, but the feeders you see in the photo below will be swapped out with a PVC gutter that we use as a feed trough in order to fix a problem.  I noticed today that the chicks' heads were getting stuck in the feeder.  They're growing.

The other thing that's different is that I replaced the one gallon waterer with our old trusty bell chicken waterer.  

It suspends from the roof of the tractor and has a 5 gallon reservoir that I'll show in the next photo.

The reservoir is simply a 5 gallon bucket with a 5/16 hole drilled in it.  A rubber tube connects to a valve on the bell waterer.  The five gallon bucket sits precariously atop another 5 gallon bucket turned upside down that sits on a cow molasses tub turned upside down.  This set up allows gravity to do its thing and provides sufficient head pressure to keep water flowing as the chicks drink it.  We're still adding apple cider vinegar to the water.

So today is weigh day.  I snatched up an average bird.  Not the biggest.  Not the smallest.  I carry him in to the kitchen scale I have set up in the garage.  He's a nice looking bird.  He feels plump.  I'm still feeding them a whole bunch of june bugs every night.  That's free protein you don't have to pay for at the feed store and the chicks love 'em.  I set this week's bird down and he gave me a nice profile pic.

I sat him down on the scale for the Wednesday weekly weigh-in...

This week, Week 3, he weighed 1 lb. 13 oz or 29 ounces

The day we got them, they weighed 3 ounces

• Week 1, they weighed 6.5 ounces
• Week 2, they weighed 18 ounces
• Week 3, they weighed 29 ounces

That's a weight gain of 11 ounces over last week.  As I look at prior years' figures, we are still right where we need to be as far as growth is concerned.  We'll check in next week to see how they continue to progress.

Today We Bought Three Eggs

Following the mink debacle, we have 32 hens left.  On average they give us 21 eggs each afternoon that we pick up.  The birds roam around all day long out in the pasture, scratching through cow patties for bugs and worms and "recycled" grain.  They'll chase june bugs and other critters that creep, crawl and fly.  They eat clover and other grasses.

Long about mid-morning, they'll make their way to the hen house and lay their eggs.  You can always tell when they've laid because they sing a little song as if they are proud of their accomplishment.  I'll have to record it one day and post it.  It is a lot prettier than the shrill, loud cry of the rooster as he exerts dominance over the flock.

We produce a good number of eggs and we eat a good number of eggs each day.  "It's power food!" one of our customers said.  Still, we went to the feed store and bought 3 brown eggs:

They aren't for eating.  Not for us, anyway.  These are chalk or ceramic eggs.  When I gathered eggs the other afternoon, the very last ceramic egg in the laying boxes was gone.  For every ceramic egg that goes missing, that means there's a dead or dying snake somewhere.

You see rat snakes (we call them chicken snakes) get into the hen house often and eat eggs.  When they are in the barn, I let them go as I am more than happy with them seeking out and eating rats.  But when they start eating our eggs, that's where I put my foot down.  I put a ceramic egg in the laying boxes closest to the little patch of woods.  The snakes slither into the hen house, curl up in the box and have themselves an egg breakfast.  Except, when they eat a ceramic egg, they develop a massive case of constipation and end up dying from the blockage.  Sometimes, we'll find the skeleton and the ceramic egg and we're able to use it again.

What I've learned to do is before I put them in the boxes, I'll get a marks-a-lot permanent marker and put a stripe around the egg.  The ceramic eggs look so much like a real egg, that I'll tend to pick them up.  They don't crack on the edge of the black cast iron skillet!  The snakes or the chickens don't seem to mind the black stripe, but it really helps us out.

Here's the nest with some good old country eggs along with the "snake bait" egg.  You see what I mean?  It looks so realistic.  The stripe really helps.

We're coming into prime snake season as it warms up, so we'll watch to see how long our striped eggs last.  A ceramic egg costs as much as a dozen real eggs cost.  I've heard a golf ball works just as well, but I kind of like supporting our local feed store and the eggs have a more pastoral feel than a golf ball does.  Beware serpents!  Things aren't always what they seem...

Treating LuLu's Mastitis

One morning we went out to milk LuLu and when we started to milk, something wasn't quite right.  LuLu is normally a gentle milker, but she kicked and kicked.  Tricia noticed that she was kicking when Nicky tried to nurse.  He's rough with her.  In a few days, she wasn't as sensitive, but she allowed Nicky to suckle.  The next time we went to milk her, we could tell that the left front teat was hard.  When we started to milk, it was difficult to get the milk to flow properly.  It was as if there was something messed up in the teat.  We assume that somehow Nicky, LuLu's bull calf, did something in nursing that messed it up.  

Due to the fact that the teat was damaged by Nicky, she didn't allow him to completely empty it out and LuLu got subclinical  mastitis in that front teat.  Tricia did the California Mastitis Test and confirmed that she had a slight case, even though there was no visible sign of mastitis in the milk from that teat.  The other teats were clear, so we've continued milking those for us.  We're leaving the affected teat for Nicky to clean up.  In a few days, the teat didn't appear to have the same difficulty in milking, but a trace of mastitis was still there.  

We knew that we needed to treat that front teat.  Tricia uses Synergy Animal Products product called Superior Cow Cream to put on the udder and Ex-Cell Countdown 7000 to treat up the affected teat into the quarter.  We got LuLu and Nicky together and let him completely empty her out.

We filled a syringe with 30 ml of product with a teat infusion cannula on the end.  We make sure we keep everything sterile.  We wash the teat with an alcohol swab.

The syringe is inserted into the affected teat.  You would have thought that she would kick, but she didn't.  She is used to standing there, without kicking, while we milk her.

The product was slowly injected.

And soon was emptied into the quarter.

We keep the the calf, Nicky, away from LuLu all day long.  Twelve hours later, we let him nurse and repeated with a second dose.  We separated them.  The next morning, we put them together, let him nurse, and then finished up with the third and final dose.  By the time the third dose was inserted, she kicked a little, letting us know that she was not happy with the treatments.

We'll now wait for seven days and then do another California Mastitis test on that teat to see if she is clear.  If it isn't, there are other products that we can try to resolve it.  In the meantime, we'll continue milking the other 3 quarters.  We'll see how the results from the test turn out and how we'll proceed in a week.

2024 Meat Birds - 2 Weeks Old

An eventful week for our feathered friends.  The changes are apparent.  First, they are putting on feathers.  Their heads still have the yellow fuzz that is typical of cute little chicks, but white feathers are starting to come out.  They are noticeably larger, too.  We'll find out how much they've grown in a minute.

The storm that blew through on Wednesday set the birds back.  First, many of them came very close to dying as they got wet and had hypothermia.  Although we saved all of them, for probably 12 hours of the day, they didn't eat and didn't drink.  Once they recovered, they ate, but in a life span of 8 weeks, losing half a day of nutrition is going to set things back a little bit.

The bug population has fallen off.  Where I was feeding them between 95 - 200 beetles each night, tonight only 5 beetles were found.  That falloff in protein will be missed by the birds.  We're expanding the real estate within the chicken tractor that they can roam on, almost daily.  Since they are eating more each day, they are also pooping more.  We move the chicken tractor to fresh grass, so that they aren't standing in their poop.

So tonight is the night I pick out an average looking bird out of the flock of 32 and bring them to the kitchen scale to see where we measure up.  Like a prizefighter standing before the scales, let's look at tonight's heavy-weight competitor:

Notice the big dinosaur-looking feet on that little bird.  That means he's got some growing to do to fit into those "shoes."

Let's zoom in on the weight:

1 pound and two ounces.  In looking at records of past history, 20 ounces at this time hold the record, I think.  This bird isn't materially far behind.

At a day old he weighed 3 ounces.

A week later, he more than doubled his weight to 6.5 ounces

Not to be outdone, a week later, he more than doubled his weight to 18 ounces or 1 pound 2 ounces.

That's pretty good growth there.  We'll see if we can keep them healthy, happy and growing!  Next week we'll see how Week 3 goes.

Foul Weather Wednesday

We knew it was coming.  We expected it.  Last night we watched the weather report.  We like to make fun of how weather forecasters miss it, but they nailed this one.  We woke up at 6 AM and were having coffee when we checked the weather.  Fierce storms had just gone through Lake Charles heading east (toward us) with a massive front line with damaging straight line winds.  

We put down our coffee and got outside with the quickness.  I'll show you the bad news first.  It's not really bad, just unfortunate.  We were blessed.  We lost a medium-sized pecan tree in the pasture.  It blew across the fence that separates us and our neighbor to the east.

The pecan tree broke off a Chinese tallow tree on the fence line before going down.  This might look sad and unfortunate to you.  It is.  But what it really looks like is a lot of work!  We'll have to get this all cleaned up.

With that out of the way, let's rewind and I'll show you where Tricia and I hunkered down as the storm passed over.  It was IN the chicken tractor.  When we put our coffee down and got outside, our first thoughts went to our Cornish Cross meat birds.  They are two weeks old.  The chicken tractor is staked down, but rain water quickly saturates the ground.  If straightline winds are strong enough, it'll pull the stakes right out of the ground and flip the tractor over.  

In the midst of the thunder, lightning, rain and winds, this is where we were:

The tractor had a tarp over it and we were inside, trying to hold it down while the wind tried to pick it up.  It turned it sideways and several times, I thought we were toast.  We were praying and I had a fleeting thought that if someone's roof comes off to the west of us, we will wake up in heaven.  

The birds (and us) were soaking wet.  They were shaking and had their eyes closed and had hypothermia.  We've got to get them warmed up but there was one big problem.  The electricity, we could see, was out in the house.  We loaded them in buckets and set up the brooder in the garage.  Tricia began to try to warm them up by drying them off with an old t shirt.

I got our solar generator out.  Fortunately it was 100% charged.  We plugged in both heat lamps and the beleaguered birds began to rally.

The power stayed out for about six hours, but the solar generator did a wonderful job and we didn't lose a single bird out of the 32 in total.  What a lifesaver!

In no time at all the birds destroyed the garage, pooping all over the place.  I had to bleach the garage to clean up the area in the afternoon.

Somewhere around 3 PM the lights came back on.  Hooray!  Not only that, but the skies turned blue and the sun came out.  What a change!  A neighbor came by and said the winds had been clocked at 80 MPH.  He laughed when I told him we rode out the storm with the chicks.

We moved them back into the chicken tractor once we were pretty sure that the storm had passed over.  I think they enjoy being back out on grass.  We count in a blessing that we didn't lose any birds.

In what started out to be a day on which the weather was foul, we counted our blessings, because everything turned out alright.

Spring is a Berry Nice Time of Year

There is an old saying around here that says, "It's not officially spring until the pecan trees bud out."  Well, here we go!:

Speaking of pecans, I've finally gotten around to shelling the 2 five gallon buckets of pecans we collected underneath our trees.  Tricia took them to our feed store here in town and they crack them.  I like to sit and mindlessly shell the pecans.  They freeze nicely, so we have gallons of pecans frozen, waiting to be turned into pies and such.

I wanted to show you the strawberries.  We've planted strawberries in the past.  I'd like to say we had success growing them, but no, I'd be telling you a tall tale.  In years past slugs would eat them before we could get to them.  I decided to try again this year.  I ordered 22 bare root strawberry plants.  They looked very strange, almost dead, when they arrived.  I planted them, ensuring that the crowns were above ground and they began growing immediately.  We had fresh, green growth the very next day.  

Soon, we began to see blooms and little berries.

It was a beautiful sight to behold.  Right there in amongst the sweet potatoes were red, ripe strawberries.

Each morning, we gather a handful of fresh strawberries and wash them, chill them, and snack on them.  I've got to say they are very sweet.  Even Russ, who is not real big on compliments, told us that they are some of the sweetest he's ever eaten.  The variety is called Ozark Beauty.

So far, the slugs have NOT been eating them.  I was prepared for that.  Someone told me that the remedy for slugs in the garden is beer.  I was told that if you pour a saucer of beer and set it down in the strawberry patch, slugs are attracted to it, fall in the beer and drown.  But no slugs have bellied up to the bar yet.

One thing we have had is Birds eating on the berries.  A few have holes where the birds peck at them.  If this continues, we have a net that we can string out over the strawberries to protect them.  I was also told to make some "strawberry rocks" and scatter around in the berry patch.  Strawberry rocks are ordinary round stones that you paint red and place around the base of the plants.  As the story goes, birds arrive to eat berries and instead are fooled and peck into a hard, red rock.  They soon get discouraged and give up.  Interesting strategy.  We'll see how that works out.  Strawberries have a difficult time with slugs and birds and other pests.  That's why strawberries are the crop that you always read about that have more pesticides on them than anything else on the produce aisle.