The Determined Broody Hen

 

My hat's off to this old girl.  She is the picture of determination and perseverance.  She's a hen that wants the eggs beneath her to hatch.  When a hen is mature and the days are long, a hen's pituitary gland will release a hormone called prolactin.  She will then sit on eggs.  The motherly instinct is at full throttle.  When you try to remove the eggs from beneath her, she will fluff up her feathers, making herself look larger than she actually is and make a frightening noise.  She'll even peck at your hand with her beak.

To tell you how bad she wants the eggs beneath her to hatch?  Well, I am not exaggerating when I tell you it must be 110 degrees in the henhouse and there she sits all day long.  Chicken eggs hatch in 21 days.  Her hen instincts are guiding her.  She is looking forward to the day when the eggs beneath her hatch and babies arrive.

Why do I keep saying "eggs beneath her?"  They are not her eggs.  They aren't even chicken eggs.  They are guinea fowl eggs.  My neighbor gave me a number of fertilized Lavender Guinea eggs to put under the broody hen.  She accepted them and has been sitting on them for what I figure is 3 weeks.  Unfortunately, I didn't write down the date when I put them underneath her.  

Who knows?  The eggs underneath her may be poached eggs in all this heat.  I'll give her another week setting on them.  If they hatch, however, it'll be neat to see this hen being a surrogate mother to her adopted guinea fowl chicks.  We will check in on her again in the days to come.

Welcome Nicky, LuLu's Baby Calf

The days are hot,

The temperatures rise,

Tongues hang out with exhausted sighs,

The ground is parched,

The grass is chaff.

But lo!  LuLu has birthed a calf!

This is the sight that greeted us on this Lord's Day as we did chores before Worship Service.  Although we were expected it about a week from now, this was a little early.  LuLu wasn't huge and her bag wasn't in "bloom" until this morning.  It's her first calf.  She's very nervous and high-strung.  When we discovered the baby, LuLu was just in the process of licking him to clean him up.  He tried, unsuccessfully, to stand up.  His long, wobbly legs gave way and he clumsily fell back in the dust.

We've had many chicks hatch out and some goats that have kidded lately, but it has been a couple of years since the last calf was born on the homestead.  It's an exciting time!  More on that later.  You look into the eyes of the calf and wonder what they're thinking.  Just last night they were secure in a dark, climate-controlled, safe location.  Now, strange creatures are looking at you, chickens are pecking at your soft hooves, the bright sun hurts your eyes.  What an awakening!

The first thing we check is the sex.  It's a... bull calf.  We always hope for heifers.  However, we're happy to get a healthy little calf.  This little guy's dad was a registered Jersey named Nick.  Tricia suggested that we name him in honor of his father.  So, we welcome NICKY to Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  LuLu's sister, Elsie, came to see her new nephew.  Sniff, sniff.  They always smell them.

Could there be a worse time to calve?  I suppose so, but this heat does stress the animals.  We decided to move Nicky and LuLu to the shade on the south side of the barn.  It will be oppressively hot by the time we get back from church and eat and have time to come out and check on things.  LuLu still needs to deliver the placenta, finish cleaning up Nicky, nudge Nicky so that he stands up and begins to drink colostrum.  That's a lot of items on the agenda!  We hayed LuLu and headed off to church.

After worship and a big plate of chicken stew over rice, sliced beets, cranberry sauce, and coffee and chocolate persimmon cake for dessert, we changed and headed out to the barn/nursery to check on the situation.  I've got to tell you not much had happened in our absence.  They were both sitting down.  They're not in a rush like we are.  LuLu had delivered the placenta, but Nicky had not stood up.  He was taking in a Sunday afternoon nap.

Tricia and Russ got him up on wobbly legs and in three shakes of a billy goat's tail, he was walking around and falling an awful lot.  Practice makes perfect, though.  He'll get it.  We got an extension cord and rigged up a fan for LuLu to cool the new momma down.  She wasn't interested much in having all this attention.  Nicky would try to find the teats, but LuLu wasn't being cooperative.

We tried to put LuLu in the head gate so that we could work with her and Nicky.  Wouldn't you know it, a bunch of wasps had built a nest in the head gate.  As I started getting her head in there, wasps came flying out.  I went back to the garage and got some gas and ended the wasps' rebellion with the quickness.  

After some time, we were able to get Nicky to nurse.  I am positive that he got some colostrum.  We'll work with him more after evening services.  I want to get his little belly full so that he gets more energy and antibodies to strengthen his immune system.  We've got to get the little fellow to stand on his own!  Right now, we're having to help him get his feet under him.

In church this morning, we sang the old hymn, "How Firm a Foundation."  This was President Theodore Roosevelt's favorite hymn.  The lyrics and music are poignant and worshipful.  Coincidentally, part of the lyrics mention 'causing thee to stand.'  (Very appropriate for little Nicky!)

How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,

Is laid for your faith in His excellent word!

What more can He say than to you He hath said—

To you who for refuge to Jesus have fled?

“Fear not, I am with thee, oh, be not dismayed,

For I am thy God, and will still give thee aid;

I’ll strengthen thee, help thee, and cause thee to stand,

Upheld by My gracious, omnipotent hand.

We'll continue to stand by to offer LuLu assistance.  We'll try to get plenty of colostrum into Nicky.  It's thick, yellow, oily, and nutritious. Then we'll milk the remainder out and freeze it.  That's a good insurance policy to have tucked away in the freezer.  Pretty soon we'll be back to daily milking - in this sweltering sauna in the south.  Not quite ready for that after a long reprieve from milking, but here we go again!  LuLu will require some working with as it's her first calf and she's never been milked before and she's as wild as a March hare.  We might have a rodeo on our hands, but that's okay.  It's always an adventure!

If A Tree Falls In the Woods...

In what has become a biennial event, the red oak borer beetle has taken out another one of our oak trees.  It has been weakened for several years.  This spring it gave up the ghost.  It stands a skeleton of it's former glory.  The oak tree to the right of it was subservient to it, leaning over to gain some access to sunlight.  Now, perhaps, it will resume a more stately shape, until the borer beetle takes it out, too.

The dead tree once served as one side of the base of the zip line, or shoot to shoot, as we called it.  Our kids zipped down the cable many times, coming to an abrupt stop at the American flag on the barn.  I think that if the tree knew that the kids were counting on it to hold up the base of the zip line, it might have held out a few more years.  But the kids are grown and the big tree that served as the launching point of the zip line succumbed to the red oak borer beetle several years ago.  Time marches on.

I put off cutting down the tree as long as I possibly could.  However, big limbs started falling out of the tree and onto the barn.  A couple limbs arched precariously over the fence, threatening to fall on their grandchildren's trampoline.  I figured the neighborly thing to do was to take the old tree down.  I called a tree service from my hometown.  The proprietor's sister and I graduated from high school together.  He and his wife do this business on the side.  They came while I wasn't home one morning and put the tree on the ground for a price tag of $500.  I feel like that was a reasonable price.

Compare the photo above with the photo below.  It is a weight off my mind that the tree was felled.  There was really only one direction that it could go, and they put it on the ground in the prescribed location.  With the bucket truck and two chain saws running, it took them no time.  They did seek permission from my neighbor and they accessed the tree from my neighbor's back yard.

As we always request, the tree service laid the tree on the ground.  We'll cut it up ourselves and then I'll split it for firewood.  As the old saying goes, "Firewood warms you at least four times.  One to cut it down, Two to split it, Three to stack it, and Four to burn it."  We use a chainsaw rarely, so I always borrow my Dad's or on an occasion or two, I would rent one for $50 per day and would bring it back the same day.  The hardware store no longer rents them out, though.

Since it isn't very smart to buy a machine with a small engine that isn't used frequently, I was reading reviews for a battery-powered chainsaw.  This one had very good reviews, so I jumped on it.

It's an 80 volt chainsaw with an 18 inch bar.  When I paid the tree service for the work, I asked him his opinion of these saws.  I guess I should've asked before buying, but he told me that they use them in his line of work all the time.  He said you'll be tired out before the chainsaw loses its charge.  He told me as long as I kept the blade sharp and bar oil in the reservoir, the saw would make me proud.  I asked if the saw was too small to cut up the tree?  He told me no.  He said he cut the tree down with a smaller chain saw.

That's just what I needed to hear.  I'll be charging up the battery and will cut up the tree so that when cooler weather comes around in the fall, I can pull out my double-sided ax, wedge and sledgehammer and get busy splitting firewood for the winter.  As bad as I hated to see the tree go, we were smack-dab out of firewood.  And that reminds me, I need to call a chimneysweep.  We haven't had our chimney cleaned in several years.  It's almost laughable that I'm talking firewood and chimneysweeps when it is 107 outside!

Gimme Some Water

The weather report today said "Feels like 107."  It's been hot.  But I can handle the heat.  The lack of rain is what's really troublesome.  Tonight at prayer meeting, someone suggested "Showers of Blessing" for our first hymn.  The second verse goes like this:

There shall be showers of blessing"—
Precious reviving again;
Over the hills and the valleys,
Sound of abundance of rain.

We would love to hear the sound of an abundance of rain right now!  The earth is parched.  The grass is crinkly and withered and hasn't grown in a coon's age.  In fact, I've only mowed the yard twice this year!  Being new beekeepers, we have been amazed to see the flights of bees coming to the rain barrel on our back patio.  Bees need water, too!

The honeybees fly to the barrel and walk down the sides to the water's edge.  Then they drink.  During the summer, bees use water to regulate the temperature in the colony.  I'll show some photos later of the bees all piled out outside the door of the bee boxes.  For the brood to survive, the temperature must be regulated.  

These worker bees carry the water back to the hive.  House bees meet them at the door.  The house bees bring the water to the comb and deposit it and then turn around and fan the water to create their own air conditioning.  Amazing! This process goes on over and over and over again.  

Sometimes, a bee gets too close and falls in the water.  We use a leaf like you would throw a life line to someone in trouble to help the bee get back to the edge and fly off.  To combat this, we did put a shallow pan with rocks in it, but no bees go to it.  They keep going to the big barrel shown in the photos above.  Our best guess is that the bees' GPS hasn't picked up on it yet.

Bees do a dance called the 'waggle dance' when they get back to the hive.  This dance tells the other bees exactly where to find nectar (and water) and how far and in what direction it is.  The best we can figure is that their dance hasn't corrected to communicate the coordinates of the new dish.  

We'll keep water available for the honeybees at our house.  Hopefully, we'll get some rain sometime in the not-too-distant future.  We pray for those Showers of Blessing.  So do the bees.

Time to Start Thinking about Fall

Tomorrow is August.  The sultry heat saps your energy.  The lack of rainfall is concerning as the grass withers and is 'crispy' when you walk on it.  We wonder out loud, "when will we get respite from the heat?"  We patiently wait.  But, we prepare, too, for cooler days ahead.

With a change of season and, hopefully, rainfall, we anticipate putting in the fall garden.  We begin looking at our inventory of purchased and saved seeds.  We start looking at planting dates for different crops.  We've always saved seeds to plant from our best produce.  This year, for the first time in forever, we saved our snap bean seeds.

Toward the end of the spring crop, I marked several of our best plants and marked them.  We stopped harvesting the snap beans from the marked plants and allowed them to mature and then dry on the plant.  When totally dry, I picked the pods and set them on our drying rack to continue drying.  We had just finished curing our onions on the rack, so we had space.

I cracked open the brittle bean pods to expose the snow white seeds.  This variety is Blue Lake Bush.  We also saved three other varieties.

Some of the seeds had blemishes, but some were absolutely perfect.

We packed them away in dark vitamin bottles that we save for this purpose.  We label the bottles and date them. 

We should have enough saved so that we don't need to purchase any - at least for the fall.  We really enjoy eating fresh green beans that we harvest whole and then bundle and wrap in bacon.  It is a nice side dish for Thanksgiving Dinner.  We'll see what type of germination we get on the saved beans.  In looking at my planting calendar, you can plant a fall crop of snap beans in mid to late August.  Goodness, that's only two weeks away.  If we get a good rain, you can bet your bottom dollar, these seeds will be in the dirt.

Roosters to the Freezer

Saturday morning we woke to the crowing of roosters near our bedroom window.  It has become a frequent and regular occurrence.  With a number of roosters occupying a limited space with many more hens, it's been quite a commotion.  That ends today.  Friday evening I set up all of the stations that we use for butchering: The Killing Cones, The Scalding Cauldron, The Plucking Machine, The Evisceration Station, and the Chill Zone.

Let's get this party started.  I turned on the fire to the crawfish pot and watched it, monitoring for the exact moment when it hit 145 degrees Fahrenheit.  Then I aim to keep it there.  Too hot and you'll cook 'em.  Too cool and the feathers won't come off.  I went and picked out the two roosters we wanted to keep.  They made the cut.  The others will make their places of abode in our deep freeze.  We put the first four roosters in the cones.

Head down, with buckets underneath to catch the blood.  Usually we bury the blood in the garden, but this time, my neighbor wanted it to make catfish bait with.  We slit the chickens' necks and allow their heart to pump out all the blood.  When bled out, they die.  The cones hole them tight.

Time for scalding.  We add some dishwashing liquid to the pot.  This allows the water to get beneath the feathers during the scald.  I dunk them deep into the water for about a minute.  To test, I pull a big wing feather and tailfeather out.  When they both come out with ease, they are ready for plucking.

To pluck, we simply toss the bird in the barrel, turn on the plucker and spray the spinning bird with water.  The feathers start to fly.  Pretty soon, there are no more feathers left on the chicken.

The homemade plucker that me and two friends put together works beautifully.  It literally takes of 99% of the feathers.  During quality control, we may pull a feather or two off, but overall, this machine saves us a LOT of time and effort.  You can see the results here:

Tricia is the Corporate Director of Evisceration Administration.  Armed with a sharp knife and the knowledge of how to use it, she guts the bird efficiently.  Keeping that in mind, I mind my Ps & Qs around her.

Once the birds are gutted, they are washed up and then put in a tub of cold water to continue cooling down.  After we're done, we dump out the warm water and refill with cool water.  We bring the tub inside and pack with ice.  The birds will stay on ice for 24 hours while the birds go through rigor mortis.  Then we cut them up and bag them.  Since (most) of these are small roosters, we don't know how tender they'll be to eat after cooking on the BBQ pit.  Most of these will be used this winter in Homemade chicken soup and Gumbo.  Both cooked low and slow, allowing the meat to become tender.

EPILOGUE:    In the "you live and you learn category," I'll share something with you.  To determine who lived and who died, we selected the two roosters we wanted to keep.  The rest of them would be butchered.  It was hard to count exactly how many roosters with them all moving around.  I thought I counted 8 in total.

As we kept filling the cones, I realized we had more than that.  At the end, we had butchered 16 birds.  I wanted to make sure I had them all.  On the last pass, I gathered 3 remaining birds.  The had a big comb, long tailfeathers, and the beginning of a spur on the side of their leg.  3 more roosters, I thought.  Got to get those, too.  Since they are young, they're a little hard to tell.

Once we butchered those, Tricia was gutting.  She said, "What is all this yellow stuff?"  I walked over to inspect.  It was egg.  Oh no!  I had mistakenly killed 3 hens!!

You can see all the eggs at different stages lined up within her.

This is a big mistake on my part.  This hen (and the two others I mistakenly killed) would have laid 300 eggs per year.  That mistake cost me almost 1,000 eggs a year.  I should have waited and watched and allowed the ones I wasn't 100% sure of to grow until I was sure of their sex.  This was a teachable moment for me, for sure.  

On the bright side, we added 16 chickens to the freezer and we'll enjoy the fresh, hormone-free, antibiotic free birds in delicious home-cooked meals this winter.  

The Cock's Clock is Ticking

The drama in the chicken tractor is impossible to ignore.  The crowing (loudly) commences at first light.  Then, the romance starts.  The pullets outnumber the cockerels, but they are mighty amorous.  The squawking and carrying on leads to fights between roosters for their 'harem."  Feathers fly.  Tempers flare.  The pullets seem stressed.  It's past time to do something.

I'll talk about that in a minute.  Each day we're picking up three to five eggs from the pullets.  I tried to put a nesting box in the chicken tractor, but they scratch all the hay out of it and lay on the ground.  It's time to move the hens to the pasture.  The eggs the pullets are laying are small.  It takes two pullet eggs to equal one regular egg.

I was talking to my wife about thinning out the herd (or flock in this situation).  You need 1 rooster to service 10 hens.  We have about 30 pullets and to the best of my ciphering, I think we have 8 roosters.  We plan to pick out three of the best looking roosters for keeping.  We'll introduce them to the flock in the pasture along with the biggest of the hens.  The five roosters that didn't make the cut will be butchered this weekend and we'll put them in the freezer for the upcoming gumbo weather this winter.  You can see some of the roosters in this photo whose days are numbered.  Who am I kidding?  All our days are numbered.

Once the excess roosters are processed, things will be more serene on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  There will be peace in the valley.

There will be peace in the valley for me some day

There will be peace in the valley for me, oh, Lord, I pray

There'll be no sadness, no sorrow, no trouble I see

There will be peace in the valley for me