Three fall sagas

The egg saga



Our chickens have been getting older. For the hens, that has meant egg-laying time. But not egg-laying in the nice little straw-filled laying boxes provided for them. Rather, eggs turn up hidden in gopher holes in the pasture, on the floor of the coop, or in a little indented spot in the straw under an overhang at the far end of the yard. Nevertheless the treasure hunting and omelet potential have been fun. Meanwhile, for our roosters, getting older has meant crowing in the mornings, chasing hens around the yard, sparring... which was waking us up at 4:30 in the morning and making the barnyard a bit chaotic... especially once we realized that we had six roosters.

We had originally bought 12 chickens -- six egg layers and six meat birds. One of the meat birds had been killed by a neighbor dog early on, and two others were commercial breeds that needed to be butchered a couple of months ago... so we had thought we only had three left. But friends of ours had also gave us three chicks that needed homes, and it turned out that all three were roosters too (it's hard to tell when they're young). So we decided that it was time for some chicken butchering, even though it's kind of sad.

So we decided to have a party. A housewarming, birthday, sukkah-building, fall, chicken butchering party. Of course that was somewhat over-ambitious and made for us running around between a sukkah (outdoor hut built for the Jewish harvest holiday of sukkot) and a chicken-killing station (which was for some reason :) populated by fewer people than we had hoped) and a barbecue grill and a normal party. Anyway, eventually all six chickens got turned into freezer meat and the sukkah got built (but subsequently fell down in the winds that blew up that night -- see?)...


Before


After

...and we even got to spend a little time at the party party part. And the next morning, there were no roosters crowing in the yard. But when we went out in the afternoon, we heard a cockle doodle doo. Turned out it was Gimpy, our limping chicken who had been battle-wounded in the same dog attack that had taken out our first meat bird. Gimpy had been a bit of a mean chicken -- pretty feathered, but mean to the others, kind of an attack chicken -- and we had just attributed that to chicken post-traumatic-stress-disorder. Turns out, in hindsight, he was just an undercover rooster. With 6 other non-limping roosters around, he had kept it under wraps, but with the rest of them out of the way, he took his presumably rightful place as crowing head of the barnyard (note his non-chicken-like upright posture -- limp compensation it seems).


Gimpy standing with the baby goats (Ed & Gigi)


Gimpy chilling

And we were foiled in our quest for no roosters (the saving grace is that he only crows once out of the coop in the morning, so no more 4:30 am wakeups at least).

Meanwhile, once the 6 other roosters disappeared, the hens seemed to stop laying eggs. We just weren't finding them anymore. The laying boxes were just filling up with poop and none of the normal egg hiding spots were seemingly being used. So we got worried that we had traumatized all the eggs out of the hens by getting rid of half the flock all at once. I bought a dozen eggs from the store in response. One day, though, there were two eggs sitting on the ground next to our yard's gazebo-made-out-of-a-satellite-dish. And then the next day, a friend suggested that maybe they had been laying under the gazebo and that those two eggs had just rolled out from underneath. So I looked underneath (which involves lying totally flat on the ground on smooshed goat and chicken poop) and sure enough there were a couple more eggs.


The space under the gazebo

And reaching under, there was another. And another. Turned out there were about 20 built up under there, and we had found the solution to the mystery of the halted egg production. All of a sudden there were 3 dozen eggs needing to be used. Come over for omelets please!


Eggs :)


The milk saga

Our baby goats have been getting older too. Ed, the boy, has turned out to be very vocal. He bleats and bleats whenever anyone is around. He cries and struggles when we try vaccinating him (whereas all the others doen't particularly like it, but don't protest nearly as much). He seems to think he's a chicken, and bleats indignantly when we lock him out of the chicken coop so that he doesn't eat all their food. Some of the other goats have been following suit as well. This is only helpful in that when you come home and the yard is quiet, it's a clue that the goats have broken into the barn where we store their hay. It's a dead giveaway.

Meanwhile, we'd been trying to figure out when and how we could separate mama Frosty from Gigi & ed so as to wean them and start milking her. Mike built a milking stand that she could eat grain at while being milked, and Frosty has learned to come into the barn and jump up onto the stand and look for grain snacks -- but we've really only gotten a couple of squirts out of her -- probably because the kids are still feeding some, probably because she's holding back (goats can do that), and probably because we're not terribly skilled tiny-goat milkers yet.


Ed and Cle (non-milk-related :))

So... milk, not so successful yet. Eggs, quite successful. In light of that we bought 25 chicks online who arrived by mail, and they are currently living in our bathtub waiting to get big enough to live outside and be integrated with the rest of the chickens.


Baby baby chick


A couple of weeks later

We're reorganizing the barn so that the chickens will have a bigger place that can accommodate more of them, and so that the goats will have somewhere to be inside if they want to when it gets really cold (we've had 3 little snows so far at our house, but none yet in Wenatchee where the elevation is lower).


Snow!

We're also needing to put up another little fence because Ed, when he gets to be 3 months or a little more, has to be separated from the girls unless we want more baby goats. Meanwhile, the new chickens should start laying in the spring, which might give us a little on-the-side egg business. Maybe if we can do some eggs and a few goat baby sales and a bit of honey and/or who knows what, we could transition to more time doing farm-y type work and less time doing desk-y type work... not yet, but we'll see how things go.


A travel saga

Mike and I are planning to visit his brother & sis-in-law & new nephew in Paraguay in December, and also to go visit my old friends/places in Peru. It has been a bit of a saga to get all that together -- between few airlines flying to Paraguay and attempts to make frequent flyer miles work, and internal Peruvian airlines who say you can pay with a credit card on their website but then you can't and then flights get more expensive if you pay any other way, and this and that and the other thing. But it's looking now like it will work as a trip... which is exciting!

Meanwhile, less exciting is figuring out how to have the goats and chickens taken care of if we're away for two weeks, especially in the winter, when getting up and down our road to/from town can be tricky with snow (so we hear)... I already hit my first deer on our road -- well, it hit me, early in the morning in the dark, just sort of ran out from a hiding spot into my side mirror (and knocked the mirror off, but otherwise didn't do any damage -- I assume the deer just got a bruised shoulder too and moved on).

Anyway, all this to say that the goat-chicken-sitting is a bit of a challenge -- so if you're looking for a rural Washington getaway for Christmas/New Years time with all the omelets you could ever want, let me know! :) Actually, though I think it'll work out. We just went to Utah for a weekend to visit friends, and one of our neighbors watched the animals. It seemed to work out okay, so we'll see...

That's about it for now. Here are a couple of pictures to leave you with -- one from a little hike near our house; and a couple from the above-mentioned trip to Utah :)


Hills overlooking the next-door-canyon


Utah


With Zhao

Til soon!
:)