-In an effort to be better about “putting up” our harvest I froze some of our zucchini.
-I also picked more wild blackberries from our property and froze them for future use (by the way, those wild blackberry thorns are MEAN!).
-I’m hoping to dehydrate our ground cherries and possibly our cherry tomatoes this weekend.
-We also made pasta salad w/ garden pickings – ground cherries, cherry tomatoes, zucchini, herbs – boy was it tasty!
-Trace built two more rabbit cages for growing out litters – we’ve found they gain weight better if we remove them from mom at about 6 weeks.
-Clover’s litter is getting bigger and, unusually, she has two jet black babies and seven of the normal grey color. She was bred to Winston – her father – so I wonder if it’s a recessive gene showing up.
-Penny’s chicks are growing real feathers and coming into their colors – we have two gold/caramel chicks, one black and one while with black speckles.
-The large guinea has taken to hanging out with Penny and her chicks. She seems to have adopted a sort of nanny role.
-White Penny (aka Penny #2), now known as Nickel, hatched three chicks the other day. She left the nest only a day after the third chick was hatched – unfortunately that chick didn’t make it through the first day/night. We cracked the remaining unhatched 6 eggs – 3 were fertilized, 3 were not; this gives us a 66%(ish) fertilization rate.
-I did some reading in an old (from 1905) poultry book and it’s recommended you remove the first hatched chicks for a day or so and keep them “in a basket by the fire” until the rest of the eggs hatch and then return them to the nest. I could see how doing that would keep the hen on the nest longer and give the rest of the eggs a chance to hatch.
-We’ve been exploring options for feeding our chickens something we can mix ourselves instead of the store-bought pellets. This would be good from a sustainability perspective. In addition, since we’re allowing the hens to raise their chicks we struggle to give the chicks their food (high in protein, low in calcium) and the adults their food (medium protein, high in calcium) without the chicks and adults crossing over. I’ve been reading posts of others who feed their chickens a whole grain diet to figure out our best option (here and here and here). The trick will be finding bulk grains cheaper than the feed store pellet food.
-Trace pulled more mulch out from under the rabbit cages and spread it on the garden. He also pulled the straw from under the chicken roots and started a new compost pile in the front yard (where the chickens won’t pull it apart).
-Trace and I put chicken wire above new cages so that the poor baby rabbits didn’t get chicken poop on them.
-We lost two hens over the course of the two weeks – our Rhode Island White and one of our Americanas. My best guess is bluecomb was the culprit but it’s hard to know for sure.
-We’re now down to only 19 hens and 5 roosters. Luckily we have chicks
-Michael (our black & white rooster) was limping badly for a couple of days but seems to have recovered.
-The poor dogs are covered in fleas – I went ahead and bought , chemical flea treatment, as much as I would prefer to have a more natural solution, the chemical stuff seems to work better once the fleas have taken hold. Maybe next year I can work on more natural preventative measures.
-The goats continue to enjoy the day they are moved – this week it wasn’t until Wednesday – THAT was their Best.Day.Ever.
(Just a quick note – we’re not that productive in a week – this covers the last TWO weeks in our world!)
Homestead Mama Preps 