After a month of consistently, sometimes brutally freezing temperatures, we had a thaw today. It reached 40 degrees! I dumped all indoor plans and got suited up – necessary because the snow is still above my knees, and up to my waist in certain places. I slipped into the trusty muck boots and the thick …
Category Archives: chickens
Chicken Update
Andrea asked for a chicken update. The nine ladies are all doing well, looking only somewhat worse for wear. It’s been really cold but that’s not as much a problem as is the state of their run. It’s impossible to shovel the snow out of there. So they have only a small area (under the …
More Winter Fun
Winter, winter… you’re still here. How can we miss you when you won’t even leave? It snowed some more, a lot more. See Amie and DH in the previous post, posing in the path, barely ankle deep? We got over two feet after that and were happy that blizzard (Juno, they called it?) did not …
Homeschooling, Chickens, Garden Plans
Homeschooling is going even better than I had expected. We are sticking to a strict schedule in the mornings, with a steady core curriculum in math and language arts. In the afternoons we do Latin and, after that, we launch into our history/science module. I’d say the last one is our favorite along with logic, …
Creaking Cold
It’s been a while since I blogged. The reasons were house guests over the holidays with whom we gladly dug in like hermits, eating wonderful home-cooked meals, playing board games with the kids when we could locate them, and reading books by the fire. Also, we watched Sharknado 2: The Second One together. It’s a …
Hurt Chicken
A couple of days ago Amie and her friends ran inside in a panic: there’s blood, blood! I ran out with them and found a crazy chicken yard with screaming chickens and screaming children. Also a broad streak of blood on the roost. Imagine my relief when I found it was just one of the …
Well, That Explains It
For weeks Ive been looking out for more tiny pullet eggs. Not a one. I thought the older hens had stopped laying and the pullets had immediately skipped to the big egg scale. Then today Amie was trying to round up all the escaped hens and ended up missing one. Where was Lucy? We looked …
Automatic Chicken Coop Door Opener
Joining the flocks after letting them spend their days in the large chicken yard together has been less dramatic than we feared. Still, in the mornings they start hollering to be relieved of each other’s close company around 6 am. I get up, pull on a sweater (that time of year), slippers and head out, …
Clipping Chicken Wings
Our pullets espouse an escapist ethic. They fly up into the vines and no fence that I’ve put in place – the highest being six feet – has kept them in the chicken yard. Their adventures have led them into the vegetable garden, which is no big deal at this point, as most of the …
Eggs, Elder Syrup
We may march in the Big Apple in the biggest Climate Action in the world, ever, but then we come home where our lives are (somewhat) normal and comfortably small. Here we concoct an elder syrup of elderberries, elder flowers, astragalus root, peppermint and homegrown, raw honey. In fact, over a quart of it! One …