Today we went to get some hay. I always thought I was a pretty good packer when it came to filling vehicles, but these folks somehow managed to get 21 bales of hay into our pickup. It may not sound like much for a truck, but bear in mine that the cap was still over the bed, which severely limits how high you can stack bales.

We also realized that the craft shack (now known as the hay shack) is the perfect place to stack hay. You can pull right up to the door and it is dry inside. Only some of our barn is perfectly dry, and sometimes the moisture wicks up from beneath and starts to mold hay stacked on the ground. Now we just keep 1 or 2 bales down in the actual barn. Pumpernickel seems to really enjoy the new hay, it seems to be a better quality than what we had before.

Today is the Floyd county fair and harvest festival! Must get there in time for the cheese eating contest!

Sourdough died a bit ago.

She had pneumonia. Andy went down to check on them around 9 or so, and Sourdough wouldn’t get up. He called the vet, and by the time she got here, Sourdough was lying on her side and breathing sort of shallow. The vet went to her truck to get an IV and some other things, and by the time she got back, Sourdough was barely breathing. So, Andy and the vet decided to just let her go, and so they sat with her until she died. Andy trimmed off as much of Sourdough’s fur as he could, so maybe some day when I know what I’m doing I can make a nice scarf or something. We buried her under a birch tree up by the craft shack.

Yesterday I finished our latest and greatest chicken tractor and we moved the d’Uccles into it (since they were pretty crowded in the last one). It’s larger (4×8 versus 4×4) and has more room inside so they can lay eggs and still have room to sleep and poop without (hopefully) getting the eggs dirty. They still need a few roosts, but I keep forgetting to grab the dowels out of the truck.

New house

Next step is to clean out their old house and move the little chicks in there. Although that will not be permanent, as they will eventually outgrow it unless we give some away first. We also might move some in with the cochins and japs once we can figure out who are hens and who are cocks.

Andy found a teeny itty bitty egg today. This is the smallest egg by far. Perhaps one of the younger hens has started laying? We didn’t crack it open. I think Andy was scared a teeny tiny chicken baby would fall out. The egg next to the wee egg is a “normal” egg for our chickens. The marker next to that egg is…a marker.

Sheep Update: Pumpernickle seems to be doing very well. Sourdough seems to be getting a tiny bit better, but she’s still pretty sick. She did go out side and eat a few leaves of clover this evening, and that made me happy.

About a week or two ago we noticed the sheep seemed sort of thin. It’s really hard to tell if a sheep is skinny or fat or regular because she often has 8 inches of fluff hiding her body. You have to really wiggle your fingers down into the sheepy fur to find the actual sheep. When we noticed the thinness, we started trying to fatten them up by feeding them more. We also gave them a dose of dewormer. Turns out, the dosage levels on the container of wormer aren’t all that effective…or so says the big animal vet we went to today.

This weekend, we noticed that Sourdough wasn’t quite as hyper as usual, and the grain they get every night wasn’t all gone in the morning. Yesterday when I went to let the sheep out of the barn, Sourdough was flumped in a corner and had to be prodded to get up. Not good. Nope. Not good at all. We gave her another dose of dewormer.

This morning, she was even more listless. We did see her eat and go potty a little, but she just was not doing well. I went to work, and Andy turned detective. All the signs pointed to severe worm levels. Andy called our cat vet who referred us to a big animal vet who told us to bring in poo.

While we were waiting for the test results, I heard someone in the back of the vet clinic say, ‘Hey, you remember the other day when you had that goat that had more worms then you’d ever seen before? Well, come look at this.’

Sourdough’s worm levels were extremely high. Extremely. The vet told us to dose both sheep (Pumpernickle seems mostly okay, but her worm levels were high, too) with six times the amount recommended on the bottle. Wow. The vet also suggested we give them some watery yogurt to help get their gut bacteria going again.

The only good thing about Sourdough being so listless was that it was pretty easy to get her meds and her yogurt into her tummy. We got everyone dosed, and Sourdough even joined Pumpernickle at the hay for a few munches.

We’ll see how they are in the morning. Here’s a picture of them a few weeks ago. Hopefully they’ll be out munching grass and baaing at us again soon.

The ducks have become incredibly difficult and will not behave. I think they are teenagers. They’ve decided they don’t want to go to bed at night, and they don’t want to eat what’s for dinner. The ducks would much rather run around the yard and eat crickets and moths. Next thing you know, they’ll be demanding cell phones and cars.

Right now I’m liking the chickens better. Here are the chicks at their recent modeling session.

We’re also getting eggs from the chickens, which makes them more likeable. We haven’t eaten any of the eggs yet, though. We did crack open a teeny egg we got to see what was inside. I was thinking it would just look like a teeny egg, but it was all yolk.

Here’s our first egg still in the nest.

And here’s all our eggs so far (minus the teeny one).

The chickens have started making us eggs! Sure, they are small (maybe medium) eggs, but they are still eggs. We have a dozen now, so maybe we can make an omelette or something. Because I’m geeky, I’ve added a link to the list that shows a chart with which chickens are producing what.

I wish I knew how many d’Uccles are actually hens.

Awww…aren’t they cute?

As adorable as these critters are, I’m definitely a duck person. I love how ducks stick together. Ducks never leave a bird behind. Chickens will wander off on their own and not care the least that the rest of the flock is far, far away. Not only is this duck mentality admirable, it’s also handy. A duck isn’t going to fly the coop and head off on its merry way. Oh no. And if one duck should happen to get separated from the group? Send the flock out after her, and they’ll round the straggler up.

Ducks are also not so pointy. I like the round, smooth duck bill. It doesn’t scare me like the pointy and most surely deadly-sharp chicken beak. Duck feet are big and floopy like clown shoes. Chicken feet are giant pokey daggers.

Finally, ducks like water. Ducks sploosh and snorfle in the pool and drill huge mud holes and shovel water on each other and dance under the sprinkler. Chickens play in the dust. Achoo!

Yesterday, Andy finished the d’uccles’ pen, and today he retrofitted the cochins’ pen to give them a little chicken cave. Both pens are pretty much the same. Andy seems to have perfected the bird pen design. It’s sturdy but light enough to move.

Yesterday our homestead’s population increased by 28. Here’s 12 of them.

Friday Andy saw a message on freecycle for two pairs of chickens, mottled cochins and mottled japs. I did a quick search online and found out that the japs are bantams (teeny), and I found that cochins are good meat birds. I asked Andy to ask the person if “pair” meant a breeding pair, and the person who posted said they were breeding pairs and to “Call Elvis” for more info.

I did some more research and found out that while many cochins are indeed full-sized and good meat birds, the mottled ones are bantams. Hrm. I don’t really want bantams because there’s not much meat on ’em and their eggs are tiny. By the time I came to this realization, Andy had talked to Elvis and learned that there were really 5 or 6 breeds of birds looking for new homes and many of them were cute, fluffy babies. We decided to go out and see what Elvis had…and hoped some of them were full-sized birds.

Elvis had a LOT of birds. Half of them were pigeons, which we had zero interest in…though the fan-tailed pigeous were pretty. There were the two pairs mentioned on freecycle plus some d’uccles, some silkies, and some other really tiny bantams that looked just like typical chickens but itty bitty. Elvis also had two bantam ducks and two very pretty quail.

We ended up with the dozen mixed chicks shown above, the pair of cochins, the pair of japs, a young silkie, and about a dozen d’uccles….some mille fleur and some porcelain, two grown up, a couple of teenagers, and a few youngsters. We also got a cage.

We put the d’uccles in the cage we got from Elvis, and the rest went into four cat carriers for the trip home. Elvis had said we’d have no problems tossing all of the (non-chick) birds into one cage, so when we got home we started emptying the cat carriers into the one big cage. Big mistake. The three grown roosters were incredibly unhappy, and we had to rush around trying to get the males separated again. In the process of doing this, the japs and cochins ended up running around free for a bit, and the two roosters got into a discussion.

We got the cochins into the duck tractor, and I rigged another pen with the top panels of the duck cage for the japs. The jap rooster, whom we named Elvis, is a diva.

Andy got to work and built one small chicken pen, which became the cochins’ home. The japs spent the night in a rabbit cage, and the d’uccles are pretty much staying in the cage we got for a while. Today Andy is building a second small pen for the japs.

All the birds are very pretty, but I don’t think we will keep them all. We don’t really have any reason to keep them all, and, well, that’s a lot of birds (especially when the chicks mature and go outside). I definitely want to keep the cochins, because they are very friendly and calm and don’t fly. And the silkie…s/he stays, too, because s/he is very extremely cute. (I don’t have a picture of her/him yet.) I think we may eventually rehome the japs because while they are very pretty they have teeny tiny eggs and are rather high-strung. Now, the d’uccles…I’d like to keep a few, but I don’t think we need all of them…most of the chicks are d’uccles. Here’s a picture of two young mille fleur d’uccles making faces at Priscilla the mottled jap.

Even though Elvis gave us all these birds for free, I’m thinking maybe we can ask a little bit, maybe $5 each, for the birds we rehome. Not only will that help us cover some of the costs for materials to build the new pens but also it will, I hope, help weed out some people who would maybe take free birds and not treat them very well. Sort of like an adoption fee.

We planted some cilantro in our sad little garden plot, but since we didn’t really take care of it, things just went to seed. Fortunately, cilantro seed is also known as coriander, so now that it has dried out from the hot spell (the same one that caused half our tomatoes to split open), i went and harvested the seeds!

Coriander

The downside is I think we still have a spice jar of coriander seeds left from the last time I did this, about five years ago…