4/29/2018 0 Comments In the GardenI come to the garden alone, while the dew is still om the roses, Boy, it's been quite some time since I posted! Life gets a bit chaotic with 4 young children, homeschooling, a self-employed husband of multiple professions, and what has become a small farm in our suburban backyard! There seems to be little time devoted to writing anything about what is going on. Maybe that will change slowly as the younguns get a bit older and more self-sufficient. For now, we seem to be finally finding spring for good... maybe. This sure has been a crazy weather year. Yet, God is good, and has been blessing us. Not only in the garden at home, but He has also blessed me with a second garden to work for my father's business associate, very close by! We now have a flock of 7 chickens! 4 just were not providing the amount of eggs we go through in a week, so this year we added 3 more. It would have been 6 total, but an unfortunate occurrence brought us to one more. We seem to finally have a fully integrated flock now, who reasonably well get along, and we should begin to see full egg production from all birds within a couple of months! I introduce to you, from oldest to youngest, our hens: Clucky -or- The Home Depot Special She joined our family in a bizarre way, which deserves a telling in a post all its own. It is filled with hilarity and chaos. She started off our chicken-keeping adventure! Mo, Chickie, and Teddy Rhode Island Red hens that we bought as chicks at the beginning of last year, once we had determined what Clucky was, and we were fairly sure she would accept them. She did! Goldie The lone survivor of the pair of Silver Laced Wyandotte chicks that we bought at the first of this year. Unfortunately, chickens are omnivores and scavengers, and Sylvie, her buddy, did not survive their escape from their enclosure. Goldie did not take well to being alone, and so... Gretel and Pudge Australorp chicks bought as a pair in hopes Goldie would not attack them as she might a lone chick, as they were 4 weeks younger. Amusingly, she took them under her wings, quite literally! She seemed to adopt them as her babies, and I got to witness her covering them with her wings under the heat lamp on a few of the cooler nights. Goldie also put up with their chick antics as a mother hen would, even with them climbing on top of and around her! Yes, I have pictures! What about where you are? Are you able to play in the dirt yet? Do you keep backyard chickens? Or are you still dreaming of one or the other?
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Carmen's Space to WriteI love to garden and craft, which becomes quite interesting with 3 little ones underfoot, and homeschooling the oldest! Archives
April 2018
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