One of Seven Eggs in the Incubator hatched and survived

The only Chick from seven eggs.

Of the seven eggs we moved to the incubator because the Mama didn't want them, three hatched, but only this one survived.

Now I'm her Mama and only friend as she is too tiny to put with any of the other chickens.  I am going to place a mirror inside the brooder so she will have company when I am busy.  Otherwise she is always peeping to be with me.

Our First Chicken Egg Just Hatched! UPDATE #3: almost but not quite......

newly hatched

We are thrilled to announce our first attempt at hatching a chicken egg has been successful, so far!   The first of seven eggs abandoned by their mother hatched this morning, just a little while ago, and this little guy is quite active.  His/her siblings should be hatching soon too, we hope, since they were all laid the same day.

They will all be mixed breeds as we have one rooster, a white sex link, and several breeds of hens. We are hoping to see a bit of variation in the color/shades of the eggs these chicks will lay.

In any case, if they all hatch and survive we will have seven chickens that we didn't need to buy.

UPDATE: #2 Broke out of its shell about an hour ago.  It took about 6 hours and the poor little thing is so tired.

UPDATE TUESDAY, DAY 2:  The third egg hatched late last night but the poor little was worn out from working all day to break out of the shell and he died this morning.  The first hatched chick also died this afternoon.  It had been strong, but then I noticed blood on it's feathers and each time I checked on it, the situation had gotten worse.  Apparently the second chick had been brutalizing it.  I separated the culprit from the other two, but the damage was done.

So as of this posting, we have one chick out of seven eggs.
Three eggs hatched, four were duds, two birds died.

The Henny Penny Farm Update: Behind Schedule but Finally Producing!

Much work was accomplished after an early start this morning, before the heat of the day set in:

-fertilized the entire garden with chicken poo tea.  Thank goodness for this garden gold mine! Each time I water the garden with I see marked growth overnight!

   I keep a fifty gallon barrel filled with chicken poo tea at a corner of the

   the garden.  To fertilize the plants I use a pail and make repeated trips
   back to the barrel.  This works best for me, after having tried using a 
   watering can and finding it cumbersome.
   
   When the tea level inside the barrel reaches below half I top it off with
    more water as long as there is still poo at the bottom of the barrel.

   Later, when I no longer need to fertilize, I will add more poo from the
   hen house along with the wood chips.  After the chips have become 
   saturated with the tea, I will spread them onto the raised beds around
   the plants.

   At the end of the season they will be turned under to get a head start
   at fertilizing next year's garden.

-trimmed all the tomato plants.  Though far behind schedule due to the chickens having gotten into the garden uprooting everything early on, there are finally tomatoes on the vines.

-pulled the few tiny weeds that were beginning to grow among the onions and other root veggies.  Mulch, the gardener's best friend. Thanks to lots of mulch the weeding chore has been reduced to just a few minutes now and then.

-fed and watered all the critters.  With the hot temperatures their water troughs evaporate before they can drink all the water. So they must be refilled two or three times a day.

-moved all the meat chicks and mama hen to the chicken tractor which will be their new home. The mama chicken that would not hatch her own eggs, has taken to being the mama for these chicks and won't be separated from them. So she is in the chicken tractor teaching them how to eat the grass and scratch for bugs.

These little chicks are going to grow to about 9 pounds each and will provide meat to our table for the entire year.

The garden is far behind schedule due to the early set-backs created by the chickens having gotten into the garden twice and uprooting everything!   But, despite this,  everything is growing fast and the first of the tomato transplants have fruit on them. The yellow beans have been providing about 1 pound of beans each week, which is perfect for us. And the green beans I planted a couple of weeks ago along side the yellow beans are growing and preparing to replace the yellow beans once they are finished.

The onions are doing nicely so far. I have my fingers crossed since these are the first to be grown from seed. I have never had any luck growing big onions..... hoping this will be the year I succeed.

I am also trying to raise some rutabaga, carrots and beets.  Although I have had success with beets in the past, these rutabaga are my first time.
Carrots have never been successful for me in the past either, never getting very big.  But, the route to success if fraught with failure, and thus I keep trying.

I planted the zucchini late for a change, only because I didn't feel like eating it yet.   This year I decided to have it later rather than sooner.

I am also focusing more on growing pumpkin in stead of Butternut or Hubbard squash this year.

It will be so nice to have the garden at the new farm where I have the space to grow all the different vegetables I would like.

Besides the kitchen garden, there are plans for a perennial garden, an orchard, and a garden for berries as well as one for herbs.  There will also be testing garden where I can try growing things I have never tried to grow or have never tasted before.

Will will be returning to the new farm at the end of July for a two week stay.  During that time I will build boxes for raised beds.  It will be easier to lay out a garden design with the boxes rather than the posts and string which I have used and didn't like.

Lots of work scheduled for the next farm trip, can't wait.

Remembering...my Grandparents

 My grandparents, Mémère and Pépère, who were born in the later

, 

 part of the 1800's, were married in Rhode Island in 1920.  They grew up without electricity, indoor plumbing, radio, telephones, processed foods, and even airplanes!  In those days nearly every household had a garden and most likely a few chickens.   Both Mémère and Pépère were born in New England of hard-working French Canadian immigrants.                                                                                                                                                   I was blessed to be able to live in their home until I left to start my own family. I can still remember tagging along behind Pépère where-ever he went, as long as he didn't leave the yard.  When he spent an afternoon watching the Red Sox on television I would climb up beside him on the big red recliner and he would explain what was happening, and teach me to read by reading the big signs around the playing field.  Because of him I was able to read by the time I started school.                                                                                                                               Pépère's life before he married Mémère is somewhat unknown since he wasn't one to speak of himself, and the past was past, no need to talk about it.  Pépère was born only a few years after the famous Gunfight at the OK Coral and wagon trains still traveled west.  He worked hard as a "mule skinner", I am still not sure I want to know exactly what his job entailed.  He had a garden where he grew the food that Mémère would "can" to feed her family through the year.  

Mémère always had flowers growing in a little flower garden and around the foundation of the house.  Her deep purple Iris's are still among my favorite flowers.  I remember looking "eye to eye" with the bearded flowers and loving the feeling the softness of their petals.

photo from Etsy.com

Do any of you remember seeing dish towels embroidered with the days of the week and the daily chore for each day? Monday = Wash day, Tuesday = Ironing Wednesday = Mending/Sewing, etc.  This was Mémère's housework schedule. 

On Monday out came the old wringer washer and laundry tubs. It took most of the day to wash and dry the laundry out on the clotheslines. When everything was dry down it came, got sprinkled with water and rolled up to wait for ironing day. She was amazing! 

She never lagged behind in her house work, her home was always spotless, and the meals were always on the table at the same time each day, no matter what came up.

She baked her bread and pastries, and made her own noodles.  Everything she cooked was made from scratch.  In her free time, she made quilts, crochet afghans, knitted sweaters, hats and mittens,  and even made large wood cut-outs for the yard to amuse the children.  To do these she would enlarge outlines from our coloring books to an average of 36" tall using grids.  Next the outlines were transferred to thin plywood and cut-out with uncle Al's scroll saw.  After they were all cut and painted Donald Duck, Bambi, etc occupied the backyard where the children played.

Mémère was also a teacher to her children and grandchildren.  She patiently taught me to do all sorts of needlework and sewing; as well as cooking all the while she would tell me stories of her life, her parents and grandparents and the old days.  One day as she and her sisters and mother were in their kitchen pulling taffy word came announcing the tragic sinking of the Titanic in 1912,  Mémère was 14 years of age and living in Fall River, Massachusetts not far from the Lizzie Borden home.

I often think about all the major changes that occurred during her life-time, she was born in 1897.  

In 1897:

William McKinley became president and was later assassinated in 1901

The first gasoline powered car US manufacturer was incorporated.

Grant's tomb was dedicated

Bram Stoker's Dracula was published

The Boston Marathon had it's first race.

She read the news about the Wright brothers flight and the discovery of Aspirin.

If you think the news is full of war, it's nothing new.

She read the latest news about the Second Boer War, US/Spanish War, the Philipine-American, War WWI and WWII, the Korean Conflict and Viet Nam, and her last war news was of the invasion of Bagdad.  I doubt she would be surprised to know the world is still at war.

England's Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee, and Teddy Roosevelt was still alive when she married my grandfather, and she raised a family of six children through the Great Depression.

The experienced the thrill of the Wright brothers first flight as well as all our flights to the moon.

The complete time-line of her life is amazing, and it made think to do my own time-line of events.  If you should do your own you may be surprised to learn what has transpired in the world during just the brief period in which you have been a part of it.

Mulching with Free Wood Chips and More Planting

While others were busy with cook-outs and fireworks, we spent our holiday weekend collecting free wood chips to use as mulch in the garden, and also setting out more tomato plants.

Along the nearby highway the state workers have been busily cutting down trees and shredding them,

leaving long piles of fresh wood chips free for the taking!  Nick spent much of Sunday and the Fourth collecting car-loads of chips and bringing them home to  use in the garden as mulch in the pathways.

After ten loads most of the pathways have a thick layer of mulch.  It will most likely take another ten
loads to complete the garden.  For the pathway along the goat yard fence we spread a heavy layer of hay from their yard.  It keeps down the weeds, and since it contains the goat droppings it also fertilizes and the hay breaks down thus building up the soil.

As the plants get a little larger we will mulch them with the small wood chips from the hen house, then we will be finished with weeding for the remainder of the season.

I transplanted my rescued tomato plants to the "old" green bean bed by first preparing their new spots the night before.  I dug a hole for each tomato plant and then filled it with water from the ducks pool which was rich with their droppings.  Overnight the tea soaked in and fed the composted soil.
This morning during a break in the rain, I set an egg into each hole and then planted the tomatoes.
The eggs will break down as the tomato plants grow, releasing it calcium and nutrients for the tomatoes.  Later I will add epsom salt to each plant in the entire garden.

I have found that adding the eggs and the epsom salt has produced undamaged and very tasty tomatoes.   Also, when I mulch with the small wood chips from the chickens I soak them first, until they are saturated with chicken poo tea.  Then I spread them among the plantings several inches thick, leaving only a small area around each plant for watering.

Because the wood chips are saturated they do not wick the water that is given to the plants, and when it rains the fertilizer they are holding in slowly released into the earth to feed the plants.  And the thick layer prevents weeds from growing.

We grow lots of heirloom tomatoes because use tomatoes the most in our cooking.  I have added rutabaga and beets this year, and also increased the number of pepper plants, adding two hot peppers and four banana pepper plants.

Also, added more cabbages, and a row of yellow beans.  The chickens killed off the row of vining peas.  Instead of my usual winter squash I am focusing on pumpkins this year.  There are still many jars of last year's butternut squash still on the pantry shelf.

The few zucchini plants have only just begun to sprout, but since they develop quickly we will have our summer squash at the end of the summer instead of its beginning.

This year will be a year for pickles ans relishes once the cucumbers get started.  The chickens got to that first planting as well, so the 72 new plants are a getting a late start.  And there is plenty of dill which reseeded from last year's crop.  The flowers also reseeded themselves and the floral border along the fence as growing nicely and will start producing flowers soon.

Once again, I am giving onions another try and they are doing nicely, thus far.  I have made certain the compost in which they are planted is nice and loose so they have an easy time expanded their bulbs, and I read somewhere that if we cut back their green stalks to about 4-6 inches it will force their energy to the growing bulb and we will get larger onions.  Fingers crossed.

Our July trip to the farm has been post-poned to the end of the month to include the first two weeks in August.  We have 24 meat chicks and also two hens brooding and we want to be here when our first chicks hatch.  Our ducks which hatch early last month are now on their own.  The parents have chased them out of their home and we relocated them to the smaller chicken run for now.  We still aren't certain of their genders, but are guessing there may be three males and one female.

The mama and papa ducks are living with the chickens now, and mama has taken to laying her daily egg in one of the laying boxes instead of outside in the dirt or mud.  It is so nice to get nice, clean duck eggs again.