The birds and the bees

We may only have birds and bees as our farm animals, but it feels like we have a lot going on with them this year. We checked on the bees a couple weeks ago. I still get pretty nervous when we open the hive and see thousands of them going about their business.

They are pretty calm though, mostly, especially after we drug them with the smoker. Mike pulled out each frame one by one to see whether the comb was being filled with larvae or honey. We also checked for the queen, because the hive can't function properly if she is dead. We did manage to pick her out of the crowd. The bees seem healthy and productive, but we're still a long way from getting to harvest honey for ourselves. 

The ducklings are still cute and growing up fast. They stick together all the time and like to go swimming in a shallow bowl of water we put out for them. They're pretty disgusting, though. Unlike chickens, their poo is the consistency of mud and smells like a stagnant pond. Paired with lots of rain we've had lately, it made the pen ankle-deep in stinky brown muck. A layer of straw helped the situation a lot, fortunately.

Their chick sibling died a couple weeks ago, apparently squashed in a scuffle inside the coop. But we did just get four new mail-order chicks this spring to help boost our flock size. They're currently growing up a bit in a bin in the garage, just like our first batch of chicks did last year.

Thinking about the eight chicks we were raising this time last year is a bit sad. We were so excited to name them and get to know them, and now only three are still alive, thanks to hawks, coyotes, and a random accident. I never imagined there'd be so much death, considering we aren't raising birds for meat! We've even lost our guinea fowl, although we aren't sure if he's dead. We got him a female companion, Mrs. Guinea, and the first time we let them out of the pen to enjoy a nice afternoon, they flew away. He always stayed close to home with the chickens when he was a single fella, so that hussy must have convinced him to run off. Hopefully they're having a nice honeymoon off in the woods somewhere (but in reality, a predator will likely get them before the month is out). 

Anyway, with our somewhat more practical and jaded mindsets this year, we haven't spent as much time cooing over the chicks or discussing names. But I hope they'll be long-lived residents of our homestead.

Birds of a different feather

Our hen Junebug is the proud mama of a flock of ducklings!

Junebug and some of her adopted babies.

She had gone broody this spring, meaning she was laying on eggs all day trying to hatch out some chicks. The poor dumb bird doesn’t realize that we don’t have a rooster and therefore none of those eggs could become anything but breakfast. Having a broody hen isn’t really a good thing, because she protects the eggs and pecks at us when we try to collect them, and eventually she stops laying new eggs altogether. But we were able to put Junebug’s broodiness to good use: Mike’s mom brought over a pile of recently laid ducks eggs that her friend had obtained. The mother duck had been chased off my a dog and abandoned them. We slipped them underneath Junebug to see if they would hatch, and two days later, we had six cute little ducklings living in the coop! There’s actually one chick in the mix, too. A (fertilized) chicken egg got mixed in somewhere along the duck eggs’ journey. 

One of the bravest ducklings, venturing out of his own to get some grub.

Sadly, there were eight ducklings originally, but it appears that Junebug accidentally suffocated two of them. The nest box is small, and she’s inexperienced at being a mother. We’re really hoping that there are no more casualties.

We’ll keep the ducklings with the chickens and let Junebug raise them until they’re adults. Mike’s mom has done this before, and she said that one day when the ducks are grown up, they all just fly away. But sometimes they stop by again the following year on their migration path.

A new year

A baby can be used as an excuse for nearly anything.: needing to go out, needing to stay in, not getting any sleep, sleeping at all hours of the day, etc. But a baby is my legitimate excuse for not blogging for 4 months. We've been a little preoccupied with preparing for his arrival and then with handling the never-ending demands of a newborn. (It's totally worth it, of course.)

But before he was born, we did manage to finish up the kitchen. Mostly. It could still use some caulk, but at least the walls look way better now.

We really like how the color turned out. Eventually we'll tackle the same wallpaper in the laundry room (seen through the doorway), but that's a bigger room so it will take quite a bit longer. I'm not in a big hurry to start stripping wallpaper again.

And despite being in the midst of the coldest, worst winter I can remember, it's time to plan this year's garden! We are going through seed catalogs and making our choices now, and as soon as seeds arrive it will be time to start some of them inside under grow lights. Last winter we set up our seedlings on shelves in the baby's room, so I'm not sure where they'll go this time around. It's hard to believe when looking at the garden now that we'll be planting things out there in just a couple months.

That large part of a tree hanging out in the garden is a branch that snapped off under the weight of heavy snow in the bitter cold a couple weeks ago. We were already planning to rebuild the fence this spring with wood poles and better wiring, or I'd be really annoyed that the branch was smashing it.

We had some successes last year. Carrots, tomatoes, peppers, and green beans all did well. We had at least that many utter failures, but I think we learned from our mistakes. We don't get nearly enough sun to grow cantaloupe, for instance, and if we want to grow brassicas (broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts), we need to be aggressive with bug-repelling soap spray or caterpillars will eat literally every plant. 

And in addition to planning better, the conditions should be a little better as well. Under all the snow in the garden beds are cover crops of clover that Mike planted last fall to help restore some nutrients to the soil. And we'll have lots of homemade compost from a year's worth of kitchen scraps, chicken poo, and dead leaves to spread. 

Everything will be a little easier with experience under our belts, but it will also be more complicated to find time to do it all with our little guy added to the mix. And he'll definitely be my excuse for whatever fails or doesn't get done this year!

We hate wallpaper

After living here for nine months, we've finally started doing some painting around the house. Every room with painted walls was a shade of white or beige, and we were starved for color, so dining room, nursery-in-progress, and bathroom (as seen a couple posts ago) all got face-lifts over the past month.

One gallon and three coats of paint later, the dining room has one bright red wall.

I had intended a darker, grayer shade of blue for the nursery, but this will do.

Encouraged by all the improvements, we decided to remove the wallpaper in our kitchen. Our kitchen is cramped, with a low ceiling, bad lighting, and cheap cabinets and counters, so it needs all the help it can get. And the checkered blue and white wallpaper that was peeling up at all the seams was one bad feature of the room that we felt confident that we could tackle without much trouble or expense.

Our claustrophobia-inducing kitchen.

If you're going to put up wallpaper, might as well do it badly.

According to people on the Internet who know about such things, you're always advised to remove a layer of wallpaper before putting up new stuff. But apparently the people who lived here before us didn't bother with trifling things like that, because we've found evidence of at least four other types of wallpaper underneath the top layer. Scraping it all off was a serious job until we discovered how to get hold of the bottom layer and peel everything up at once. Our favorite of the wallpapers is definitely the bottom one, shown below, which has various scenes of wagons, boats, and houses on it. The kitchen must have looked magnificent when it was completely covered in tiny brown drawings.

Two of the other four types of wallpaper we found under the top layer.

Halfway through the wallpaper stripping, it just looked like the kitchen had caught fire. What's with the wood patch in the wall above the stove? We don't want to know.

And yet another unfortunate surprise was that we don't even have normal drywall or plaster walls in our kitchen. Underneath all that wallpaper is hardboard, which is the composite wood stuff that pegboard is made from. In same places it's been cut and wrapped around the edges of the cabinets, and in other places it goes behind them. And the seams between the pieces of hardboard are some kind of plastic strips that are impossible to remove or to strip the wallpaper from. Sigh.

The exposed hardboard and plastic seams underneath all that wallpaper.

We talk a big game about one day redoing the whole kitchen, enlarging it and getting all new cabinets and counters. When that day comes, I can't wait to get rid of the hardboard and put up some nice, normal drywall. But for now, all we can do is sand out all the weird irregularities, clean up the plastic strips as best we can, and give the room a few coats of paint. It's still going to look a whole lot better at the end than when we started, but we definitely bit off more than we were expecting.

Adding some fowl, subtracting a rooster, and multiplying eggs

We have eggs!

Our first egg

Some are brown and some are white (the color depends on the breed of chicken). We know that at least three of the hens are laying, and it might be all four. We're getting about two eggs a day, sometimes three. So far they're all small, probably smaller than medium eggs you'd get at the grocery. As the chickens get everything figured out, they'll become more normal sized. But we've done some testing, and even though they're small, they're perfect on the inside.

Cooking up our first homegrown breakfast

I'm also very happy to report that our annoying rooster, Charlie Murphy, is no longer our problem. On Sunday morning Mike cornered him in the chicken coop, wrapped him in a towel, and stuffed him into our cat carrier for transport to his new home: Mike's parents' house. They were in need of a new rooster, and we were happy to make it happen. They live in a more isolated area than we do and are used to hearing crowing (at one time I think they had three roosters), so the change suits all the people involved just fine. They also have a bigger flock of hens and more area for the birds to roam, so we're confident that Charlie will be very happy at his new home. 

But we didn't leave our hens lonely: The same day, we finally brought home two guinea fowl to add to our flock. Mike's mom raised a bunch of guineas from eggs earlier this year, and they've grown up at her house with the chickens. Unfortunately, our chickens have never seen guineas before, and since they're terrified of everything that moves, they've been in a state of alarm for the past day. When the guineas walk near them, they flee, sometimes attempting to crash through the chain link. And the guineas are afraid of me and Mike and aren't used to being penned up, so they've also had their share of panic. Hopefully everyone will calm down and get used to the new situation in a few days.

Our two guinea fowl. This is the best picture I could get, because they never stop running. 

Eventually we want to be able to let the guineas out to free range so they can eat ticks (reported to be their favorite snack), but the logistics are tricky. They're safer outside than the hens, because they can fly up high in trees. But if they sleep outside, they're still vulnerable to raccoons and owls, so we need to train them to take shelter at night. The coop is the obvious choice, but I don't know how to let the guineas in and out while keeping the chickens inside. The barn might work, but then we'd have to deal with guinea poop all over the barn, and some predators could still get at them. I have no idea how we're going to settle this.

She wants to be friends with the chickens, but they're strongly opposed to the idea.

Shower remodel

Although most of our posts have been about outside projects, we do work on the inside of the house here and there. My approach to home improvement is to dwell on something I dislike for 6 months or so, stewing about how ugly it is and how much better it could be, until one day I finally get motivated and tackle the project in a whirlwind. And a feature of this house that I've been stewing about since the day we moved in has been the shower doors.

The shower as it was. Not hideous, but not good.

I think shower doors can be fine, but the ones in our master bathroom were really gross along the edges and impossible to clean. They were also too low, so I had to duck or smash my head every time I got in and out of the shower and water sprayed over the top. I also kept imagining how annoying it was going to be to bathe a baby while leaning over the sharp edge at the bottom and having access to only half the tub at a time.

Grossness at the bottom -- and this only a few months after we'd already stripped and replaced the caulking.

I finally got motivated this week to remove the doors, and then I felt ridiculous for having procrastinated so long when the entire project only took an hour.

I started by taking off the doors and spraying all the caulk on the frame with Goo Gone Caulk Remover. Then after I took out the screws holding the frame to the edges of the shower, the four metal sides of the frame were pretty easy to pry off. What was left on the two sides of the shower was pretty scuzzy, but what was underneath the bottom piece was downright frightening.

The horror!

Miraculously, by using a scraping tool equipped with a razor blade and a bit more Goo Gone, it only took a little elbow grease to clean up all that old caulk and gunk. I scrubbed all the surfaces with a bleach solution and steel wool for good measure, and then they looked shiny and new!

The perfectly smooth, clean surfaces revealed after a bit of scrubbing.

The only remaining task is to fill the screw holes, visible in the picture above, with dabs of caulk. They'll still be noticeable, but the shower curtain will hide them most of the time.

In my humble opinion, a vast improvement.

I feel much better about the whole bathroom now. I always felt icky having something so dirty and uncleanable so close to where we wash ourselves. Now the bathroom is perfect . . . except for the rusty light fixture, the flimsy door, the ugly doorknob, the missing towel rod, and the mismatched light switches. One thing at a time, I guess.

Grown-up chickens

I thought I'd give an update on the chickens now that they're nearly grown up and their situation has settled down. Our final count after coyote attacks is five birds. Our rooster, Charlie Murphy, is turning into a very handsome fellow. He's noticeably bigger than the hens and has a nice greenish sheen to his feathers. He tends to favor the two hens of his own breed, Henrietta and Helena Bonham Carter. Henrietta was the one who hurt her foot a couple months back, but she seems healthy and happy now. Then we have small, spry Junebug, who's too nervous to hold still for a photo, and plump Marjorie Stuart Baxter. We check regularly for eggs, because the hens are now 5 months old and should start laying any day now, but so far no luck.

Charlie Murphy, crowing proudly -- much to our annoyance

The more unpleasant development that comes with chicken maturity is that Charlie has turned into a serious crower. What was at first charming has become incredibly annoying, because he starts every day with 20 minutes or more of repeated crowing. Usually that starts around 6:30 or 7, but he's clocked in before 6 a.m. a couple times. Then any time he hears people outside or we come near, he crows 10 or 15 times. And he can be counted on to give another half dozen crows at random throughout the day. The noise is really loud (and obnoxious), and our neighbors might be starting to hate us. I don't have any friendly feelings myself when I'm hoping to sleep til 8 on Saturday morning and he wakes me up before dawn.

Marjorie the hen

The crowing isn't the only strike against Charlie Murphy. He's proved himself worthless at keeping squirrels out of the pen and coop (they squeeze right through the chain link), so we've had a parade of rodents chowing down on chicken feed. He's starting to show signs of being aggressive towards people when we go in their enclosure, which is unwelcome now but will become dangerous when his spurs grow in. And we don't need him to protect the hens anymore since they aren't really free-range now and are well protected by their pen. The only purpose he serves for us at this point will be fertilizing eggs in case we want to hatch more chicks next spring. But Mike's mom has offered us a nice gentle rooster who never crows who could serve the same purpose, so Charlie is on thin ice with us. If he keeps up his current behavior, we'll be offering a free rooster on Craigslist to whoever wants him. Kind of funny how a month of bad behavior can totally negate all the affection I had for a bird we raised from a cute little chick.