Man, I can’t believe I’ve gone this long without posting. Well, we did lose a couple of kids. Found one of Scamper’s kids, a doe, dead in the pen when about two weeks old. I’m not sure what happened to her as she seemed fine. The next week, one of Maddie’s does was accidentally crushed when Bucko knocked down the pen gate. The remaining four kids are doing fine although I’m sure they’d like to get out more. Scamper seems to be weaning hers. They are eating hay.
We have roosters everywhere and are starting to get eggs. We are going to try and butcher a few roosters over the next couple of weeks. It’s been warmer and we’ve seen a lot of snow melt, but it’s still not the sort of weather you want to pluck chickens in. Jeffrey dug out a path down the driveway yesterday as the snow path was breaking up so badly as to be treacherous. There are still areas where the snow is knee high. It may be mid to late March before we can use the driveway. He was able to get the house dug out at Mike’s which will make it easier to haul water.
I picked up some gardening books with my tax return. One is Steve Solomon’s Gardening When It Counts. I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Really, if you have just one garden book, this is it. It even tells you what to do when you are just starting out. My second book is Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Gardening. This one has some good info on things like poly tunnels. I haven’t read it just yet, but it looks good. If you are not thinking about gardening seriously this year, I recommend you take a look at your grocery bill. It’s going to be higher yet this year. If you start planning now, there’s no reason you can’t grow at least a little of your food. If we can grow it at 1700 feet up, you can too.
Hi Teri! LONG time, no see! Just a short comment on butchering/plucking roosters. You really don’t want to wait for especially warmer weather to de-feather a bunch of dead roosters. If you don’t already know of a relatively “bloodless”, and less traumatic way than the “ol’ chopping block for putting them down, give me a buzz on my email addy. Maybe we can catch up?
I like to dry pluck. I doubt that we’ll have anything like warmer weather soon. Jeffrey tends to wring their necks, although it didn’t work out too well with the last rooster he did in. We just need to give the poor hens a break.