Warning: Lecture.
This is a great part of the reason why I feel so strongly about raising my own animals for meat, eggs, and honey.
Ignorance. The hand-washing syndrome of paying someone else to do your dirty work for you, allowing you to take the lives of the animals that sustain you completely for granted. I believe [...]
I just discovered the “Partridge Rock” chicken breed. Apparently it’s a good dual-purpose bird and a good egg layer; I suppose I only just heard of them because they’re fairly rare. But look how beautiful!
Via Trying to Be Green
Via ChickenCrossing.org
According to the McMurray Hatchery site, Partridge Rocks “are considered one of the best setters and [...]
Guess who I caught in the nesting box yesterday morning?
Jopari!
When I put my hand in, she lifted right up to show me what she’d left us:
(That other lump under the straw is a round stone, to give the hens the right idea).
I love Bossy for her sassy personality, but I think of the two Barred [...]
Apparently I’m more out of touch than even I had realized; my mom just sent me an email about an egg recall due to a salmonella outbreak all over the country. I’d had no idea.
But guess what!
We got our first egg on Friday, and our second today! Woo-hoo! Two little round light-brown orbs of free-range, [...]
I hope y’all don’t mind my being a little Debbie Downer here – I know that I appreciate it a great deal when the other bloggers I read share both good and bad parts of their homesteading efforts. It’s not all easy, ya know? And because suffering loves company, I need to hear every so [...]
This is my last post for the weekend – like I said, Josh and I are going on a little mini-vacation. So I leave you with: BEES!
I went out to check on my hive this afternoon. It looked promising: much more activity all around, bees up in the super when I cracked the top off [...]
Poor chickens, exiled from the veggie garden.
I know it’s difficult to see, but the chickens have a brand-new special enclosure to do their free-ranging in. I went and actually bought -gag- 50 feet of 48″ fencing and staples. It’s only about 150 square feet – so much less than they’re used to! – but it’s [...]
Well, I finally figured out why, out of four or five prodigious vines, I had only one baby watermelon. This morning when I went to check the watermelon vines, I was overjoyed to find five new baby watermelons swelling on the vine!
The winter squash vines have lately been suffering from some sort of malaise that [...]
I love how the chickens all follow me around the yard whenever I go out to the garden. Do they see me as their rooster, or are they trained to expect treats?
They frighten poor Sofía because they’ll peck you if you squat down, thinking you’re feeding them – and they peck hard – but today [...]