Wasn't That a Mighty Storm?

On the heels of way hot came the storm to end all storms. According to lifers here in our little neighbourhood (including Mr.BCF) this was unlike any other. The dark clouds gathered and swirled quickly as water picked up from the lake and headed for land. The rain came in a vertical sheet soaking everything. The wind picked up canoes and trampolines and relocated them. It broke huge branches and moved them across the street. The power went out. Our new chicks (teens, maybe young adults by now) are still free rangin' it. They live in a plastic box at night and roam free during the day. It seems a little cruel and I think the big girls are a little jealous ( I think I hear them banging the bars with their tin cups when the young ones strut by). It occurred to BCFjr that the girls should be rescued. I mean the wind was picking up canoes-canoes for goodness sake! "Could the wind pick up the chickens?" "Oh, of course not honey" I cooed. When did lying become so easy? Finally, when the lightning stopped striking around our house, I was convinced to go out and perform "operation rescue chicks". I expected to find them hiding in their usual spots like the bamboo grove or under oversized hostas. I've been told that turkeys will drown in the rain simply because they don't know enough to not look up at the sky and open their mouths. We found the chicks, looking like turkeys, in the open staring up at the sky and blinking profusely in the rain. BCFjr simply grabbed them in a group hug. There was no fight or flight as usual. They didn't make a move as we each took one under the arm and brought them into safety. Having lost a chicken 2 days before, it seemed sweeter to rescue the least of these.

And then there were 5...

Every night before BCFjr goes to sleep, we pray for "no nightmares and keep the chickens alive". I go through the exercise with little thought to "what if..." Well, today, "what if..." happened. Here, in an unnamed Southern Ontario town with the most humidity in Canada, we are, as much of North America is, experiencing record-breaking high temps. It got hot, followed by real hot, followed by stinkin' hot...Now, chickens don't fare well in heat. They don't sweat and like dogs and cats (fellow non-sweaters) they pant to stay cool. They have been panting a lot! Compound this with the fact that our coop is in the only sunny spot in our backyard and the fact that I have weaned myself off of letting them go free range. The reason for the latter is that I decided that mulch belongs IN the garden and not ON the grass and that hostas look so much prettier when they are not chewed down to the nub. Can you hear the slight guilt in my voice? Yes, it is real And as BCFjr has not fallen far from this tree, he is taking blame too. Hours before finding our fated fowl, he confessed that he threw dirt on her. I assured him that God made dirt and dirt don't hurt. So hours after the "dirt incident", the day following the hottest on record, on hen simply lay down and breathed her last. We were all saddened by this, but not as much as jr. He took it hard and became so burdened with the fact that death could come a knockin' on any other hen's door. That night, as I prayed the standard prayer, I caught myself before kicking into autopilot. I acknowledged that God had let a chicken die, and that we didn't understand, but we would trust him and trust him to care for the rest. That seemed to make sense to all of us. I hope it sticks.

New Arrivals

Apparently after a year of laying, the egg supply slows down. Kinda like women in their forties (kinda). So Mr.BCF decided that we should keep up egg production. He is a project manager when he is not farming. Now our coop accomodates 6 chickens, so someone has to go. We ordered 2 new chicks and 2 lucky chickens, chosen based on bad behaviour, will be going to the farm down the road owned by some elderly Italian farmers. I don't even want to know if those girls become chicken cacciatore. I'll just assume they are happily, however progressively more slowly, laying eggs. So we ordered 2 new chicks. I walked into the feedstore and said to the stoic farmer behind the counter, "I'm here to pick up some chicks! "I was so tickled by my own humour. Mr. Sourpuss farmer didn't share in my joy. Mr.BCF also thought we should get a new breed, so we could tell the new from the old apart. He is so smart. We settled on black sexlinks. They are a cross between the barred rock (our "old stock") and rhode island red, I think...anyhow, they are just plain old black. The sexlink part comes from the fact that you can tell the boys from the girls really easily when they are teeny tiny. That fact should come in handy at cocktail parties when you're picking up chicks.

They Grow Up So Fast

Dear reader - it has been a long time since I've updated you on "the girls". We just celebrated their 1st birthday last week and the brevity of time came into focus for me. Everyone survived winter for starters. I was really expecting to find at least the weaker ones frozen to the roost at some point. Mr.BCF made some attractive blue tarp flaps for the bottom run - tarps, so many uses. We also put a lightbulb in the roost to keep them from being found frozen to the roost. We had to play with this one. The initial lightbulb/aluminum reflector combo proved problematic. It has a big springloaded clamp on it which you simply attach to the overhead beam. But, girls will be girls and they simply can leave anything alone. They (fill in the blank here) until it fell down, night after night (I never caught them red-winged, but I have my suspicions). Often this would knock the lightbulb out, which defeats it's purpose. So, with a dented lampshade and fear that I would end up with 6 whole chickens in my freezer, I put on my inventor's hat. I got 2 bungee chord and lashed a flowerpot to the lampshade (they happen to be the very same circumference). The girls stayed warm and I could sleep at night. So, it is Spring now and the girls are 1. We had a party, complete with cake and guests. Our guests brought cut apples and Red River Cereal - what a party! BCFjr. couldn't have been happier except for the fact that he wanted his entire class to show up on a Tuesday night. I prefer a more intimate affair...party favours were a carton of eggs - of course.

If an Egg Falls in the Forest

There is an ongoing debate going around the farm. If a moose moults (looses it's antlers) has any human ever witnessed it? Wouldn't it be cool to be canoeing up north and see a big moose and "CLUNK" it's antlers fall off? I'll let you guess who dreamed this one up (the creative mind) and which one poo-poos it (Mr.Logic). I mention this because in a similar vein, there has been ponderings as to whether or not we could witness egg-laying. We have certainly heard it. Especially at first when they were still learning to lay, the girls would make such a racket - I was sure that our neighbours were regretting ok-ing the whole urban farming thing. We've joked about getting a "chicken cam" to capture the miracle of food production - there are technical roadblocks like lack of light and the fact that chickens will peck at anything (see earlier blogs re: almost destroying their thermometer). But the other day, it happened. BCF Jr and myself were hanging with the girls on a sunny, autumn day and had just let them free (more later on chicken mommy guilt) to run and peck and spread mulch all over the lawn (more later on chickens for meat). One girl stayed behind, up in the nesting box. She let out a strange choking sound - we wondered if this was the moment. Now, I always thought it was a quick "buck-ah" and out popped the egg. Nature does have a way of taking it's time however. I mean, really, this is like labour, and if you have ever experienced/witnessed that, you know there is some work involved (it's not called labour for nothing!)I crouched at the opposite end of the coop, door propped open just enough to get a view, The chicken walked around and around in circles, first one way and then another. This went on for at least 5 minutes. BCF jr. lost interest and went inside. I was bound and bent that I would witness this event. I continued to crouch, my foot was starting to fall asleep, the chicken walked around and around in restless cirlces. Finally, she stopped her spinning and sat, her tail feathers high in the air (she looked like one of those stuffed pheasants on top of a ladies' hat). The sitting lasted some time as well, as she occasionally nibbled at the woodchips surrounding her. At last, she raised her tail ever higher, lowered it completelydown and "CLUNK" . And that was it. The egg was laid and although I didn't see it "exit" I feel I had witnessed a miracle. I ran to the house announcing that the egg had been laid. BCF Jr. ran out to see. He retrieved the egg "It's still hot!" and it truly was. "I want to eat it right now!" he declared confidently. It was as if he recognized a special moment that was not to be missed. I obliged and made him the freshest egg of his life.

real farmers eat quiche

This is going to sound really funny, but I haven't eaten any eggs yet. I should qualify that: until today, I hadn't eaten any of our girls' eggs. Now at first, I let BCF jr eat the eggs since they were few and far between. And egg laying is a strange thing. Maybe it's just a natural, non-tampered, non-technical, un-drivethru thing. I was expecting the 5 months mark to arrive and bang - eggs galore. Firing on all six cylinders, if you will. Not so. It's more like, a bunch of women are due to have their baby on the same day but they come at all different times. There seems to be a lot of wiggle room. So one starts and then 4 days later another starts. And they don't lay an egg a day suddenly. It comes on gradually. In honesty this is all conjecture. I have little to back this up. It's not like we have a "laying cam" set up in the coop, although we have had discussions doing just that. Our evidence comes from the eggs themselves. The first eggs are very small and rather oblong. They are also discoloured. With each egg, they get larger and more egg shaped and coloured (brown in this case). When we get a weird small egg, we figure a new girl has graduated to hen-hood. Now it seems that 3 hens are laying and there are more eggs to be had. I have no excuses to not try the eggs. I let our chicken sitter eat the ones he found (future blogs on crazy Joe the chicken sitter). I brought 5 to my mom. Now, she had a fridge full of organic free range eggs from a local farmer. She lives in farm country and she's a baby boomer- I should have known better. I think a small part of me was feeling weird about eating my children's potential children so to speak. I know it makes no sense since we have no rooster (oh ya, and they are not my children, they are chickens), but the potential is there. Anyhow, I was getting tired of lying to people who enthusiastically said "fresh eggs must be so good." So today, when we had restocked our eggs I decided it was time. I got out my trusted Linda McCartney vegetarian cookbook and whipped up the finest "Quiche Linda" you ever did see. Potential never tasted so good.

the day we have all been waiting for...

I've been feeling mildly guilty all summer. There have been many moments with the chickens like, when 2 are perched up on the bird bath, and I say, man, I gotta blog about that - it's just so cute and strange all at once. Then I see a butterfly or get hungry for lunch and "poof" the thought is gone. Now that summer is fleeting and autumn is peeking around the corner, I'm feeling the need for routine and to tie up loose ends. There are a few blog ideas knocking around my noggin. However, I would be an irresponsible farmer and blogger if I did not blog about a very important happening...you guessed it, WE HAVE EGGS. This past Labour Day weekend (fitting) we got our first 3 eggs. The fourth came today. I will spare you with the count from here on in (I am keeping track to see how much money we actually save - so far we are still in the red minus 75 cents). Now here is the killer part; it was Mr.BCF who "called it" or predicted and confirmed that we had incoming eggs. This part really bugs me. I am with those fowl every day. I check on them many times a day, talk to them, give them bits of my lunch, hose their manure off the walkway. You get the picture - I am intimately acquainted with these hens. Moving on with our story...Friday morning, the girls were particularly noisy. I was having chicken remorse i.e. "I thought the roosters were the noisy ones, why did I get chickens, why?" Mr.BCF said matter-of-factly, I think the chickens are going to start laying today. He goes to the coop and sure enough, there it is - a perfect, brown egg. BCF jr was so thrilled that he ran around the neighbourhood to show all the important people: his aunts, uncles, cousins, grandmother, the guy who watches the chickens when we are away, the people on the corner who own the pizza joint - you know, the usual. When BCFjr got home he said he wanted the egg for lunch. He handed it to me, warm and wet from his little sweaty hand. Yum.