365 Days of Me

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History Fading Away

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Happenings Around the Homestead

What a slow week around here, at least on ‘homestead’ things.  I can’t think of a single thing I have done other than dehydrate some herbs and make yogurt.

I had hoped to work on the roof of the chicken coop this weekend, but I didn’t get around to it with the rain on the early part of the weekend and a need to just take it easy in the later part of the weekend.

This week I hope to dry some more mint, re-pot some mint, work on the chicken coop roof, and pick garlic.  Yes, I actually have some garlic that is ready to be harvested.  It is a little earlier than normal, but it is time.

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The Chicken Chronicles

Just like yesterday’s post, this one is two weeks in one.  I forgot to schedule both of them last week.  DUH!

The Welsummers are now about 13 (now) 14 weeks old, and they are FINALLY starting to venture out with the big hens some.  Up until this point we have wondered if we made a mistake putting them into the coop with the older hens, and perhaps we did, but now they seem to be coming out of their shell (pardon the pun) a bit.  😀  We are still cornering them by themselves in a separate cage almost daily to give them time in the sun without having to worry about the older hens picking on them.

One of the issues we have had with the Welsummers is that they just roost on top of the nesting boxes instead of the roosting bar.  Last night I put a branch in there near the nesting boxes and was happy to see a couple of them on the branch when I opened the door to the run this morning.

The laying is going full steam, and we have been able to bless family and neighbors with several dozen eggs so far.  It sure is nice to see the smiles on the faces of folks when you bring them a dozen fresh eggs, especially those who really enjoy them.

Speaking of eggs, the silly Welsummers are roosting on top of the nesting boxes, so there ends up being a mess in the boxes all-too-often.  I need to get another roosting pole put in the coop in an effort to prevent this – it’s not happening this week though.

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Happenings Around the Homestead

WEEEEELLL – it helps if you hit the post button.  😀  This week you will get a double update.

It’s been a bit of a slow week around the homestead, at least outside.  Inside I have been drying some herbs, both oregano and mint.  It might be better to air dry these both outside, but I prefer to use the dehydrator on low (around 95 degrees) because it is consistent.  When things are dried outside I have to keep a closer eye on them to ensure pests aren’t getting into the items I am drying, and I have to watch for the rain.  I don’t have either of those worries inside.

The oregano I am drying is a nice, strong, True Greek Oregano, whereas the mint is Chocolate Mint (my favorite), Orange Mint, and Spearmint.  There is something special, I think, about herbs that have been dried at home.  I don’t know whether it is simply knowing where they come from, or if there is a quality difference (I am sure of that, btw), but I sure do like it.

The plants I started last week are all doing well though.  I am so hopeful that the sweet potatoes take off and grow well.  My biggest concern is the deer.  Once they find these plants, they will certainly eat the leaves off of them.  They always do.  I probably need to get a covering for them as soon as I can to try and keep that risk down a little.  I may put the tomato cages over them temporarily until I can get something more appropriate.

I am a little surprised that the brassicas I planted early in the spring haven’t all bolted yet.  They are in a part of the yard that gets afternoon shade, so it may be that this is enough to keep them from bolting, but it is also enough to keep them from growing like I want to see them grow.  Even so, I don’t mind the plants taking their time as long as they don’t bolt.  

Since I originally wrote this, last week, I have successfully finished drying the mint and the oregano.  Today I plan to put Feverfew on the dehydrator.

Perhaps the item of most interest this week is that some of the winter sown plants have just been happily living in their milk jugs since winter.  My oldest son has been wanting to plant some things, so I showed him where to move them yesterday.  That means I now have Skullcap, German Chamomile, and two types of Echinacea in my raised flower bed.  Woot!  Here, let me share a picture or two:

One of the new flowers/herbs in my garden, German Chamomile.

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The Chicken Chronicles

There is not a whole lot of new things happening with the chickens.  The biggest news right now is the babies (Welsummers) and the older ladies (Rhode Island Reds, primarily).  The Reds sure do pick on the Welsummers, so much so that they Welsummers stay in the coop away from the other hens.  This week we have taken the step of putting the babies back in the baby coop and a separate run when we can.  It doesn’t work so well when it rains, which it has been doing this week, but it is nice to get them outside.

One thing that is encouraging is to see the Welsummers testing one another.  No, I don’t relish the fact that they are establishing a pecking order amongst themselves, but I do like knowing that they are getting tougher and stronger, which means they will be able to hold their own with the older ladies soon enough.

The biggest problem with the Welsummers is they are roosting on top of the nesting boxes, and in fact they stay there much of the time, which means their droppings are falling into the nesting boxes.  We have to make changes because of this.  It isn’t hurting anything, but it is making the eggs more dirty.

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Happenings Around the Homestead

As I have said in a previous post, I am not planting my garden in full this year.  I decided to only plant those things which were already ordered (sweet potatoes and herbs) and some things I had already planted before deciding this (corn, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, and garlic).  So even though I am not doing a lot this year compared to previous years, I am still planting quite a bit.  This weekend I needed to plant some sweet potato slips that arrived a couple of weeks ago, as well as Goldenseal plants.

I must have ordered more sweet potatoes than I remember ordering.  I planted 45 slips, 15 each of Beauregard, O’Henry, and Purple Passion.  Those are orange, white, and purple sweet potatoes, respectively.  Oh, you didn’t know there were different colored sweet potatoes?  Yep, and while they taste similar, they do not taste exactly the same.  I find the purple sweet potatoes to be more dry and a little less sweet, while the white sweet potatoes are more mild, and actually make a pretty good white potato substitute.  Here is a picture of one of the slips I planted:

O’Henry Sweet Potato Slip

The garlic is coming along nicely, and it won’t be too long until it is ready to harvest.  It is not all that is doing well though – the mint is growing like wildfire this year.  Check out these pictures:

Chocolate Mint – one of my favorites!

Orange Mint

I mentioned the Goldenseal.  Check out the roots of this plant!  They are so golden in color:

Goldenseal Roots

Here is picture of the leaves.

Goldenseal

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New Photo Project

I’ve mentioned a couple of times lately that I have been working on a new photography lighting project, and today I want to share the first sample from the completed project.  The lighting is based somewhat on Kinoflo lights, which are a brand that are used for professional headshot photography.  I love the soft light the Kinoflos provide, but I don’t appreciate the expense (thousands of dollars).  So I decided to make my own.  This headshot is a sample from the completed project:

Headshot Sample

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The Chicken Chronicles

Well, I meant to post this last week, but for some reason I forgot about it.  So, you will get last week’s post and an update to last week’s post.  

Another week, another chicken problem. It seems Red has hurt her leg somehow. Red, by the way, is any one of the Rhode Island Reds, as we cannot really tell them apart. Anyhow, we have had to separate her to keep the others from picking on her, and to keep her from trying to go up and down the stairs in the coop. We’re also giving her half a baby aspirin at least two times a day. Right now she is avoiding standing on that foot, but I cannot see anything wrong with it. That leads me to believe she might have sprained it somehow.

 In other chicken news, we built a small coop for the babies (the Welsummers) so they can start staying outside all the time. The silly girls wouldn’t go into it the first night though, acting like young kids the first time they try to camp out. 😀 We finally decided to bring them in after listening to crying for an hour. Maybe they will get used to it decide to sleep in it. It won’t be long until it is time to integrate them with the rest of the girls.

 We had a good week of laying both weeks, including one day where all of the older birds laid eggs – that hasn’t happened often at all.

This week’s update: Red is doing much better.  She is now back in the coop with her sisters, and while she is still favoring her leg, she is much, much better.

Since last week, we have put ankle bracelets on three of the Rhode Island Reds, and amazingly we can now see who rules the roost!  There is one of them, tentatively named Pink (because of the pink bracelet) who is obviously at the top of the pecking order, and it seems Blue (you guessed it, a blue bracelet) who seems to be #2).  The Easter Eggers seem to not really care either way, but they do recognize Pink’s authority.  It’s funny how we could never notice that without some identifier of who was who.

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Happenings Around the Homestead

Work and a special photography project I have been working on have kept me busy enough lately that there hasn’t been too much activity from me around the homestead outside of the chickens (more on that tomorrow), but some things of note have happened.

Cicadas!  Wow, these things came out in force this past week!  I don’t ever recall seeing so many that they were on car tires, grass blades, small plants, and anything else they could latch onto.  Wow, this is a bumper crop this year.  😀

Sweet Potatoes – despite not putting much of a garden out this year, I am putting out sweet potato slips.  They arrive this past week, and I neglected to get them out over the weekend.  I’ll try to do that Tuesday of this week.  This year I have purple, white, and orange.  Hopefully some will grow this time.

Volunteers – Again, despite not putting out a garden this year, the leftover seeds in the compost had a different idea.  We have at least three volunteer tomatoes growing that we will let continue to grow.

Grass – We have a buch of grass peeking its head through our new woodchip covering on our garden.  Time to move the chicken pen to let them take care of it.

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Metal Wizardry

Stop. Take ten minutes and watch this video. Wow. My mind struggles to understand this even after seeing it.

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Simple as Riding a Bike

Riding a bike is simple, right?  Not so fast, hotshot!  It seems it is far more complicated than we think, and there is a lot we can learn from that.  Check this out:

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The Chicken Chronicles

As I mentioned yesterday, the chickens are earning their keep this time of year as they are becoming the fertilization factory.  The portable coop is helping with this tremedously.  Next I need to get the next phase of the project done which will allow them to run about in other spots in the garden more freely, yet with protection.  I can’t wait to share more on this.

The babies, the Welsummers, are doing very well, though I cannot wait to get them in with their sisters.  They are still too small to intermix them without supervision though, as the other hens will have some motivation to show them who is boss.  That is, to establish the pecking order.  I am writing this part of this on Sunday, and today we plan to let them all out to play together in the yard to see how it goes. Update: we let them out to play together with the older hens, and overall it went very well, though one of the Reds was taking every opportunity she could take to peck at one of the Welsummer’s heads. SIGH.

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Happenings Around the Homestead

How I love this time of year!  The weather has just been amazing!  The plants are coming out everywhere – I love it!

One of the biggest pieces of news around the homestead this week is the number of apples on the apple trees!  I cannot believe this!  We have had these trees since we moved in here, and while they have made one or two apples a year, it has been truly pathetic.  This year, as you may remember, I pruned them heavily.  I can’t say that made all the difference, but I have to believe it made the bulk of the difference.  There seems to be hundreds of tiny apples now growing on the trees.  Check it out:

Growing Apples

The other big news of the year is my almost-firm decision that I am not going to put out a full garden this year.  I have decided that there is wisdom in letting your soil rest periodically, and with us having just converted to a new type of gardening, this is a fine year to let it rest.  I have already ordered some plants, and I have already planted some things, so anything that grows from that will be permitted to grow, but we aren’t going to do anything else.  Basically, this means we will have garlic, some greens, some popcorn, and sweet potatoes.  The rest will be left to rest.  (I sure hope we can find someone with plenty of fresh tomatoes this year!)

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The Chicken Chronicles

I have to begin this week’s post with some unfortunate news.  For those of you who know my wife, I would ask that you not talk about this around her.  She is still taking it a bit rough.  We lost our first hen last week.  Snow White had become egg bound, and to make a long story short, she died from it.  Believe me, there is more to it, which is why my wife is not keen on discussing it, but it ws a good lesson for us.  In the future any hen who gets egg bound more than a couple of times in their first year of laying will be removed from the flock.  It seems this is a strong sign that there is something physically wrong with the hen, which ended up being the problem with Snow White.  This is why I want to add one or two birds a year to the flock though.

Speaking of new birds, the Welsummers are coming along nicely, and they are spending most of their days outside now except when the weather is bad.  They are loving it.  We still haven’t mixed them in with the rest of the flock yet, as we are wanting them to grow some more first.  In fact, I hope to make a make-shift small henhouse for them today so they can stay outside more, but still in their own cage.

Egg-laying is coming along nicely, and even with the reduction of one laying bird, we are still keeping up with our typical totals of 49 eggs per week or 5.44 eggs per bird per week.  I can’t wait to see that number go up when the Welsummers start laying.

Speaking of the Welsummers, how about a picture?

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Happenings Around the Homestead

While there wasn’t a homestead or a post about the chickens here last week, that doesn’t mean things weren’t happening.  As you can imagine, with the temperatures warming up, things are buzzing here.

Speaking of buzzing, that is the first thing of interest today.  It seems the native bees, the Blue Orchard Mason Bees, did not decide to make the bee house I put up home.  There is no sign of them nesting there at all.  This doesn’t mean they aren’t around, they just aren’t there.  Even so, there is plenty of bee activity.  I think, looking back, I messed up by getting them delivered too late.  That’s okay though – you live and learn.  I still have one more shipment of native bees coming, and they are set to arrive around May 15th.  These are Leafcutter Bees.  I’ll post more about them as we get closer.

One thing that has happened in the last couple of weeks is the arrival of my Goldenseal plants.  Goldenseal is an herb that is native to the US and widely known for its medicinal properties.  One of the really cool things about it is that it grows natively in hardwood (preferably oak) forests in the shade.  That makes it a perfect plant for one of the flower gardens here.  Let me show a picture of it:

Young Goldenseal Plant

I have already planted three of the six of these I ordered, and the other three are ready to be planted now.  I might be able to set them out today.

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Review: Rowenta Pro Master DW 8800

Getting right to the point: This is a high quality iron that you will not be disappointed with.  Those words aren’t really strong enough.  If you are have come to appreciate that good quality equipment sometimes costs more money, this iron is for you.

Full Review:

Rowenta Pro Master DW8080 iron

Occasionally in life you use a product that you are expecting to be good, but you don’t realize how good it can be until you use it.  The Rowenta Pro Master DW 8800 is one of those products.

It’s an iron.  Seriously.  How much different can an iron be?  They all get hot and take wrinkles out of clothes.  This is almost a commodity now.  Even so, there is a difference.

I have historically ironed more than anyone in my house, and even today, though I pay one of my sons to iron for me, I still iron a considerable amount, especially when traveling for work.  Because I often iron in hotels, I had almost seen the full gambit of irons, from basic irons with the most advanced feature being a spray nozzle that leaked to a “deluxe” hospitality iron that steamed, had an extra long cord, and even offered a headlamp to better see the wrinkles you were trying to remove.

For the last couple of years our iron at home has been a most basic iron, but it has done the job.  Even so, I have been looking to upgrade to one with a steam feature for some time.  It is the one feature I miss when it is not available, as it really helps get the wrinkles out.  A couple of weeks ago, someone touched some red plastic with the heated plate of our iron, and this pushed me to action.  After looking at numerous irons and reading numerous reviews, I decided to follow an instinct I only began to appreciate in my late thirties: buy quality equipment.  Quality in this case was the Rowenta Pro Master DW 8800.

Rowenta seems to be an iron appreciate by professionals: laundry mats and the such.  This is for good reason.  My first reaction was nothing short of utter amazement!  While it seemed to get hot faster that our other iron, that was not the feature that blew me away.  It was the variable steam feature that steams your clothes automatically while ironing WITHOUT pressing a button.  If you wish to steam vertically, perhaps curtains or even suit jackets, there is a button that produces serious bursts of steam.

All of this was amazing to my gadget loving self, but it was not until I ironed my most difficult shirt this morning that I truly appreciated how amazing this iron is.  This iron glides across my clothing like no other iron I have ever used.  The constant steam feature easily removed wrinkles I have wrestled with on this particular shirt for minutes in the past.  The “High Precision Tip”, while not a big deal to me, did indeed allow me to get into certain spots on the shirt easier.  As if this wasn’t enough, the constant steam feature also allowed me to iron my pants in half the time.  The steam pushing through my pants allowed me to be done ironing after only ironing one side of the pants.  That sort of thing makes me seriously happy.

All this said, the iron is comfortable to hold, and the weight of the iron speaks to its high quality.  From what I have read, this isn’t the same for all Rowenta irons, but those made in Germany posses a level of quality not seen in those made in China.

It remains to be seen how well this holds up, but my first impression is a solid WOW.  I am anxious to see how well the “Anti Calc” feature keeps the calcium buildup down, and I am anxious to see if the heated plate remains smooth after months of ironing, but for now, I am amazed.

All these good points aside, I do wish the iron had a longer cord, but this is a small price to pay for the rest of the incredible features.  I didn’t measure the cord, but I suspect it is 7 feet long.  I would have appreciated 10 feet, but again, this is a small complaint in comparison to the rest of the features.

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The Chicken Chronicles

Our ladies sure are enjoying this warmer weather!  I cannot wait until we get to a point this summer that we can begin primarily feeding them out of the garden.  I am smiling as I write this thinking of how much they love tomatoes.  Those hens go nuts over tomatoes thrown into their run, but I am not sure whether it is the tomatoes they enjoy or the red color.

Speaking of hens, look at the size of their young sisters, the Welsummers:

Aren’t the Welsummers getting big!?

They are growing by leaps and bounds, and by next week they should be ready to be introduced to the rest of the birds.  Whew!  I still need to read up on that.  I will do this as soon as possible though, as I don’t really think keeping them in a garage without fresh air and sunlight is the best thing for a chicken. Even so, they must be protected from the elements a bit while young.

The hens are really laying well now, averaging about 5 eggs per hen each week.  That means we are getting about 7 eggs per day.  When the Welsummer start laying, we will have an incredible abundance of eggs, probably near 70 or so a week.