Now there are 103 baby chicks. We suspect trampling was the cause of the fuzzball's demise. 1 out of 104 isn't a bad loss, I guess.
They are all just eating, drinking, chirping and crapping away! The storage tubs are getting REALLY crowded. Monty has everything he needs to build the new baby chicken coop with brooder (thingy with warming lamps) to go in it. Now all he needs is a couple more days without rain!
Mamma goats are doing well as is the baby girl and little Spencer. Billy kid however has the scours really BAD.We are medicating him and watching him closely. I have to give him a liquid medicine and an injection today.
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Today . . . .
Went to the Cattle Sale this morning and bought a regular size pressure cooker ($12 T-Fal no-stick with the instructions & recipes, almost new!), an old used crock pot for soap-making ($4), and LOTS of fresh veggies including green beans, little yellow squash, tiny red potatoes, a bunch of Bermuda onions, 2 big containers of broccoli, a big fresh rutabaga, 2 small watermelons, and a basket of small, early Chilton County peaches (all those for $18). Here’s what I looked at and did NOT buy:
a Tibetan sword for $15 (yeah, a Tibetan sword!)
a tin “purse” container that I would’ve hung on the wall of my deck with other tin “things” for $2 – no she’d take $1
a HUGE bourbon tom turkey $50
a half-dozen guinea chicks $3 each
a $4 bolt for the tractor
a $10 used crockpot
a $5 used crockpot
a $5 roll of window screen
a chicken-catching net – didn’t ask the price
and many other little critters and junque.
NOW I have everything I can possibly need to make soap. I’m going to use the old used crockpot for melt & pour and for heating the oils for the soaps.
Last week we went to Bham and stopped into the Golden Temple on Southside to get some “exotic” ingredients for soap and cosmetics. I bought 16 oz. of Shea Butter, 2 little cakes of beeswax, some vitamin E oil, a large container of Bentonite clay and two different essential oils – lemongrass and clove. I already had cinnamon. Golden Temple is such an experience, it's a wonder they don't charge a cover to let you in. The sights, smells, and people-watching there are priceless.
At Whole Foods, I found a LARGE container of grapeseed oil, some palm oil, and coconut oil. The family sampled EVERY flavored olive oil there. We spent about 20-30 minutes in the cheese area sampling and having delightful conversation with the cheese man about mites, goats, sheep, and mold. Wonderful!! The children and hubby all got a single slice of pizza from the deli area. I got gluten-free pretzels (kind of anti-climactic, huh?). We saw, we sampled, and we bought.
At Hobby Lobby, I bought a couple of molds and some lotion containers. Jessica got a block of clay to try sculpting with, Noah bought some models, and the girls got a stuffed animal. I walked through the store with hands cupped around eyes to keep me focused on my list.
I have found great online sources for containers for lip balms and other cosmetics, but I want to do some testing first. ALSO, I am trying to keep track of what each item costs so that I can figure the actual cost of anything I end up making.
If I actually end up making the soap (instead of buying the inexpensive plain melt & pour blocks and rebatching it with my creative stuff added) I want to get the simplest possible ingredients leaning towards stuff I have in my garden, goat’s milk which I hope to be getting from my goats, and stuff I can get at this Wal Mart. Dollar Tree (of all places!!) had a package of beautiful handmade papers that I got to try as wrap for the soap. I hope I can get a couple of days of rain now to give me the excuse to concentrate and really DO this thing!!!
I’ll keep you posted how it goes and the recipes I try. Wish me luck.
a Tibetan sword for $15 (yeah, a Tibetan sword!)
a tin “purse” container that I would’ve hung on the wall of my deck with other tin “things” for $2 – no she’d take $1
a HUGE bourbon tom turkey $50
a half-dozen guinea chicks $3 each
a $4 bolt for the tractor
a $10 used crockpot
a $5 used crockpot
a $5 roll of window screen
a chicken-catching net – didn’t ask the price
and many other little critters and junque.
NOW I have everything I can possibly need to make soap. I’m going to use the old used crockpot for melt & pour and for heating the oils for the soaps.
Last week we went to Bham and stopped into the Golden Temple on Southside to get some “exotic” ingredients for soap and cosmetics. I bought 16 oz. of Shea Butter, 2 little cakes of beeswax, some vitamin E oil, a large container of Bentonite clay and two different essential oils – lemongrass and clove. I already had cinnamon. Golden Temple is such an experience, it's a wonder they don't charge a cover to let you in. The sights, smells, and people-watching there are priceless.
At Whole Foods, I found a LARGE container of grapeseed oil, some palm oil, and coconut oil. The family sampled EVERY flavored olive oil there. We spent about 20-30 minutes in the cheese area sampling and having delightful conversation with the cheese man about mites, goats, sheep, and mold. Wonderful!! The children and hubby all got a single slice of pizza from the deli area. I got gluten-free pretzels (kind of anti-climactic, huh?). We saw, we sampled, and we bought.
At Hobby Lobby, I bought a couple of molds and some lotion containers. Jessica got a block of clay to try sculpting with, Noah bought some models, and the girls got a stuffed animal. I walked through the store with hands cupped around eyes to keep me focused on my list.
I have found great online sources for containers for lip balms and other cosmetics, but I want to do some testing first. ALSO, I am trying to keep track of what each item costs so that I can figure the actual cost of anything I end up making.
If I actually end up making the soap (instead of buying the inexpensive plain melt & pour blocks and rebatching it with my creative stuff added) I want to get the simplest possible ingredients leaning towards stuff I have in my garden, goat’s milk which I hope to be getting from my goats, and stuff I can get at this Wal Mart. Dollar Tree (of all places!!) had a package of beautiful handmade papers that I got to try as wrap for the soap. I hope I can get a couple of days of rain now to give me the excuse to concentrate and really DO this thing!!!
I’ll keep you posted how it goes and the recipes I try. Wish me luck.
Monday, June 01, 2009
We lost a baby chick . . .
This happened last week:
I'm so ANGRY!!! We lost a baby chick tonight.
Today, I moved those week-old nasty buzzards out of my dining room where those warm lamps were making their little chicken smells waft all through the kitchen. I took them and put them in the garage after carefully running an extension cord just right so I could keep their little butts warm. It was great. The garage is about 10 degrees warmer than my house and about 5 degrees hotter than outside.
Well, tonight we got home from Bham and the garage stunk to the high heavens!! So, smart folks that we are, we left the garage door open for a "few minutes" to let it air out a little. Well, about an hour later, we're sitting together in the living room watching old Tom and Jerry cartoons, and Monty hears the chicks all making a ruckus. He jumps up and runs out to the garage where he sees the neighborhood roaming German Shepherd "Baby" toting off a sweet little yellow fuzzball!!!! He scolds her and she drops the chick and slinks off into the night.
Monty grabs the chick and there's no blood, but he has a dangling leg. Awww, crap. We closed the garage door and checked all the other animals just to be sure. Then we had to take the little chick and Monty had to finish him off - he was fading fast anyway. It was AWFUL!!! I felt SO badly that we'd been careless. The good news is that this is the little 11 chicks I got for $20 last week that have taught us many things in preparation for the big shipment that's coming any day now. Oh, well. Such is life on the farm????
I'm so ANGRY!!! We lost a baby chick tonight.
Today, I moved those week-old nasty buzzards out of my dining room where those warm lamps were making their little chicken smells waft all through the kitchen. I took them and put them in the garage after carefully running an extension cord just right so I could keep their little butts warm. It was great. The garage is about 10 degrees warmer than my house and about 5 degrees hotter than outside.
Well, tonight we got home from Bham and the garage stunk to the high heavens!! So, smart folks that we are, we left the garage door open for a "few minutes" to let it air out a little. Well, about an hour later, we're sitting together in the living room watching old Tom and Jerry cartoons, and Monty hears the chicks all making a ruckus. He jumps up and runs out to the garage where he sees the neighborhood roaming German Shepherd "Baby" toting off a sweet little yellow fuzzball!!!! He scolds her and she drops the chick and slinks off into the night.
Monty grabs the chick and there's no blood, but he has a dangling leg. Awww, crap. We closed the garage door and checked all the other animals just to be sure. Then we had to take the little chick and Monty had to finish him off - he was fading fast anyway. It was AWFUL!!! I felt SO badly that we'd been careless. The good news is that this is the little 11 chicks I got for $20 last week that have taught us many things in preparation for the big shipment that's coming any day now. Oh, well. Such is life on the farm????
Describing the Garden
The following post is an email (letter) I wrote to a friend today describing the garden. I'm including it in this blog, because I like it.
Dear Kathleen:
I’ve taken classes at the county extension for gardening and at Petals from the Past, and we have the most humongous garden I’ve ever attempted this year.
I’ve got 3 tomato areas: the main “eating” tomatoes area has 5 bamboo tepees under which there are 5 plants each and the tepees alternate between big slicing tomatoes and grape tomatoes. Between the tepees are planted purple, red, and green basils, and marigolds line the walking path in front of the tomatoes. To play off the height of the tepees, I planted mixed sunflowers between each tepee along the “wall” of the garden. I’m very excited to see this all filling in as the plants continue to grow. The 2nd tomato area is a bed of only roma tomato plants for sauce. I have 17 roma plants out, 9 in the center of those round metal cages, and 8 beside these weird metal poles the previous owner left. That’s going to be pretty, too. I only planted those from seed this past weekend, and I’m going back to interplant green basil with them today. The third tomato area will be heirlooms, and I’m just doing those for fun. They have great flavor, I’m growing them from seed, and they are SO pretty. I’m (hopefully) putting those out today, and interplanting them with onion and parsley.
Other than tomatoes, I have a bed with decorative Indian corn interplanted with cantaloupes and honeydews, pumpkins, and decorative gourds including birdhouse gourds. I also have wildly successful pumpkin plants growing in the compost heap!
I have a cabbage patch interplanted with chamomile, clary sage, and dill. Impatient as I am, I’ve decided that only chumps wait for cabbage to head! I just snip the leaves and use them in stir fries and this new recipe for this weird (delicious) patty thing.
I have a 50 ft wire fence inside supporting pole beans called gita – yard-long green beans. I’ve grown them the past three years very successfully, and they are so fine and delicious that you only have to just let them hit the sauté pan for a few seconds and they taste fabulous! At each support pole of that fence is a cucumber plant, and at every foot or so is a buttercrunch lettuce, and all this is interplanted with scarlet nasturtiums.
The squash bed contains zucchini, yellow squash, butternut, and acorn squash. It has red clover between the squash hills to keep weeds down and to nitrify the soil supporting the growth of the squash. Petunias line that bed – mixed colors.
A stubborn old stump has been heaped up with dirt and has become the strawberry hill. It looks GREAT!
The bush beans are planted in 3 rows beside the strawberry hill, and I’ve just planted 3 rows of swiss chard (mixed ruby and neon lights) beside those plants. I’m going to put in some more lettuces in that bed, too, including arugula and some thyme.
I went crazy at Petals from the Past buying seed packets for their gorgeous art, and I ended up with 6 varieties of peppers to plant. Got them in the ground this weekend, too, and there are 6 rows with a wide variety of colors, sweet and heat plants, and shapes.
The last two areas are a garlic/onion bed which is doing GREAT and the long row of potatoes against the fence – white and red – both of which were planted back in February. The white potatoes are doing great, but the foliage came in on the trees and is blocking most of the sun over the red potatoes and they look puny.
There is also a row of purple hull cowpeas coming along nicely. I laid drip hoses for every area of the garden and constructed this series of connectors that I basically have to manually hook up the hose to one receiver to water the entire outside area of the garden, and another one to water all the inside beds. That was quite a bit of engineering for my brain, but I managed. Outside the garden we have blueberries and raspberries and fruit trees planted including peaches, pears, plums, apples, and plums. I just saw a pomegranate tree at a friend’s house with those fiery orange blossoms and HAD to get one. The little fruit tree man that comes to the “cattle sale” every Wednesday morning had them, and I got one. I haven’t planted it yet.
Landscaping? I’ve done nothing. The priority this year is the garden and the animals. We haven’t done nearly enough to the inside of the house yet either, but the plan is to make a 4th bedroom in the basement with a full bath. We moved in August, so I didn’t try to get a teaching job this year, and what I don’t understand is this: How did my family ever have clean clothes to wear or a hot meal to eat when I was working outside the home????? It seems like they need me more now that they’re older than they did when they were babies, but I really like that.
I’d love to meet you in Bham or Alabaster for lunch, or you could have a day in the country down here. We could do lunch and visit Petals from the Past in Jemison (just hide your checkbook and debit card!!!). It is a lovely place to spend HOURS and HOURS gawking at beautiful plants and chatting. Let me know what you’d like to do. Hope to see you soon.
Love, Rebecca
Dear Kathleen:
I’ve taken classes at the county extension for gardening and at Petals from the Past, and we have the most humongous garden I’ve ever attempted this year.
I’ve got 3 tomato areas: the main “eating” tomatoes area has 5 bamboo tepees under which there are 5 plants each and the tepees alternate between big slicing tomatoes and grape tomatoes. Between the tepees are planted purple, red, and green basils, and marigolds line the walking path in front of the tomatoes. To play off the height of the tepees, I planted mixed sunflowers between each tepee along the “wall” of the garden. I’m very excited to see this all filling in as the plants continue to grow. The 2nd tomato area is a bed of only roma tomato plants for sauce. I have 17 roma plants out, 9 in the center of those round metal cages, and 8 beside these weird metal poles the previous owner left. That’s going to be pretty, too. I only planted those from seed this past weekend, and I’m going back to interplant green basil with them today. The third tomato area will be heirlooms, and I’m just doing those for fun. They have great flavor, I’m growing them from seed, and they are SO pretty. I’m (hopefully) putting those out today, and interplanting them with onion and parsley.
Other than tomatoes, I have a bed with decorative Indian corn interplanted with cantaloupes and honeydews, pumpkins, and decorative gourds including birdhouse gourds. I also have wildly successful pumpkin plants growing in the compost heap!
I have a cabbage patch interplanted with chamomile, clary sage, and dill. Impatient as I am, I’ve decided that only chumps wait for cabbage to head! I just snip the leaves and use them in stir fries and this new recipe for this weird (delicious) patty thing.
I have a 50 ft wire fence inside supporting pole beans called gita – yard-long green beans. I’ve grown them the past three years very successfully, and they are so fine and delicious that you only have to just let them hit the sauté pan for a few seconds and they taste fabulous! At each support pole of that fence is a cucumber plant, and at every foot or so is a buttercrunch lettuce, and all this is interplanted with scarlet nasturtiums.
The squash bed contains zucchini, yellow squash, butternut, and acorn squash. It has red clover between the squash hills to keep weeds down and to nitrify the soil supporting the growth of the squash. Petunias line that bed – mixed colors.
A stubborn old stump has been heaped up with dirt and has become the strawberry hill. It looks GREAT!
The bush beans are planted in 3 rows beside the strawberry hill, and I’ve just planted 3 rows of swiss chard (mixed ruby and neon lights) beside those plants. I’m going to put in some more lettuces in that bed, too, including arugula and some thyme.
I went crazy at Petals from the Past buying seed packets for their gorgeous art, and I ended up with 6 varieties of peppers to plant. Got them in the ground this weekend, too, and there are 6 rows with a wide variety of colors, sweet and heat plants, and shapes.
The last two areas are a garlic/onion bed which is doing GREAT and the long row of potatoes against the fence – white and red – both of which were planted back in February. The white potatoes are doing great, but the foliage came in on the trees and is blocking most of the sun over the red potatoes and they look puny.
There is also a row of purple hull cowpeas coming along nicely. I laid drip hoses for every area of the garden and constructed this series of connectors that I basically have to manually hook up the hose to one receiver to water the entire outside area of the garden, and another one to water all the inside beds. That was quite a bit of engineering for my brain, but I managed. Outside the garden we have blueberries and raspberries and fruit trees planted including peaches, pears, plums, apples, and plums. I just saw a pomegranate tree at a friend’s house with those fiery orange blossoms and HAD to get one. The little fruit tree man that comes to the “cattle sale” every Wednesday morning had them, and I got one. I haven’t planted it yet.
Landscaping? I’ve done nothing. The priority this year is the garden and the animals. We haven’t done nearly enough to the inside of the house yet either, but the plan is to make a 4th bedroom in the basement with a full bath. We moved in August, so I didn’t try to get a teaching job this year, and what I don’t understand is this: How did my family ever have clean clothes to wear or a hot meal to eat when I was working outside the home????? It seems like they need me more now that they’re older than they did when they were babies, but I really like that.
I’d love to meet you in Bham or Alabaster for lunch, or you could have a day in the country down here. We could do lunch and visit Petals from the Past in Jemison (just hide your checkbook and debit card!!!). It is a lovely place to spend HOURS and HOURS gawking at beautiful plants and chatting. Let me know what you’d like to do. Hope to see you soon.
Love, Rebecca
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
