It’s Been a Month

Tags

backyard chickens, canning, Cherries, gardening, soft shelled eggs

An entire month since I posted anything.  Time bloody flies when you’re so busy you barely have time to eat and sleep.  

Well, to be fair, I did want to be super busy after Foster Toddler left to keep myself occupied.  So, in that respect, this “busyness” has been great.  On the other hand, I haven’t had a day off since Foster Toddler left.  I don’t feel like I’ve really had a break yet.  We had discussed taking another placement once the shows opened in mid-July, but I haven’t even caught up on my sleep yet.  I need to sleep for a few weeks before caring for another child.  

Unfortunately, our schedules aren’t really going to calm down all that much once the show open anyway.  Once the shows are open, there are three other projects on the go that require my attention.  At this point, it feels like we won’t have any down time until perhaps Christmas.  

It’s been much too long since I did a Garden Diary entry, so long in fact, that I now need to start Canning Season diary entries as fruits are starting to ripen.  Make hay while the sun shines!

Garden first:  

I had to pull the second batch of radishes that we planted as they got maggots.  Unfortunately, the onions and hardneck garlic look like they may have been affected too.  I pulled a few onions and only found one infested with maggots, but the leaves are turning yellow and dying, so I think the whole crop is done for.  

The peas are almost ready to harvest.  The potatoes in a barrel are doing REALLY WELL!  I’m loving having cucumbers and tomatoes in pots on the patio.  Squash is getting there – it’s just starting to vine out.  I think I may already have powdery mildew on some squash.  I’ll treat it tonight.  Damn that powdery mildew.  

The other garden is doing well too, and the weeds are mostly under control.  Corn is up to my waist, and the carrots are coming in strong. 

Canning Season:

Sweet BC Cherries!  I bought 10 pounds for $25 from the fruit truck at the Farmers’ Market last Saturday.  I canned seven pounds into cherry pie filling, and I’m eating the last three pounds fresh.  Next up will be apricots.  The cherry pitter I spent waaaaay too much on last year came in handy.  What a great little time saver, not to mention “mess” saver.  I pitted seven pounds of cherries, yet my kitchen did not resemble a grisly crime scene by the time I was done!  Hurrah! 

 

Tried something new this year with the pits:  cherry pit vinegar.  Put the pits in a mason jar and fill with white vinegar.  Leave it three or four days.  Strain the pits. Thought it might make good salad dressing? 

  

Chicken News:

Ginger is going through a hard molt, and one of the other ladies is laying softshelled eggs.  I say “laying” – what I really mean is “dropping them from the roost.”  I couldn’t figure it out until I read an article on Fresh Eggs Daily that said if they eat too much spinach or beet greens or kale, the oxalic acid in the greens binds with calcium in their bodies.  Four years later, and I still don’t know how to take care of chickens.  I’ve been giving them fresh greens almost every day.  I thought I was doing a good thing by giving them LOTS of spinach and kale for calcium.  Turns out, you just need to add a little acid to their stomachs, so I put some apple cider vinegar in their water.  That should do the trick.  Fingers crossed.  

Phewww!  I think I’m caught up now.  Hopefully, I have a bit more time on my hands by next week, but I make no promises.  

 

Hard-Shelled Eggs Again (or The Importance of Calcium)

Tags

backyard chickens, calcium for chickens, egg, Eggshell, soft shelled eggs

Mystery solved.  It was Scruffy that was laying the soft-shelled eggs.

Not who I expected at all.

Her eggs have always had beautiful, smooth, hard-as-rock shells.  They were tough eggs to crack!  Perhaps she depleted her calcium or maybe her egg shell gland wasn’t working properly.  Whatever the case, the sardine-yogurt-eggshell-oatmeal mash did the trick.

It took five days, but her eggs are back to normal, and praise the chicken gods she didn’t get egg-bound at all through this ordeal.

I’ll cut back on the mash, maybe giving it two or three times a week now.  I think this little chicken will always need some calcium/protein hand fed to her.  She doesn’t seem to want to eat any oyster shells on her own.  (Ginger, on the other hand, can’t get enough of the oyster shells, but she has yet to start laying again – go figure!)

Day One – the shell is so thin, the yolk gives it a golden glow

Day Two – the shell is thicker and looks white, but I can still poke it with my finger

Day Four – she took a day off from laying, and laid this lovely the following day. The shell is solid, but a bit pale

Day Five – back to normal. A lovely blue, hard-shelled egg

Related articles

• Soft-Shelled Eggs (dreambles.com)
• How is an egg made? (thenaturalpoultryfarmingguide.org)

Soft-Shelled Eggs

Tags

backyard chickens, calcium, crushed oyster shell, layer ration, soft shelled eggs

We’ve got a problem in the coop.  For the past three days, someone’s been laying soft-shelled eggs, or perhaps no-shell eggs.  Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the difference.

I have no idea who it is.  It could be any one of them.  Today, I found a good egg in the nesting box, but I’m having trouble deciphering if it’s Liesl’s or Scruffy’s.  And for all I know, the soft-shell/no-shell eggs could be coming from Ginger.

What I do know is that they are laid in the middle of coop, perhaps even dropped from the roost.  They look like balloons.  And I’m glad they are coming out of the chicken instead of getting stuck inside.

The girls always have access to crushed oyster shells, and we feed them a layer ration that is supposed to cover their calcium needs.  I’m not sure what else to do.

I’ll try adding some more protein and calcium to their diet by giving them a mixture of oatmeal, yogurt, sardines and crushed egg shells for the next three or four days.  One of the many awesome things about chickens is that they process food so fast, a change in diet can have a positive effect in a very short period of time.

This combo doesn’t sound at all appealing to me, but the girls gobbled it up like little pigs as soon as I put it in the run this morning.

Fingers crossed that this works!