We are chicken people. We just love our chickens. We really don't care about the eggs, the chickens are our pets.
There's one thing we've learned over the past 3.5 years of raising chickens, and that is they make lousy pets. Especially for sensitive young children. Never choose an animal at the bottom of the food chain as a pet. Especially one as unintelligent as a chicken.
At the beginning of 2018 we had 6 chickens. I received 7 chicks for my birthday and G also brought home 3 Silkies this spring.
One of the chickens wandered off in April. I'm assuming she got snatched while the chickens were free-ranging.
My birthday chicks, which I have written about before, were very loved by the kids who each had their own special chicken. We kept very good care of them and were very protective of them after the previous chicken massacres of 2017.
(This next part is really sad, grab a box of tissues.)
GE had a very special chick named Green Layer Like Gecko Is Green. He held and fed Green Layer every day. He made sure Green Layer got special grass to eat. He watched Green Layer the entire time she was outside and always locked her up tight. He would talk about how he couldn't wait to go out and get her green eggs every day when she started laying. He was so excited for his special green eggs.
One night, despite the coop being shut up tight, a raccoon pulled a board off the coop and killed three chicks, including GE's Green Layer.
When he found out, he cried out, "Not my Green Layer! I need my Green Layer!"
GE is a very compassionate, sensitive little boy. He mourned deeply for the next several days. He wouldn't eat. He would just lay on the floor and sometimes fall asleep in the middle of the day. It was so sad.
G searched and searched for a replacement for this special breed of chicken. G can find anything on Craigslist and came home one day with not one replacement, but five. GE loves these Green Layers and he came out of his mourning period, but he has not been able to bring himself to get too close to these new chicks, which is sad considering how attached my boys used to get to the chicks.
At first GE named all the chicks "Green Layer." Finally he started to differentiate them. We now have Green Layer the New Real Green Layer, Green Layer Like Tractors Are Green, Santa (formerly known as Fluffy), and he gave two of the chicks to his siblings and GD named his Turbo and KM named hers Flower.
The other two chicks that were killed in that incident were my special chick Sunshine and one of the Silkies Josephine. Henrietta was also chicken-napped but managed to wander back later that day.
KM became very attached to Henrietta after that but a few weeks later Henrietta disappeared while free-ranging. We couldn't keep her in either of the coops because she was getting picked on. We later have concluded that the 3 Silkies were blind. None of them survived the summer.
Meanwhile, we tried putting the birthday chicks in with the big chickens and my Buff Orpington Watermelon, the one chicken I had specifically requested that I had plans to let become a mother, was killed by way of fear of the head chicken Blaze.
So, now our chickens no longer free-range, our children no longer forge strong attachments to our livestock, we lock the Green Layers in the workshop every night, and emotionally no one is up to raising chicks next year.
Also, if you're ever talking to one of the kids about the chickens, they think that Henrietta wandered off to find her sister Josephine and they are living a happy life together somewhere and we never mentioned Watermelon and let the memory of that chicken fade away.
(I really wish I could have made this post more enjoyable to read or funny or something, but really we're pretty bummed about our chickens and I felt like there needed to be some closure on the original Green Layer.)
Wednesday, November 28, 2018
Thursday, November 15, 2018
"Learning Experiences" of 2018: Part 1: The Gardens
I previously titled this post "Failures of 2018" but decided to take a more positive approach. As my former manager used to say, "We have areas for improvement."
It's been awhile since I have written. It's not that I haven't had much to write about, it's just that when we take down our 2018 calendar I'm pretty sure we'll just have to write FAIL with a big black Sharpie across the front.
Now I don't like to be a pessimist...a killjoy...a Debbie downer...but I've been pretty bummed out about the past year lately. Of course 2018 wasn't all bad, we are all happy and healthy, the kids are great, and only one thing that I would label as terrible happened. But it's been a year a growing up for everyone, a year to reset our goals and priorities, and a year to lower--or change--our expectations.
Let's review some of our failures of 2018, shall we?
The Gardens
We started out the year with BIG BIG homesteading plans. G and I have never set out to be "homesteaders," that was never our goal or our dream, we just like to grow and raise things and do things ourselves. We would really rather not be dependent on anyone else, and we're pretty stubborn. And we also thought it was being more "efficient" to use our soil and time to grow food. Somehow we got stuck in our heads that we had to spend our time productively, and somehow this equated to growing all our own food. As our efforts grew we realized we were starting to fall under the category of "homesteaders," which, honestly, was way too trendy of a title for us anyway, but we embraced the idea of homesteading and ran with it.
Included in our plans of a fruitful homestead this year were a couple acres of gardens. We wanted to produce enough sweet corn and pumpkins to sell at a farmers market. We wanted to can at least a year's worth of tomato sauce for our family. We wanted to freeze at least a year's worth of vegetables--beans, broccoli, cauliflower, snap peas, squash--for our family. We hoped to have enough leftover to sell. The boys were so excited to be planning for a farmer's market.
The whole family worked hard to meet our goals. We found a little garden center and were thrilled with the plants we bought. We ordered seeds online. We got everything in the ground early. We planted over 500 hills of pumpkins, a big corn patch, another big corn patch, and a big garden. We worked hard to weed and water the gardens. We fertilized everything.
AND.....
Pretty much nothing grew.
It was all pretty sad and ridiculous and discouraging. We wanted to teach our kids about working hard and to appreciate where their food came from, but all they were learning was how to waste time and be disappointed.
The best we can figure is 1) we have really poor soil and 2) we got some over-spray from the field around us spraying Round-Up (our corn was doing good until the field was sprayed).
We were able to get a few meals worth of beans and not very tasty broccoli frozen. It was during the couple hours that G and I spent prepping the vegetables and blanching them that we were struck with the realization--WOW! WE ARE REALLY WASTING OUR TIME! WALMART HAS BAGS OF FROZEN VEGETABLES FOR 99 CENTS!
In our effort to be efficient we were being terribly inefficient. How many more worthwhile things were on our to-do list than freezing spindly broccoli? Not to mention that this spindly broccoli was still ending up costing us more per ounce than the stuff we could find in the freezers at Walmart, not even accounting for our time
It was that evening that we decided to throw our full support behind America's vegetable farmers, as well as Walmart's empire, and allow ourselves to use our time for more worthwhile things. We kind of completely gave up on the garden at that point. There was really nothing left growing in it anyway. We had wasted enough time and money on it and were ready to move on. I didn't even like gardening anymore. We had a few pumpkins to pick and GD's sunflowers had actually grown, but as soon as those were done and the ground was dry enough we tilled up the garden area and are going to plant grass there in the spring. Our gardening efforts are done for now.
Although I did enjoy not having the tasks of weeding and picking and prepping and freezing looming on my to-do list all summer, the loss of the garden hit me hard. Gardening has been a life-long hobby for me and it's been hard to admit that I failed at it and to give it up for the time being. I remember loving helping in the garden from a very young age. I remember my dad making me stop hoeing the corn rows because he thought I was going to be sore the next day. I remember going out to the garden every morning in the summer to see what was ready to pick. I had my own garden from the time I was about 10. And now I can't even get green beans to grow or keep my flower beds looking nice.
It's a big change of thinking to move away from gardening for me, but I think we're all a bit relieved to embrace the 21st century and the convenience of mass-grown genetically-modified frozen vegetables.
It's been awhile since I have written. It's not that I haven't had much to write about, it's just that when we take down our 2018 calendar I'm pretty sure we'll just have to write FAIL with a big black Sharpie across the front.
Now I don't like to be a pessimist...a killjoy...a Debbie downer...but I've been pretty bummed out about the past year lately. Of course 2018 wasn't all bad, we are all happy and healthy, the kids are great, and only one thing that I would label as terrible happened. But it's been a year a growing up for everyone, a year to reset our goals and priorities, and a year to lower--or change--our expectations.
Let's review some of our failures of 2018, shall we?
The Gardens
We started out the year with BIG BIG homesteading plans. G and I have never set out to be "homesteaders," that was never our goal or our dream, we just like to grow and raise things and do things ourselves. We would really rather not be dependent on anyone else, and we're pretty stubborn. And we also thought it was being more "efficient" to use our soil and time to grow food. Somehow we got stuck in our heads that we had to spend our time productively, and somehow this equated to growing all our own food. As our efforts grew we realized we were starting to fall under the category of "homesteaders," which, honestly, was way too trendy of a title for us anyway, but we embraced the idea of homesteading and ran with it.
Included in our plans of a fruitful homestead this year were a couple acres of gardens. We wanted to produce enough sweet corn and pumpkins to sell at a farmers market. We wanted to can at least a year's worth of tomato sauce for our family. We wanted to freeze at least a year's worth of vegetables--beans, broccoli, cauliflower, snap peas, squash--for our family. We hoped to have enough leftover to sell. The boys were so excited to be planning for a farmer's market.
The whole family worked hard to meet our goals. We found a little garden center and were thrilled with the plants we bought. We ordered seeds online. We got everything in the ground early. We planted over 500 hills of pumpkins, a big corn patch, another big corn patch, and a big garden. We worked hard to weed and water the gardens. We fertilized everything.
AND.....
Pretty much nothing grew.
It was all pretty sad and ridiculous and discouraging. We wanted to teach our kids about working hard and to appreciate where their food came from, but all they were learning was how to waste time and be disappointed.
The best we can figure is 1) we have really poor soil and 2) we got some over-spray from the field around us spraying Round-Up (our corn was doing good until the field was sprayed).
We were able to get a few meals worth of beans and not very tasty broccoli frozen. It was during the couple hours that G and I spent prepping the vegetables and blanching them that we were struck with the realization--WOW! WE ARE REALLY WASTING OUR TIME! WALMART HAS BAGS OF FROZEN VEGETABLES FOR 99 CENTS!
In our effort to be efficient we were being terribly inefficient. How many more worthwhile things were on our to-do list than freezing spindly broccoli? Not to mention that this spindly broccoli was still ending up costing us more per ounce than the stuff we could find in the freezers at Walmart, not even accounting for our time
It was that evening that we decided to throw our full support behind America's vegetable farmers, as well as Walmart's empire, and allow ourselves to use our time for more worthwhile things. We kind of completely gave up on the garden at that point. There was really nothing left growing in it anyway. We had wasted enough time and money on it and were ready to move on. I didn't even like gardening anymore. We had a few pumpkins to pick and GD's sunflowers had actually grown, but as soon as those were done and the ground was dry enough we tilled up the garden area and are going to plant grass there in the spring. Our gardening efforts are done for now.
Although I did enjoy not having the tasks of weeding and picking and prepping and freezing looming on my to-do list all summer, the loss of the garden hit me hard. Gardening has been a life-long hobby for me and it's been hard to admit that I failed at it and to give it up for the time being. I remember loving helping in the garden from a very young age. I remember my dad making me stop hoeing the corn rows because he thought I was going to be sore the next day. I remember going out to the garden every morning in the summer to see what was ready to pick. I had my own garden from the time I was about 10. And now I can't even get green beans to grow or keep my flower beds looking nice.
It's a big change of thinking to move away from gardening for me, but I think we're all a bit relieved to embrace the 21st century and the convenience of mass-grown genetically-modified frozen vegetables.
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