The Wayfaring Wordhack

An OS update, which I thought I had installed weeks ago, put an end to my horrid keyboard lag problem, and I can now type freely. Color me happy.

I have other happy news:  My "baby" bee colony (started for and given to me by a kind and generous beekeeping neighbor) is growing splendidly, contrary to the fear that took hold of me when J told me he thought, due to the lack of visible activity,  the hive was dying.  I bought J a bee suit today--as well as two for the kids (I wish I had a pic of Farmer Boy in his, but it is on J's phone)--and we went to check the state of the hive. Thank the Lord, the bees are doing so well that I went ahead and added a super on top of the main hive body to give the bees room to stock honey so that the queen can continue laying...  I pray the workers can gather enough nectar to complete their honey stores for the winter. Since I am just starting out, I don't want to be faced with the moral dilemma of letting my bees starve or feed them sugar. :-/

We now have a duck sitting on a clutch of four Khaki Campbell eggs and eight Indian Runner eggs.  It seemed a pity to let the duck sit on only four eggs, so we went ahead and bought the IR eggs in hopes of getting a flock for slug patrol. 

Now for a bit of grimmer news, we only have one duckling left from the incubator clutch (and she* still doesn't look like a Khaki Campbell); however, the two goslings hatched well and are growing. We named the three after Narnia characters, so we have Lucy (duck), and Polly and Diggory (geese).

Today, we had to kill yet another sick hen. It is so heartbreaking to have to do that.  That was why I was really in a funk until we checked the bees and saw they were OK. It is hard raising life and harvesting death. 

Sometimes, when a series of bad things happen, you really forget to look up and take stock of all the progress you have made.  I have been reminding myself of late how much more my garden is approaching my ideal now than it was when we bought the place. If I can find them, I will post some Then and Now photos.

This year, barring an unforeseen disaster, we should have a very nice eggplant and pepper harvest, and my tomatoes are looking good. I might even get lots of carrots.  We have already pulled up some hefty early potatoes, and I had my first-ever successful garlic harvest.  We're eating cucumbers and have had zucchini since the last week of May.**  Last year it was too hot, and this year is on the cooler side, so other harvests are slow in coming.  I am not sure pumpkins and such will have time to ripen because my plants are barely setting fruit. :-/   The winter was so mild that the garden has a pretty hefty pest load ,and all my first sowings of beans were completely wiped out. My okra was so shocked and stunted--those that have survived the insects--probably aren't going to do anything at all either.  Such is the the growing year.... Better not to put all your eggs--or seeds--in one basket.
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*If Sprout's and my fledgling skills are anything to go by, after vent sexing the goslings, we have a goose and a gander.

**We've eaten plenty of other stuff, too, like peas, beets, salads, rocket and mustard, cabbage, etc. from the cooler days on...

 Two years ago today, we were holding baby ducklings:


Today, one of our hens, Lacey, is hatching out her second clutch of eggs this year:

 Once again, we came to a season when one of our roosters was not really being the gentleman that he should be. For weeks, I hesitated over butchering him because a) killing one's chickens that have been slated to be part of the flock is hard and never fun, b) I saved him when he was crushed in his egg as a chick, c) I need another line of genetics to keep improving my flock and after bringing in Marek's disease only God knows how, I prefer the known dangers of the birds already here.

While reason C was a vote in his favor, it was also a strike against Lucky Fluffypants and an almost-attribution of a one-way ticket to the soup pot: He didn't have enough hens, and I don't want to buy in any more.  We can't be building individual pens everywhere to deal with each and every scenario for our fowl, so when the hens in his pen started looking too beat up and he started showing overt aggression to one in particular, we decided the easiest solution was to process him.

Heart-heavy, but believing it had to be done, I carried him toward a temporary holding coop.  Suddenly J asked, "Why don't we put him with the ducks?"

!!!

Yes! Why not?

So that is what we did, knowing we could always kill him later if we had to because of incompatibility or depression. But no. It has been more than two weeks now, and while Lucky Flufflypants certainly misses living with his ladies, we now have a tried and true option of rehousing fowl.  

*applauds J's brilliance*

ETA: Just after posting this, while cleaning the kitchen, I watched this video.  Yes, yes, yes. It spoke to a lot of what I feel and have experienced.


 In a comment to asakiyume  in one of my posts, I had said I might expand on what has been going on with my flock, but up until now, I haven't really had the heart to do it.

This winter, one of my hens, Winona, started acting a bit scared/depressed. She stayed inside the coop, barely venturing out, and as a result, lost quite a bit of weight. I thought most of it was caused by the fact that we had two roosters who were constantly fighting over the hens, often dismounting them roughly when chased off by the other male. I figured Winona didn't want to have any part of it and didn't worry too much at that point.

I finally separated the flock into two when we got the infrastructure into place, but one of the roosters got really agressive with the hens. They were so scared they wouldn't come out to eat or drink (moveable coop without the necessary room to put in victuals). So, we harvested the rooster and replaced him with Lucky Fluffypants.  Then one day, one of my hens died in my arms (from the other flock). I thought she was egg-bound, but we didn't find anything to suggest that when we cut her open. She was FAT, though. She was a meat bird that I had decided to breed (as was the mean rooster). However, we also found (post-boiling for the cats) a tumor between her breast and her thigh.  

Exactly one week later, I had another hen acting like the first (purplish comb, sleeping in the nesting box, a general air of straining), so I called the vet and made an appointment for the afternoon. When we went to catch her to take her to the vet, she died in my arms, too. Ruptured vessel. I decided to go through with the autopsy, and we found her intestines completely covered in lesions and her cavity bursting with fluid. The vet had never seen the like, and the lab said the tissue was too old when they got it to be sure of a diagnosis. They suspected Marek's disease, however. I wasn't sure because my animals hadn't exhibited any of the more classic symptoms.

Then we had another hen (one of those meat birds) start eating our eggs, despite having calcium available. Considering her a ticking time bomb, we harvested her, too, and despite being really fat like the other and having a yellowish liver, she seemed OK.  Having three less hens meant the others were being sorely used by the roosters, so we bought in three cou-nu hens who were ready to lay  (naked necks; yes, they are very ugly).

However, Winona kept getting weaker and weaker, so I took her to the vet. He suggested a fecal analysis to look for parasites. Found out we had a very serious infestation of roundworms, invisible to the naked eye. I started treating the flocks, moved them to new pens, scoured out the old coops (with help from a friend), but two days before the treatment ended, Winona died. This time, I did notice her irises had begun to change color, and she was paralyzed when I found her early in the morning.  I thought she was dead and prepared to bury her, not wanting to go through the labs, etc. again since I was sure of myself, but then I moved her leg and saw that she was still alive.

I was all alone and knew that I could sit with her until she died or put her out of her misery myself. I opted to kill her humanely, but by time I had sharpened the knife, she had died.

So now we have a disease on our farm that is basically impossible to get rid of. It can be vaccinated against, with no guarantee that our birds will not get one of the three strains of it--and the strains are mutating in response to the vaccinations, of course. We can stop raising chickens. Or we can try to breed resistant stock. I just had a hen hatch five chicks. The problem? The dad is the son of the one who died from a confirmed Marek's disease victim.  Logic and protocol say not to breed animals that have shown a susceptibility to the disease. And Lucky's dad was Lila, the one who was so sickly last year. Lila survived, however, when no one thought he would. And this time around, with Lucky, we had the best hatch rate ever. We would have had 7 out of 9 if not for my own carelessness, which really hurts.

The conundrum, the conundrum.   

And to complete my heartbreak, I effectively killed 15 ducklings in the egg by moving the mother duck off her nest to relocate her and her clutch to the new pen we built for our ducks. It was stupid and ill-planned on my part. I didn't want to leave her confined as she was in the dark, with no access to fresh air, greenery, etc., but I should have tried moving her under different conditions. "Live and learn," is all well and good, but when it becomes, "Kill and learn," it is devastating. As our neighbor says, When you work with life, you work with death. But the pointlessness of this loss guts me. I won't allow the duck to sit another clutch this year because we don't want to feed birds through the winter or have to harvest them then, either. :( So there goes a lot of the meat production we were counting on.

Anyhow, this is a large part of why I have been absent of late. That and the garden, of course.

What have you been up to?