The Wayfaring Wordhack

What follows will be long and quite possibly uninteresting for anyone not into growing food, but I wish to get a copy of my thoughts and observations of this growing season (as well as a few comparisons to others) in one place where I can refer back to it.  I mentioned before that I have not really allowed myself the joy of all the work we have accomplished so far because I am always looking into the future of "when it will be more like it 'should' be," and that can get pretty depressing.

(Funny side note, the above lines were written weeks ago. Alas. That is the way things go)

To battle the depression, I thought I would post some before and now pictures to truly get a grasp on just how much has changed. However, now the garden has changed even more and I need new photos. :P

(Extra Funny Side Note:  The above lines were written almost two months ago)

Let's skip the long and blather and just post some photos because I have another post I want to make.

Garden when we moved in (view from the house):

( Photos under the cut )


Busy bees we've been.  I guess i fibbed because that was pretty long....

Forgive the hodgepodge nature of this entry, but there has been so much going on this week

- It seems wrong to include this first category in an entry with more trivial stuff, but it has shaped my week and affected me more than the rest, so:

This week, we have been notified of three deaths : the doula who helped bring Farmer Boy and Ti'Loup into the world lost her husband. He died in the night in Cairo, we know not of what. A friend's son, who had been paralyzed and in a coma last year after falling from a roof, made a miraculous recovery only to die a few days ago of a brain aneurysm. Another friend's 20-year-old daughter was in a fatal car wreck on Thursday.  So much grief. So many questions about how well are we loving those around us when we have no idea when our lives on this earth will come to an end. So much anger at myself every time I lose my temper with my own lively, hyper-alive kids.

- Our broody duck is down from 4 duck eggs and 3 goose eggs to one duck egg and 2 goose eggs. I thought the drake was stealing them from her because I saw him in the nest with her. We were prepared to harvest him because we can't have an animal that eats the eggs or young and it woluld be too hard to house him alone and only let him with the others for breeding purposes. So, we separated them and then discovered it was the mother duck eating the eggs. :( She is still on the three, and I don't know whether to take them from her and put them in the incubator (which I detest)or just leave them and see what happens. Sprout is devasted because it is her duck, and of course, what is good for the gander...or drake, in this case, is good for the duck. 

The reason I haven't just moved them to the incubator---besides hating the thing--is that it is still occupied by one egg, which leads me to my next topic:

--Mr. Crude (as I call the man from whom J bought the duck eggs because of his penchant for sexual innuendo, which i often overhear) is either dishonest or not at all careful of his duck breeding. J asked him for Khaki Campbell eggs, and instead of saying he didn't know what that was or saying that he has a mixed flock, he sold J a dozen eggs, only 4 of which were viable.  ( Granted, he was not selling them as hatching eggs, but J was very clear that that is what he meant to do with them.)  Two ducklings hatched on the 11th, one hatched today, and the other should hatch tomorrow (it didn't make it out of the shell) from the look of things, and so far, of the three, none of them appear to be KC ducks.  Two could be Rouen or Rouen crosses, and one could either be a Cayuga or a Swedish cross...or something else entirely. Looks like if I want Khaki Campbells, we are going to have to drive an hour and a half one way and pay 2euros per egg for them.

- Just when I told rimturse  that our hens were doing great on the hatching front, our latest clutch only produced 4 chicks out of 9 eggs. Two chicks were crushed under the mom, two mysteriously disappeared (no sign of them or their shells), and one egg never developped. Then  the mom pretty much rejected them for the first day. The kids babysat the chicks in the warm greenhouse until we could convice the hen to mother  them. All is well now. 

- We finally got some rain, brought in on those lovely dark clouds looming over our daisy-studded field,

 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*

 Not my sons, mind you. My poultry dads' sons.

As you might (or probably don't) remember, we had some trouble with our first rooster, Rico. His aggressive nature earned him a one-way ticket to the soup pot, but not before he sired a son, our first chick to hatch here on our little farm. "Miracle" we named him because the brood hen abandoned the nest just before he hatched, and I found his cold, stiff body in a corner of the box. Lots of prayers and warm breath over his little body in my cupped hands were rewarded by a tiny cheep, so I quickly restored him to his suddenly attentive mother. Against all odds, Miracle made it and is now our alpha rooster.