He knows she’s a moo cow and he’s not afraid of her.  He runs right up to her and moo’s with her.

He doesn’t like the chickens much.  He tricked them by walking around the yard with an empty feed scoop.

They kept begging.  He kept shouting “NO” and pointing his finger at them.

He’s a small farm boy….but he loves helping his big brothers out!

Our 6 year old came in the house a few days ago with an important farm announcement concerning our barn cat. 

Missy Mouser is definitely pregnant!  She has a big round belly and is losing feathers around her teats. 

I guess that might be a sure sign to this little  farm boy who is confusing the signs of a broody hen, a milk cow and a pregnant cat.  One of the ways the boys can tell if a hen is about to go broody, or about to sit on a clutch of eggs, is when she starts to pull the feathers out of her breast to ready herself to warm the eggs.  Cats don’t pull feathers obviously but since this cat has been nursing kittens, it looks as though she has lost some of her “feather’s” on her belly.  Hopefully, her fat belly is due to the fact that she ate the rat the boys caught in the milk barn with their small rodent trap and then accidentally let go by my back door step.  I haven’t calmed down over the rat story to be able to relay that rationally yet. 

The frogs and toads are out in full force.  Night time is a symphony of sound.  I love leaving the windows open and listening to the night sounds…that is until I am reminded we live on a farm with renegade roosters who know where my bedroom window is. 

Our science lessons are all around us…outside. 

My kids love picking up all the frogs, toads, lizards and salamanders.  Even as a kid…I didn’t like touching them.  My girls fight over who gets to hold the frog next. Frogs are their babies and they get pretty serious about taking care of them by building lavish 5 gallon bucket homes for them with lots of grass and “pretty flowers” for them.   

Lately, there have been plenty of frogs to go around.  In fact, our ponds are being over taken with thousands of baby tadpoles or as the 3 year old says…the “tad-uh-polts” (say it just like you would catapult.  She has brothers.)  One day not too long ago we spent a morning out at the pond…watching hundreds of frogs mate.  The kids thought it was a great.  Frogs give me the creeps…especially hundreds of them…mating…and carrying on like they do. 

The boys brought me a present one night…a 5 gallon bucket hopping mad with frogs they had captured on the way back from the milking barn.  They knew how much I would enjoy a 5 gallon bucket of frogs…that’s what made it so funny for them. 

We have bull frogs, tree frogs and toads…all kinds…all over.  I was pleased, however, to find out that the tad-uh-polts make great duck food.  And when they finally leave the pond, the chickens are in for a real treat. 

Lately, the frogs have provided a great opportunity to observe, discuss and learn many important science lessons for all of us.  The best thing about frogs is that they eat a great many bugs.  That makes me happy! 

Even with all the laundry and the messes…….all the endless work, there are amazing perks to this job!  Whether it is those little smiles, giggles, hugs and kisses…or those cute pictures they draw for me and fresh yard weed flowers they pick… motherhood is beautiful and incredibly rewarding and fulfilling every day, not just on Mother’s Day. 

My 6 year old little boy walked up to me on Monday while I was cooking with a surprise for me hidden behind his back.  With a cute smile on his face, he said, “Mommy, since I forgot to give you a mother’s day present yesterday,  so I have a surprise for you.” 

Out from behind his back he excitedly handed me an old dog food bag full of …something….  I cautiously opened the dirty bag and at first glance it looked like something dead…with lots of feathers…so I didn’t look too close.  Remember, not too long ago I said I was an experienced mother of boys?  With a forced smile and a sweet voice, I said, “Ohh nice…what is it?”

With a giddy smile he said, “It’s rooster feathers…just what you wanted.  There’s only a little bit of blood on them, but not too much.  It’s ok.” 

I did the over exaggerated “Ohhh, son..real rooster feathers…..you’re are such a thoughtful boy…. thank you, son!” and gave him a big hug and told him I loved him very much.  He stepped back all proud of himself with a big smile. He was so happy. 

He then proceeded to tell me about killing the bad rooster with his boot because it didn’t die all the way before he could pluck the feathers.  I stopped him short of the great story I am sure any boy would want to hear to find out if this event was “daddy approved”.   It was. 

He said he was sure I would love the feathers so he worked hard to pluck all the pretty ones and packaged them up for me. 

It’s memories like these that make the day in and day out work worth every bit of sacrifice.  Not every mom receives such gifts from her boy.  I could have never guessed how a dirty dog food bag full of fresh rooster feathers would have made my heart leap and my face light up…but it did. 

Today, his older brothers helped him clean the feathers and arrange them to dry.  I am thinking up something crafty to do with my feathers and still smiling at his creative thoughtfulness.  Maybe I’ll use some of those Mother’s Day rooster feathers and make my boy a nice Indian hat for his birthday!

We didn’t have a great experience hatching out chicks last month.  We lost the two chicks that did finally hatch out and haven’t tried hatching out more chicks yet.  However, our boys informed us that two of our hens went “broody”.  The boys know how to spot this sort of thing…  It is when a hen starts to sit continually on her nest of eggs.  She becomes more irritable, makes different chicken sounds, fluffs her feathers out when sitting on her nest.  She pulls her own feathers from her breast to keep her eggs warmer. 

When the boys noticed some “broody” signs one of their hens was displaying while she was sitting on some golf balls, they separated out this hen from the rest of the flock and put her in a nesting box in a chicken tractor all by herself with some hay and a clutch of real eggs.  They moved her at night so that she wouldn’t run back to her nest of golf balls. 

Broody hens are amazing.  They sit on that nest all day long, only leaving once a day for about 15 minutes to get a drink of water and eat.  All the other 23 hours and 45 minutes of the day…she is sitting…keeping her eggs warm and gently turning them.  21 days later…she hatches out chicks.  She continues her broodiness by protecting them and training them how to eat and drink.  It is truly amazing how God designed the hen! 

On day 21, we were all anxiously awaiting to find out if chicks would hatch or not.  Sure enough, all that day, we kept seeing cute little chicks peeking out from under our beloved Fluffy Feet - the faithful mother hen of our flock. 

She hatched out 11 healthy, thriving chicks!  We have one more broody hen sitting on a clutch of 14 eggs which should hatch out in the next day or so. 

This was an unusual egg.  It didn’t have a shell.  No, we didn’t eat it. 

Wow, that was a huge learning experience.  Hatching out our own chicks didn’t work out like we had planned. 

To sum up the results:   We finally had one chick…then another…then several more that started to hatch but didn’t make it.  A couple of days after they hatched, the light bulb went out that kept the two chicks warm.  We found them sprawled out barely chirping.  Replaced the warm bulb and gave them water.  They quickly perked up.  Chick one died at 3 days old.  Chick two died a couple of days later.  We’re not sure what we learned from that except that we have a hunch that it had something to do with the fact the hatch time was very long due to the humidity being off? 

Ohh well, try again!

Humidity is very important when you are incubating and hatching out chicks.  We knew we were having some problems with the humidity because our incubator was collecting condensation on the glass.  With a few adjustments, we still didn’t have it right.  Which is beyond me because, they seem to do a lot better out in the wide open outdoors where the humidity widely varies day to day?

Remember when I said 100 different things have to go right before you end up with live chicks.  It’s true. 

We now have two chicks!  And about 40 something dead ones…we think???  We will evaluate in the morning but after two very long  hatchings…we finally have two very loud chicks.  One is doing great.  The other one is a few hours old, so it doesn’t look so great yet.  Hopefully it will perk up. 

Here’s a picture of the second chick hatching out.  It was very neat to watch!

Our 8 year old bought a trap with his birthday money.  Since then he has been learning the ropes of how to trap like his big brothers.  They trap possum usually…possum that like to come closer to the house and find the chickens and their eggs.  So keeping the critters away is an important job. 

The boys requested a case of vienna sausage and some peanut butter to use for their traps.  They use various other trapping incentives that I don’t care to mention or think about. 

Up until recently, our little trapper-in-training would lament often how he keeps catching the cat in his trap (disclaimer:  it’s a box trap, no cats have actually ever been harmed in the young trappers training opps).

However, this morning was different.  The young trapper returned rather exuberant from checking his trap with the glorious news that he had indeed trapped a possum.  “A beauty” according to him!

With the help of his brothers, they carried the trap down the hill to my back door.  After breakfast, I finally went to take a look at this “beauty”.  I’ll take their word for it..it looked just like all the other possums to me.  Everyone was very excited and I was very proud of my boy. Very proud. 

My little trapper is looking out the back door with me talking a mile a minute about his “beauty”.  The other kids are finishing up the kitchen chores.  Work is humming along. 

As I am looking out the back door at his possum in the trap and listening to my boy ramble on about all the great qualities of this possum.  I notice something else in the trap…something with mangled feathers…yellowish, buff color feathers.  What in the world?  The possum is eating something with feathers in the trap sitting outside my back door. 

I exclaim, “GUYS!  IS THAT A DEAD CHICKEN IN THE TRAP!” 

I think I zoned out then.  My words jumbled into some big long outburst on how we were all going to catch some disease and die from all the bacteria breeding just inches from the kitchen door.   Peanut butter is one thing… decaying, rotting, decapitated dead animals and a possum sitting on my door step is quite another!

Just then, I’m smacked back into reality.   

I hear my 11 year old son ask, “Mom, what’s a totalitarian?”

Late last night our first chick finally hatched out of its egg.  Just in case anyone is wondering…chicks don’t immediately hatch out of their eggs.  It takes forever.  
 

Here’s the shell.  It has been quite fascinating for the children to see the process of taking an egg, incubating it, turning it, keeping it warm and then to watch the first cracks appear, hear the chick chirping inside the egg and then finally see the new chick appear.

The first chick is still wet and has not yet dried off.  It looks dead.  Evidently, they take a long rest after hatching before they begin to learn how to walk. 

The boys set up a chicken brooder for the chick once it is dried off. 

Here’s the chick at about 12 hours old.  It is dried off, chirping loudly and stumbling around the chicken brooder. 

There are several more eggs cracking and more chicks peeping.  The kids are watching and cheering another chick on in his final break free of his egg shell. 

Very soon we hope to have some chicks hatch out of the eggs we have been incubating.  It has been a fun family project either way. 

The other night the boys candled some of the eggs and were able to see some that had stopped developing, some that continued to develop and some that were infertile. 

Everyone likes turning all the lights out and taking a peek into the eggs.  See that dark spot.  We think this egg stopped developing.  We found several of them that looked exactly the same way.  Possibly from not rotating them enough throughout the day.  The others were completely filled up with dark (the chick) except for a tiny light spot where the egg sack would be. 

We are awaiting anxiously to see what happens

We thought it would be a good experiment to see if we could reproduce our own chicks without having to buy chicks from the hatchery.  All this self-sufficient, self-sustaining talk is more complicated than the books tell you it is. 

Our son has a flock of white leghorn chickens.  They are not disappointing him with their amazing egg laying capabilities.  They are amazing egg producers even in the winter!  However, they are bad mothers and do not hatch out their own chicks.  To keep his business going, he is thinking about the future and preparing his next batch of chicks. 

That is why I currently have a small incubator sitting on my kitchen counter, incubating 50 eggs he collected from his hens. 

First, to hatch out your own eggs.  You will need to have a rooster around.  Out of the 100+ hens he ordered last spring, 2 of them ended up not being hens…so he has 2 white leghorn roosters.  Perfect! 

He gathered 50 eggs for the first try.  They then marked an X on one side of the egg and an O on the other side.  The eggs need to be turned 2 or 3 times a day.  After they tweaked the incubator temperature , they put the eggs in and started counting down the days.  In another week or so, he hopes to have some baby chicks…that is if about 100 different variations were just right.  We’ll see. 

It is a very interesting science.  Yesterday, we candled (turn all the lights off and shined a flashlight under the egg to take a look inside) some of the eggs.  We were all excited to see baby peeps moving around inside.  How exciting is that!

Last year when a restaurant told us they only wanted white eggs we reluctantly started researching white egg layers.  It was not that we have anything against white egg layers, but we had just purchased around 40 brown egg layers and the brown eggs just seem more “back to the farm”.

None the less, we purchased 100 White Leghorns raised them, fed them….fed them some more and now they are producing eggs.  In fact they are producing a lot of nice size white eggs for us.  So many that we just surpassed 1,000 eggs these little guys have provided so far this year!

If you click on the image you can see our home school business math class as our 13 year old maintains a SharePoint list to keep up with his eggs production, feed costs, and customer purchases. 

You find some interesting facts out when you track your production and your sales.  For instance he found that although he had no eggs left at the end of January, he had a deficit of 34 dozen eggs between what he collected and what he sold.  Does any want to guess how many eggs a family of 10 eats in a month?  Apparently about 34 dozen! 

What this means in practical terms is that in January our 13 year old was able to produce and sell enough eggs, to pay for his feed cost, put a little bit of cash in his pockets, and provide about $70 worth of eggs for our family economy.  At the very practical level, this child blessed his family this month.  We are loving the lessons the farm provides.

We are just too cold to blog.  No, really, just really busy.  We have had a grand time getting together a first ever Vaughnshire Egg Sale Day:  happening today at the adorable bakery on our little town square.  Our egg production has continued to climb despite the dog killing 10 of our good layers.  We collected over 70 eggs just yesterday. 

That means we have our back refrigerator full of eggs.  We ended up having to order some egg cartons.  Cleaning and putting away eggs has added a lot to the regular boy work every day.  But it has been so rewarding for them to see the hard work starting to pay off.  It is rewarding for me to see their efforts turn into baskets of country fresh farm eggs—just like they hoped it would!  

We are still anxiously awaiting  another lamb to be born!  It snowed yesterday and I thought for sure she would have her lamb (lambs) during the snow?  Not so. 

She is still waddling out there..if sheep can waddle, she does. 

Beth already spilt the beans as they say.  But, today was another exciting day on the farm with many lessons in the ups and downs of life.

It started off very “low” in the early hours of the morning.  You know those early hours, the ones before most computer geeks go to bed.  Yep, it was in those early hours that I found myself wondering around the carnage of dead chicken bodies and a feather covered field.  With a chill in my bones and frost on my breath, I was hunting or uhm…searching - no I think hunting is the correct word here, for Dixie, the dog we now know has an insatiable appetite for chicken. 

I had caught her with “a” chicken a few moments earlier, and scolded her from the front porch while I was in my sock feet.  She immediately let the chicken go, tuck her tail, hung her head down low to the ground and headed for the back barn where she normally resides.

I slipped my boots and coat on to quickly run out and tie her up.  She was no where to be found and I soon found out why.

To toll the next morning as the boys surveyed the damages and learned yet another real life experience thanks to the farm, was eleven birds dead and a few suspected missing with big unexplained piles of feathers at a couple locations.

But the day progressed from there and as the farm hands assessed the damage they noticed the brown ewe, Georgia, had not come down with the rest of the small flock.  They found her with her new 10 pound baby lamb, complete with umbilical cord.  She was nursing and happy and she was a baby ewe!  This makes our ram, Winchester, two for two as far as gender determination goes.  He also apparently produces large babies.

We transported momma and baby down to the lambing pen where we could ensure they were OK.  The whole family enjoyed them throughout the day as we fed and generally pampered both of them.  We are now waiting for the white ewe, Louisiana, to have hers.  The boys have gone out as I write this for the pre-bedtime check on her.

There were other exciting adventures that filled the rest of the day.  Such as discovering what happened to the two missing kitties and at the same time what caused the strange odor coming from the air conditioning vents in the floor. 

There was also recapturing all the chickens at roosting time and getting an official head count.  There are now 22 brown egg layers and around 68 White Leghorns.  I’m awaiting the final eggs count for the day, but it looks like we are still on an up trend even with the dramatic fowl and mammal conflict during the night. 

Finally, there was the much anticipated and awaited “dispatching” of the possum the boys trapped.  All in all, it was just another day on the farm.  What a blessed life God allows us to live!

We are nice farmers.  We gave the dog a second chance and she let us down.   

She has killed chickens in the past.  In our presence, she pretended to be chicken broke.  Lately, she seemed to have learned a lesson.  She even started letting them eat her food!

However, last night we discovered when you hear chickens squawking and flapping around at midnight, that isn’t good.  We also discovered that if you are running an egg business and have over 100 birds, you should never give a chicken killing dog a second chance.  Save yourself a lot of trouble and only have farm friendly dogs around.

Our boys were crushed to hear the news the next morning.  Dad sent them outside to gather the birds and survey the scene.  The carnage left us with 10 dead laying hens and a field of feathers.   It could have been worse but it seems that this is another one of those lessons in “What Not To Do Next Time”!

Over breakfast, I heard about the victims.  I heard the names and how they were related to one another…. “Junior’s sister, Fluffy Feet’s chick from the second group she hatched out, Speckled Neck’s sister, and a beloved Buff called Fluffy Feathers ..” 

The children were somber. 

The dog is soon to be out of here.

I am amazed they know so much chicken genealogy!

The amount of eggs keeps climbing….  we’re up to 54 eggs a day.  And we are all very excited about that!  For the first time, the boys are getting more white eggs from the leghorns than brown eggs from the other hens. 

They have some escapee hens, so currently the boys are working on some ways to halt the chicken run-aways.  They have noticed that certain chickens have more of an escape artist knack than others— currently the white leghorns are the biggest run-aways.  The Buffs are next.  They told me they like to call the Buffs..the “bluffs” because they pretend to be cute and nice and then run away behind your back. 

For the last several days, the boys have had record breaking egg production days…each day beating the record on the previous day.  Today, the boys collected 44 eggs!  We expect this number to climb to around 100 eggs per day come spring. 

We have lots of eggs for sale! 

A very excited young man indeed–his white leghorn chickens are now laying eggs!  He has kept his egg production up with the other hens this winter and has been anxiously awaiting for his white leghorn hens to start laying.  He put a light on a timer in both chicken houses to give them 14 hours of light per day. 

The guys have been putting together a larger chicken tractor to house our white leghorn chickens.  In order to keep them separated from the other farm chickens and give them the needed free range grass they need, he had to build a larger house he could move every couple of days.  They used left over green house parts to put together the chicken tractor. 

These birds also have some sort of magnetization pull to the road.  So if you want to get leghorns, make sure you have them semi-contained or they will wonder off.   Or you might have a freaked out woman come to your door telling you she just ran over one of your chickens and when you assure her it’s ok…she promptly will inform you everything is not ok and you had better get it off the road immediately…. obviously someone not from around these parts…

Here he is releasing birds into their new home.  Notice the nice orange plastic construction fence??  He didn’t consult the neighborhood covenant (i.e. mom) to see what building materials are allowed.  Our yard art is loud and unconventional. 

The day after they caught the birds and had them all nice and cozy in their new home, one of the goats ran through the plastic, ate the chicken feed and let all the birds out.   

Back to the drawing board for the boys.