Happy Harvest Blog
Nosey is auditioning for role of house chicken.
Nosey the Nosy thinks that I have a chicken-shaped void in my life, and she’s the chicken to fill it. I see that you don’t have a house chicken at the moment. I’d like to leave my resumé. It’s true, it’s been a long time since Cheeks moved out. Nosey has an unusual degree of interest in the house. With the door always open and the screen on, she spends a lot of time standing on the threshold looking in. And riffling the screen with her beak.
Tomato canning
A lovely pile of a wide range of tomato varieties. I have late blight now in the greenhouse (what the? It's not damp), so the harvest may turn out to be smaller this year than usual, but any reduction isn't showing yet. Three bread bowls of tomatoes today is the second haul harvested, and now the cauldrons boil and bubble.
Saturday shirking
It’s sunny, it’s Saturday. The house is a mess, the woods are a mess, I have so much to do but will probably do less. 2/3 through that I thought I should make it rhyme. In celebration of shirking, here’s a chicken in the act of discovering me lying on my back in the weeds.
Profile: Nosey
All chickens have their own unique chickenalities, but some chickens distinguish themselves more than others. Nosey has been her own bird from a young chicken, and unlike everyone else, it is rather tame. She got her name from always being excessively interested in my business, and always really into being near me. She’d be the first at the door, have her beak up in whatever I was doing, sit on my shoulder, and generally tag along or be underfoot.
chicken drill bit
The Silkies have picked a spot to dig a hole, and are digging the hole with their bodies, removing the dirt in their feathers and shaking it out elsewhere. Slow and steady. They take turns, and now they have the hole twice as deep as this so that they are fully below ground level. Odd little birds. Sidewinder unwinding in the pool. I haven’t bought them a bag of the pro-mix outside of the greenhouse before because, in the greenhouse, they are doing the work of distributing it for me to amend the soil I will grow in, but hey.
Cheeps at the door
I hear them coming around, the cheeps. They never stop chatting at this age. I’m glad that the moms are starting to gravitate to the house and beehives – the safe zones instead of the adventure safaris. This is where you’ll spend your time when you grow up, kids. Mooching. The two of them are too adorable to me. Inseparable, yin and yang chickens, not very alike other than that they (were) both loners.
Done with the dentist
I think my summer of dental hell is finally over. Root canal part 2 yesterday (hallelujah, the dental staff was at work with the power on Monday!), and the sudden end of “mild” dental “discomfort” in my mouth was like the lights coming on, or discovering you’ve been wearing sunglasses without noticing – energy re-surged into my life! I think the mouth stuff has been contributing to why I’ve been sick so much, and headaches, lately the past weeks. It just saps you, enduring it.
Pincushion chickens
Hurricane’s over. The three are back to trying to sleep in the tree. SO stubborn. It’s cooling off at nights, so it’s a good time for the hens to grow their feathers back. It’s such a relief when they start to refeather, because they go naked for what seems like terribly long, and it looks so uncomfortable I worry, and then one day, they come out in little spikes all over that unroll into feathers.
All over
Dorian has passed. The chickens are all fine, the pig house did not flip over, one beehive had an outer lid blown off, no cars or structures were damaged. Casualties: clothesline, woodshed roof has another rip, the big hazelnut tree outside my window is tipped over:( It may live, but it’s at 45° with the roots torn and heaved up. I don’t know how well nut trees adapt.
Dorian
What’s left of Dorian is about to hit us here. I don’t think the forecast is very catastrophic at all, but everything is canceled and dire warnings abound. Quite a lot of rain for one day, but we’ve had it before. I definitely expect that power will be knocked out everywhere; that happens with any stiff breeze. Perhaps the internet will go.
An unexpected guest for dinner
You again!? If rabbits are joining us, I’m leaving. I guess she got over it and decided to share. I’ve seen this rabbit around more recently than the pictures were taken, and she seemed hugely pregnant, with her belly dragging on the ground. So no wonder she was too hungry to wait for the chickens to go to bed to glean.
A conjoined cucumber
I got a fused cuke. That’s never happened before. Of course, I didn’t think to take a picture before giving it to the hens. Inside, two seed cavities. It’s like a double yolk egg, only a cucumber.
A Bee of unusual size.
I saw this bumblebee on the goldenrod so large I had to get my camera. It was as big as the first joint of my thumb. For perspective, the adjacent honeybee. Oh, this totally doesn’t show how large this bee is. She spent the night in this spot too, on the goldenrod.
I've always wondered where all the helium balloons go
What goes up must come down. Turns out they do come down in the woods. I found this shredded remnant of a balloon hanging in a tree, randomly. Still tied with the gift ribbon. Actually, I’ve been told (by a marine biologist who’s seen them) that they much more often come down in the ocean. They rise, catch an air current, and are carried out over the ocean before the helium degrades and they come down.
Velvet and Ghost
The co-mamas.These are the first hens to successfully hatch babies in the large coop. Right through the heatwave, they sat on eggs, and I brought them water. They would even switch eggs, so it makes sense that they're one family now. They only spent two days in the chickeries, maybe three, before release and integration. Nosey visitor, They still had unhatched eggs, one each (they did not hatch late, they gave up on them), so the hatched chicks had a nice slow transition).
Well, I left the bag of dirt on the porch.
What? Nothing to see here. I’m brown. I almost didn’t see her at first; she was holding still. Set down a basket for two seconds and it draws a crowd…and a fancy caterpillar.
We have different cultural ideas about how we should look after a bath.
We had rain! (Blessed rain!) Dust baths are closed, mud baths now available. I was pretty surprised to find this little enthusiast digging in. Really digging in. Naturally, onlookers.Because when you’ve planned to go to the spa, you go to the spa.What? Some people pay good money for this. The Colonel included for dirtiness comparison. Yes, the Colonel is still the big boss, my v first rooster from my v first collection of chickens.
These two are dating
These two guineas are dating. Or bonded for life; I can't tell what stage they are at. Probably post-commitment ceremony somewhere on the continuum, maybe still honeymoon. It's been nearly two months. Here they are running away from the paparazzi and seen here jumping out of the bath after privacy invaded: You wouldn't know that these are the tamest guineas I've ever had and let me get quite close. It's been hard to get a picture of them together, although they are ALWAYS together.
Instagram.
I may not make a blog post every day, but at least I Insta.
Bite size.
