Can you believe it's June already?! Man! They weren't kidding when they said time flies when you have kids! My Oldest will be 7 on Friday and since we have decided 2009 to be the year of no birthday parties, it will just be her grandparents coming up on Saturday for her birthday. She has already made her requests for specific meals and a cake for her special day and I need to get busy and make a doll for her like I did her other sisters. Shhh!
My computer still isn't back to normal yet-- I'll be calling the local computer fix-it place and see what they can do. We use this computer for so much that we cannot put it off any longer. I use the photo program I downloaded for ebay and etsy sales, this here blog, and for personal family pictures and it's so frustrating not to be able to upload more pictures. Plus this setting that the computer went back to is so plain and all our personal preferences and favorites are gone and we have to go by memory on where certain things on the internet are located. A real pain in the you-know-what!
A lot has happened since I last posted. Something got into our chickens Thursday night/Friday morning and left one Rhode Island chicken dead and 2 Speckled Sussex chickens were carried away, presumably to be eaten. I followed a trail of bloody feathers into the woods and then lost the trail. They were not in the coop, it was not done yet and they had been settling in for the night in the corner of our sunroom and dining room. I put up a fence and they spent a week there until the incident happened. Friday, the Husband and I spent the day finishing the chicken coop and it was a good thing that my Mom happened to be visiting us because she watched the kids and Baby for us.
We finished the coop! No pictures, unfortunately, but I'll post them when my computer is normal. I still have to build nest boxes, but the roof, walls and door is done. I'm sore from all the hammering and the physical work I did to lift and carry all the wood I needed, but I'm so proud of our little coop! It's nice and solid and we paid less than $50 in materials we needed that we couldn't scavenge. I need to tweak it a little bit, add windows for light and block a few spaces that the chickens got stuck in, but for the most part, it's done. They have been in there since Friday night and every morning when I go to let them out, I hold my breath and count the remaining chickens-- still 11 left, whew!
We also tried our strawberry wine! Yum yum! It's been a year since we made it and my instructions for the wine said to let it ferment for a year. I think I'll wait 6 months next time, try it and then check every month after that because we had a 50/50 success rate-- wine and vinegar. The wine is delicious!! I can definitely taste the alcohol. It's a sweet wine, light and tasty, I'll make it again. The vinegar is also good, but my! that's a lot of vinegar we're stuck with! Looks like nearly 2 gallons of vinegar so far. Looks like there's going to be a lot of strawberry vinaigrette on my salads this summer.
3 comments:
Ahhh, the life of a farmer! And living in the toolies! I grew up on a dairy farm in Washington State and every day was a crisis! The vet always came to the barn directly and I can recall so many issues! Chickens are easy prey to almost all wild animals. Yum, yum! A wooden chicken house with a "side yard" of heavy wire of somekind is necessary. Our coops were always wood. The nesting boxes were inside the wooden coop. I recall that our "chicken sideyard" had a huge Gravenstein apple tree growing in the middle of it. The fertilizer from the chickens made these apples taste better than candy!
Aww... about a few unlucky chickens. Hope your kids did not take it hard. I know it is part of life, the chickens having mortal enemies (count us human beings, also, since we like eating them also :o/ .)
50/50 chance for either strawberry wine OR strawberry vinaigrette... either sounds good! :o)
I'm so sorry about your chickens. We lost a good portion of our flock a few years ago to a raccoon. It was pretty devastating, but it did motivate us to fix the coop, which, ultimately, is a good thing.
Glad to hear your wine turned out good. We tried strawberry wine, but it was a failed project. I think we'll stick with cider and beer, and use the strawberries for jam :).
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