Three Plus Two

K-2 and Early Learning: November 1-7

This week was a "hither and thither" sort of week... heavy on the "thithering".  Andy took off on All Saints Day so we could run moving-related errands; Katydid had her once a month choir practice for her once a month choir (which, unfortunately, she will not be able to attend because so many of us are sick); we spent Thursday visiting gyms to find a good preschool gymnastics program; and the little boys, pumped up on Halloween candy and irritated by a virus most of the week, did their share of "thithering", too.  In other words -- it was a light week academically.  

While we were driving around we listened to Hotel for Dogs, by Lois Duncan.  We haven't seen the movie, but the book is good.  I did my fair share of indentifying with Andi Walker, the 10 year old main character. 

Because I apparently have SO MUCH to talk about for a "light week" (ahem), I'm going to break my usual weekly review post into two.  This one will focus on Farmerboy and the twins, who are roughly 2nd grade and kindergartenish, respectively.

Art and Nature Study:

I forgot to mention last week that we started a family nature journal.  It's not an original idea, but I can't remember where I first heard about it.  Anyway, I thought it would be a good way to encourage the little boys in some nature drawing and possibly to encourage my 14 year old as well.  (Katydid has her own nature journal in which she draws frequently.)  Our first project was leaf rubbings:

(Sorry about the glare from the page protector.) 

We're just using a 3-ring binder.  Katydid and Farmerboy made a cover for it and then led all the little boys on a nature walk around the yard.  They drew what they found and filed the pictures in the binder. 

This week's "excursion" (hands-on science in the yard, basically) was a dig initiated by Farmerboy, who wanted to see if any rocks could be found at all.  When it was so dry, the dirt was as hard as rock, but with our rain this week, it softened enough to take a shovel.  Unfortunately, no rocks were discovered, but a long, rotting board was, and also signs that a raccoon has taken up residence in the barn.  The raccoon will have to be evicted somehow; one of our jobs this winter is to convert one of the big stalls on the outside of the barn into a chicken coop.  Raccoons are bad for chickens.

By Sunday afternoon, the trench had become an entire river system, complete with tributaries, mountains, volcanoes, bluffs, forts, and civilizations.  Chipmunk and Pop had apparently been assigned the titles of "Erosion." 

 

Pip worked hard coloring some bird notebooking pages.  He has become very meticulous about his nature coloring pages, prefering to work from actual photos in order to get the colors right.  In order to color his blue hen chicken (the state bird of Delaware), we had to round up Storey's Illustrated Guide to Poultry Breeds, which has excellent color photos of all the breeds it references.  (And, really, if you are at all interested in raising poultry, you need this book.  Read it alongside the poultry catalogs, which is what we're doing right now.)

Math

Farmerboy and the twins have also been learning to tell time for a while now.  Farmerboy started out last spring with a few pages in Seton's Math 1 for Young Catholics, but math workbooks usually give telling time and the concepts behind it short shrift.  Time (like most mathematical concepts) is a concept best dealt with in a practical, hands-on manner anyway, but the kids do like practicing their time-telling skills on paper.  This is where typical math workbooks can become frustrating, because once you've done a page or two of clockfaces, you've exhausted the workbook's fund of time-telling practice.  So this is what we do:

Montessori clock cards :  These are not the same cards I have, I don't think, because I printed mine from somewhere I can't remember back when Katydid was learning to tell time.  But Lori's materials are top-notch, and I'm fairly certain this set is more comprehensive than the one I have been using.  The twins are working on telling time to the hour; Farmerboy is struggling a little bit remembering :15 and :45, but he's getting there.

Judy Clock:  Again, the teaching clock(s) I actually own are not the same.  I bought them (I bought two of them, one for Gareth and one for Katydid, back when there were only two kids to buy for) at an amazing teacher supply/educational bookstore we used to frequent when we lived in the St. Louis area.  (The best thing about the store was that it had a large play area in the back.)  Our clocks are not as fancy, but I actually like them better because they have the corresponding minutes printed beside the big numbers to help kids learn to tell time in 5 minute intervals.  The boys use these a lot, for fun.  They sit on the couch turning the hands and say, "It's 7 o'clock!  It's 3 o'clock in the morning! It's 12 o'clock now!"

Clock Stamps: The boys are not as keen on these as Katydid was, but they do use them occasionally.

Books:  Well, you knew there had to be books, right?  Two of our favorites: Telling Time with Big Mama Cat and Little Rabbits' First Time Book (Little Rabbit Books).   Mama Cat has been read with so much enthusiasm over the years that the hands on the clock were torn off, so it is in need of being replaced.  Little Rabbits is one of Chipmunk's favorite books at the moment.  A book I found at the library this week that shows some promise is All in One Hour.  It's illustrated with colorful cut-paper collages and digital clocks timing a chain of events set off by a cat chasing a mouse in the early morning.  (Another book of which I have fond memories is Gail Gibbons' Clocks and how they go, which I read over and over and over and OVER to Gareth when he was about 4 years old.)

Another opportunity for time-telling practice is letting me know when it's 4:00 and time for computer/Wii time. ;-)

Farmerboy is also working on adding and subtracting two digit numbers in Seton's Math 2 for Catholics.  This is work he enjoys doing, but he gets horribly frustrated if anyone talks while he's doing it.  Finding him quiet corners in which to work has been a challenge.  Also, this is another instance where kids really need some concrete, hands-on work, but our base 10 blocks were all packed up.  I finally managed to unpack them this weekend and am hoping to introduce Farmerboy to "trading up" (and hopefully the snake game, too).

And the twins spent a few hours on Sunday morning before Mass inventing their own games using Rummy Roots card decks and other board games.

Reading

Because Farmerboy was sick much of the week (including a three day headache), he didn't do too much reading, which is more difficult for him than math.  But he did read most of a picture book to me, Drat That Fat Cat!, which I found at the library.  This is a really excellent book for young readers -- SO much more intelligent and funny than most phonetic readers, and with a vocabulary mostly based on short vowel words.  I had to interject some help here and there (eg.  as with "This is an outrage!"), but Farmerboy could read a lot of it on his own.  I think that struggling readers often think they are doomed to read short, meaningless books about "nags", "cats", and "hams" for a long time, so I was happy to be able to provide Farmerboy with something different.  Glasses certainly improved his reading, but we are still going slowly.  This week has been the first I have heard him try to read words in the books HE likes to look at, or on the closed captioning on the TV.

Pip and Pop are anxious to try out their fledgeling reading skills, too, and are just at the "starting to blend" stage.  Pip in particular demands long lessons using Phonics Pathways, and this week I helped him along through his first book: a short K-4 phonetic text from Abeka I have had sitting in our container of readers (I keep sets of early phonics readers each to their own ziploc bag in a tall Rubbermaid container) for... a really long time.  Gareth and Katydid never picked them up, but they seem to be just right for the twins at this stage. 

 

 

 

 

 

There's a chicken in my van!

So last night I head out to the van to make a quick milk run, just up to the corner convenience store.  I figure it will only take 10 minutes and then I'll be able to make dinner.  I open the driver's side door, and...

There's a chicken sitting there, between the two front seats.

After a few startled moments of staring at each other, I lift the chicken out of the van and send it home to roost in the coop... which I firmly close and lock behind her.  Then I head back inside to retrieve Clorox wipes and a whisk broom, so I can clean up the mess she left.  It takes a little bit of thinking, but I finally manage to conclude that the chicken has been in the van for over 24 hours... surviving on old french fries, apparently.  Katydid must have accidentally trapped her inside when she went out to find a bag of batteries that had been left in the back.    

At this point, even though it is clear that the hen was using Pip's car seat as a roost, I am just grateful that I decided to go out and get milk.  Otherwise, we might not have discovered the chicken until Saturday morning before swimming lessons.  I don't think old french fries would have kept her alive that long in the absence of water.  What we might have found then... I shudder to think.

But I'm wondering... do things like this happen to other people, or is it just me???

A Visitor

I was wrapping a present on the dining room table today when I looked up and saw this in our birch tree:

A red-tailed hawk.  We lost a chicken yesterday in  broad daylight.  Now maybe we know what did it.

Country Diary: About dinner

Weather: Cloudy and damp after a hard rain overnight.  42 degrees at 8:30 and I don't think the temperature is going to budge too much over the course of the day.

At the feeder: We're late in getting our feeders set up this year, but Katydid managed to clean and fill most of them a few days ago.  We finally hung a collapsible feeder that holds 5 lbs of sunflower seeds.  The birds love it.  Right now I can count at least 6 goldfinches clinging just to the sides I can see.  A downy woodpecker flew away a few seconds ago, and yesterday we had a female cardinal.  The chickadees have also been out in force, 5 or 6 at a time, and our tufted titmice are back as well.  We need to get our suet feeders set up for the woodpeckers now.

In the garden:  In spite of it being November, we are still eating from the garden a little.  Well, brussels sprouts actually.

Here's what the plants look like "in the field".

And on the stalk.  When we went to the farm store last week, I was pleased to see that our brussel sprouts compared very favorably to theirs.  In fact, ours looked better.  (Ok, shameless bragging, but it was such a hard gardening year that I ought to be allowed to wallow in what few successes there were.)

(A brief feeder update... I need Katydid's binoculars... are those goldfinches or pine siskins out there???)

However, most of the garden is now planted to cover crop.  I think Andy used crimson clover, which stands up to our winters pretty well.  In the summer, the crop of choice is buckwheat, which he mows when it flowers so that it doesn't go to seed and become a weed.  We rotate our beds and try to leave some fallow every year.  After four years of cover cropping, adding compost, and 2 seasons of chickens, the soil has become a lot softer and easier to work.  (Not now, of course.  The ground freezes a little overnight, then thaws every morning so it's always a little muddy.)  The cover crop comes most in handy in the spring time when the snowmelt comes rushing down the hill.  Having a cover crop down instead of exposing bare dirt helps to retain our soil.

 
 An exciting photo of a mat of young crimson clover.  In the spring time, it blooms a vivid crimson.  It can be a little hard to get rid of, but it's not as invasive as, say, rye.

Or mint.  This is my own fault.  In desperation, because bugs and everything else were ruining my squash plants, I set out a chocolate mint plant beside them.  Now the plant itself is nowhere to be found, but I discovered this healthy specimen about 10 feet away in a different bed.

In the pantry:

• 2 pie pumpkins, which I will try to bake this weekend for pumpkin pie
• half an already baked pumpkin, which I will turn into pumpkin custard tonight (technically this is in the refrigerator)
• 6 Delicata squash
• All the Walla Walla onions have started to sprout.  They're not keepers.  The Cippolini onions are fine, though.
• A 5 gallon bucket of potatoes 3/4 full, mostly Yukon Gold, which we're eating through. 
• a half-bushel box of sweet potatoes from the farm store

 
  This is how I bake pumpkin and winter squash: with butter and maple syrup.  The butter and maple syrup form the stickiest candy ever on the bottom of the pan.  So it's important to spoon that up while it's still so hot that you burn your tongue on the spoon as you lean over the stove. Not that I would ever do such a thing, of course.

In the coop:

There are a lot fewer chickens in the coop these days.

But the ones in my freezer make really, really good chicken soup.

Using heritage breed chickens for meat was kind of a toss-up.  On the one hand, they were all small, the biggest not quite 5 lbs, and they took a long time just to get to that weight.  On the other hand, the taste is so much better even than the Cornish x Rock broilers raised on pasture.  The meat is firmer (probably because our chickens were free-range, not raised in chicken tractors, and breeds that were not bred to sit by the feeder and eat), the dark meat darker, and just in general, more flavorful.  But because it took so long to get them to butchering weight (such as it was), I'm not sure it was economical, and it was a lot of work.  

If you're keeping track at home, we used White Rocks and Delawares.  The Delawares were, in general, nicer than the White Rocks, which even Katydid looked forward to eating.

The turkeys turned out a little better in the weight department -- or at least the Naragansetts did.  They were butchered at the beginning of the week and are currently all jammed into the freezer ( all 6 of them.)  Everyone is a little sad that the turkeys are gone, I think, which was not the case with the meat chickens.  The Naragansett tom dressed out at 17 lbs, so he will be our Thanksgiving turkey.  Will we raise turkeys again?  I don't know.  The learning curve is pretty steep with turkeys.  They break your heart the way they die as poults, then they get interesting and curious personalities and the thought of eating them does not make you happy, and if you really want to pasture them, you have to clip their wings or they will fly 20 feet up in the trees at night or disappear with the wild turkeys.  But heritage turkeys are so much more beautiful and impressive than the typical Broad-Breasted White.  So -- I don't know.  I think we are going to take an animal breather next summer and just worry about the 23 laying hens we've got right now.

None of which are really laying at this point, however.  The old hens are moulting and should probably be turned into stewing hens, but they have all been named.  (Don't name your chickens.)  The new hens are not laying yet, or are laying in some incredibly out of the way spot I haven't discovered yet.  I've been buying "free-range" eggs to make up the difference, but their idea of "free-range" and my idea of "free-range" are obviously different:

 
  The orange yolks taste better, too, if you've never eaten an orange-yolked egg and you're wondering.

 

 

Country Diary: Pick a Peck of Peppers

Weather: upper 70's today, cloudy, off and on showers which prevented me from picking beans today...I picked cucumbers (most notably) in the rain.  Chipmunk, who was out in the garden with Andy and me at the time, was not amused.  This surprised me, because he will cheerfully dunk his head in a mud puddle.  All last week it felt like summer with highs in the 80's.  We even had to use fans.  But this week it looks like temps will slump into the 60's, with overnight lows dipping into the 40's.  Fall, I guess.

In bloom: Well, my rosebush is still going, which is hard for me to believe.  It likes the chickens.  Otherwise, the field is full of goldenrod, black-eyed susans (Pip calls them "black-eyes"), and the first asters.

Photo by Katydid

In the Barnyard: It's been a while since I posted a Country Diary.  About a week and a half ago, we lost two of our turkeys to what we think must have been raccoons.  (Only raccoons tear off the head and leave most of the meat untouched.)  So Andy spent one very long Sunday converting the the frame of a larger chicken coop he'd been working on into a turkey coop.  It looks a lot like an aviary.

But Andy says not to give Katydid ideas.

The poor turkeys... they are really not meant to be cooped up like this.  What we've discovered is that heritage turkeys are excellent flyers and, unlike chickens, they don't particularly care if they make it home to roost or not.  When we let them out of the coop to forage on grass, they will fly up about twenty feet into the tree behind the woodpile on the right.  I guess raccoons can't get them there, but still.  Another worry we have is that there has been a wild turkey hen hanging around with her poults since we put the turkeys out.  The other day I looked out the window to see the wild hen having a bit of an alteraction with our Bourbon Red hen, who might have been trying to tag along. 

The wild hen is becoming increasingly less afraid of us, though.  The boys and I came upon her and the poults in the garden a couple of days ago and were able to come quite close before they all flew away.

The turkeys do have interesting personalities, though, and if you ignore the bald heads, the rest is beautiful and graceful.

Our Naragansett tom...

Blue Slate hen in the left background and Bourbon Red hen in foreground...

Close-up of one of the Blue Slates...

In the Garden:

It's not a banner year.  There's very little to freeze or can, and the blackberry bush seems bent on ripening only a pint of berries at a time.  I put away 2 qt. of beans and 2 1/2 qts of squash last week, and that was the first all season.  I had to use farm stand tomatoes to make freezer salsa with my peppers.

Of which there have been quite a few.  The peppers have actually surprised me this year.  Usually our pepper production is not good.

The tomatoes are such a disappointment that I'm not even going to show you a picture.  They started out beautiful and lush.  And then -- late blight struck.  It's epidemic in the Northeast this year.  I couldn't even go into the garden for days.  Some of our tomatoes seem to be pulling through okay, but most aren't.  I can't can the green tomatoes (as pickles or whatever) because canning potentially diseased produce doesn't sound smart to me.  If you pick the tomatoes green and leave them in the windowsill to ripen, most rot anyway.

I have to tell you, it's heartbreaking.

Here's what our late August harvest looks like, sans tomatoes:

That's what I picked in the rain today, along with a bunch of okra Andy picked last night.  Apparently we had forgotten about the okra patch for a few days.  Those long purple things are eggplants.

A funny curlicue one using my garden journal as background...

A comparison of cucumbers... Marketmore slicer on top, Homemade Pickles on the bottom.  Homemade Pickles is a producer.  Even in a wet, mostly cool summer, it will give me more cucumbers than any other variety.  I sliced up the pile of cucumbers I picked this morning for refrigerator sweet pickles.

And some homemade salsa, using all home-grown ingredients except for the lime juice. 

Now I just have to figure out what to do with all the rest of those peppers and that giant striped zucchini!

Country Diary: July Garden

I was going to name this post "Tomato Madness," but then I thought, well, there are other things going on in the garden, too.  So instead I went with the boring "July Garden".

Weather: 75 ish and the sun has come out again after a few brief rain showers.  I believe it has rained almost every single day this month -- at least a few sprinkles.  We have spent more than a few soccer games huddling in sweatshirts.  I made Italian sausage and onions Friday night.  It was raining again, as usual -- a steady cold rain -- and as Andy sat down he said, "Boy, this is a good dinner to warm you up..."  And I finished for him, "... on a cold July night."

In Bloom:

Black-eyed Susans at the edge of the comfrey bed...

Katydid's miniature wildflower meadow...

A closer-up view of Katydid's flowers...

The roses, which are a bit past their prime.  The old growth is already spent, and now only the new growth is blooming.  I'm not deadheading the flowers because I want to try to collect rosehips in the fall. 

The milkweed smells wonderful and has been buzzing with bees all week.  I haven't seen any monarch caterpillars, but...

Katydid found this Mourning Cloak caterpillar on the driveway and brought it inside to see if she could watch it form a chrysalis and turn into a butterfly.  We see a lot of Tiger Swallowtails around here, but we've never seen a Mourning Cloak, so it should be interesting.  The caterpillars feed on birch and wild roses, so it's strange we've never seen one before (as we have both in abundance).  Katydid has been taking pictures every day to chronicle the caterpillar's progress.  She reports that it has formed a complete chrysalis already.

Another insect related to blooms...

The milkweed beetle.

In the Barnyard:

Turkeys.

Actually, they're in the orchard with the elderberries.  The elderberries were teeming with Japanese beetles, and the turkeys love to eat Japanese beetles, so it seemed like a good match.  We have them enclosed with electric poultry netting, which does absolutely nothing to stop them from getting out.  Heritage turkeys are exceptional flyers.  And they don't seem to care about getting shocked by the netting either, which I find strange.  Their favorite place to go after they get out of the netting is the chicken coop, where they eat the chickens' food, then fly up to the roof to roost.  They have good personalities, though.  They're very inquisitive and people-friendly.  The Bourbon Reds and Blue Slates are not very smart.  The Naragansetts (the ones that look like wild turkeys) seem to be far hardier and more intelligent as well. Oddly, of the 8 turkeys that survived out of our original 15, only one is a tom.  He's the big Naragansett with the red neck.  I like the turkeys far better than the meat chickens, who will not only peck but bite you when you try to change their food and water.  (We ordered a straight run of White Rock and Delewares for meat birds, so I'm talking about the young cockerels here... Katydid has actually already decided which one she wants to eat first, which is something.)

In the Garden:

This is why I wanted to call this post "Tomato Madness":

We thought these tomato plants were going to die.  The night after we planted them, we had a light frost here and there.  Some of their leaves curled up and turned yellow and black.  Andy went out and bought more tomatoes to replace most of these, which looked pretty bad. Now they have formed their own tomato jungle.  These are not the only tomato plants I have.  In fact, this is just half of one bed.  I have another bed this size full of more jungley tomato plants.

I am really scratching my head about this.  Usually in a cold, rainy year, the tomatoes do not do well.  The plants don't blossom, the blossoms don't set, and the tomatoes take forever to ripen.  Or, they are ruined by slugs.

Can you see all the tomatoes in there?  They're pulling the branches so close to the ground the branches are developing roots.  (All those little hairs on a tomato plant have the potential to turn into roots, which is why when you plant tomatoes, you're supposed to stick them in the ground right up to the bottom of the first set of true leaves.)  It's been raining so much (or we've been at soccer so much) that we haven't had time to attend to the garden.  So now we have super-sprawly tomatoes and weeds run wild among the eggplants and cabbages.  Anyway, these are Early Girls (I think), a hybrid variety, but even my heirlooms (Brandywine, Striped German... and oh, I can't remember the others) are doing well for the most part.  I had to toss a big half-ripe Striped German to the chickens this morning because of slug-damage and rot (which made me gnash my teeth a bit) but most of the tomatoes don't look that bad, even though they're growing so close to the ground.

I did pick this one before it could get any worse, though:

First tomato.  Not pretty, but my expectations have been low in the garden this year.  Deer ate every.single.pea plant. Rabbits ate all (all) my lettuce and spinach.  Something is decimating the brussel sprouts. The squash and cucumber seeds rotted in the ground it was so cold and wet in June.  And crows stole all our corn twice.

See the corn plants here and there? (If you squint?)  We planted that whole space to corn.  The only corn that actually managed to escape the crows are two rows on the right, which happened to be under netting.

I'm not feeling very charitable toward the crows lately.  They run the hawks off, but I don't think that makes up for stealing the corn.

A few more garden pictures (because I like to look back from year to year to compare):

This is the first year we've grown cabbages, and they're doing well in this wet, cool weather.

My few remaining squash plants are starting to bear.

The peppers are not doing too badly.

The onions are getting rather large.  They like the steady supply of water.

The blackberry bush is still my favorite.  It's loaded with fruit and will need to be wrapped with bird netting before too long.

Harvest this week:

2 yellow squash, one sweet pepper, a handful of purple and yellow beans (not pictured),  1 zucchini, 1 cippolini onion that Chipmunk stepped on and knocked out of the ground, 5 giant Walla Walla onions (not pictured), 10 Yukon Gold potatoes, 5 stalks of rhubarb, roughly a half-pint of raspberries, eaten off the bushes, 1 cherry tomato, and 1 nearly ripe Early Girl tomato.

I made a strawberry-rhubarb crumble that everyone pronounced one of the top 10 best desserts ever... and a 3 bean salad (with squash and zucchini added) that I am going to have to eat all of myself. (Ahem.)

And now I had better go tie up some more out-of-control tomato plants. Before it starts raining again.

Country Diary: Poultry Farmers

Weather: A front is approaching and it's supposed to rain for the next three or four days.  Temperatures will remain in the low to mid 60's because of the rain, but will hopefully rise into the 70's this weekend.   In spite of the fact that we've had a lot of rain recently, the ground seems bone dry.  The little boys come in every night covered in a layer of dust that builds up in the bottom of the bathtub. 

In bloom: Those darn peonies are STILL not blooming.  Pip and Pop have been picking the buds to give to me.  If they take any longer to become flowers, there just aren't going to be flowers, period. Our cinquefoil bush erupted into flower today, though, and the rose bush's buds are swelling.  The irises are in full bloom, and I am thinking that I might need to divide them this year.

Oh, and the wild strawberries that dot the lawn are just about ripe!

Birds: I left a cardboard box from a plant delivery on the outside table, and a wren has been filling it with sticks.  I had seen (and heard) the wren perched on the chair next to the table, but Katydid (of course) was the one who had seen it bringing sticks.  I peeked in the box today and sure enough, the corner of the box is full of twigs.  I was confused because it wasn't a nest, per se, and Katydid told me that wrens often fill a spot they want to use next nesting season with sticks to prevent other birds from nesting in it. Considering the fact that the wrens also destroy the young of other species so they can take over their nests, I find that rather uppity.  But I still like to hear the wrens sing.

 

A phoebe is nesting in the eaves of the outer garage and every time we open the door to check on the chicks and turkeys, it buzzes us.  Scares me half to death, even when I'm expecting it.

Wildlife: None to report but mice in the house. I caught one of them last week, but another has already taken its place.  Ah, the joys of life in the country.  Usually we don't see any this time of year, though, so I wonder what's going on. 

In the garden:  None of the corn we planted came up.  Zero.  We think the crows got it.  This weekend we scrambled out to buy new corn seed to replant.  Replanting is a big deal in this climate; we went ahead and planted Kandy Korn again (our favorite), but with 89 days to harvest... we're pushing first frost here.

On the positive side: the little boys pulled the rest of the radishes for me, and I was able to positively ID which radishes Pip had actually planted.  French Breakfast.  So we can plant them again.  The spinach and lettuce are now big enough that we can make salad from the thinnings, and my tiny little tomato plants are just getting blossoms.

In the barnyard: Otherwise known as "the outer garage". Last Wednesday, the kids and I were called to the post office to pick up 50+ chicks.  One of the Ameracaunas died en route -- it was in the corner and looked as if it had probably been suffocated -- and two of the Delawares (which we will be raising for meat and eggs) died in the first few days.  But overall, chickens are definitely hardier than turkeys. (We lost yet another turkey last week, bringing our count down to 9, and one of those has a leg problem.)  All 10 of Katydid's bantams made it through all right, though.  She took pictures on the first day:

We ordered 30 meat chickens (Delaware, White Rock -- the little yellow fuzzballs) and 12 layers (Speckled Sussex, Ameracauna -- the "Easter Egg" chicken, and Black Jersey Giant).

Black and Barred Old English bantams.

A closer look at the bantams, which were really teeny-tiny a week ago.

Speckled Sussex...

Black Jersey Giant...

Ameracauna...

One of the few remaining Blue Slate turkeys...

This is a Naragansett turkey, which seem to be far hardier than the Blue Slates and Bourbon Reds. We've only lost one of them, but we've lost three of each of the other kinds.

Here are the turkeys all together.  They've still got a few weeks left in the brooder.

Of course, I'm not telling the whole story.  Andy was out of town when the chicks arrived,  and we couldn't get the heat lamps set up right (they were the clamp-on kind, but kept falling off... not exactly fire-safe... so we had to hang them), and it got cold that night, and that was the reason another turkey died.  Fortunately, there is Katydid.  She has really been doing most of the chicken care.  Andy and I check to make sure everything is okay, and we fiddle with the heat lamps, but Katydid does most of the work.  (And those first couple days, it was a lot of work!)

Around the house:

So much cleaning needs to be done, especially since our Little Flowers/Blue Knights group is gathering here this coming weekend to help work in a garden we're growing for the Little Sisters of the Poor. I did manage to put my file crate back together, though, so at least we can eat on the dining room table now.

What I'm Reading: Lots of rural-related magazines: Hobby Farm Home, Hobby Farm, Backyard Poultry, Acres USA.  We went to Tractor Supply this weekend.  That's my only explanation.

Country Diary: First Harvest

Pip's radishes! I sauteed them in butter and seasoned them with sea salt, and they were delicious.

Weather:  Right now -- becoming overcast, 42 degrees at 8:30 AM. We had a frost advisory last night; lows were supposed to dip down to around 33 degrees.  I don't think it got that cold -- thankfully -- but I covered as many of the tender plants as I could with sheets... all the while thinking of how Almanzo Wilder and his family had to unfreeze their corn on the Fourth of July.

In bloom: Irises!

Birds: Hummingbirds! We saw two males in the rain on Sunday morning. This is the first year there has been any indication that we have more than one pair of hummingbirds. They seem to like the purple catmint flowers (which we bought because catmint features prominently in the Warriors series of books about cats, not because we thought they would attract hummingbirds.)

Katydid took this picture out the window yesterday.  It's a little grainy, but I think the comparison of the hummingbird with the clothes pin is neat.

In the garden: Well, radishes, and after a week of rain, the spinach, lettuce, and kale looks good.  The tomatoes - not so much. The cold weather also claimed most of my winter squash transplants and one of the cucumber transplants.  Three hills of melons are gone.  Beans are coming up, but nothing else planted from seed last week.

In the barnyard: No turkey losses over the weekend.  They are rather brazenly attempting to fly out of their brooder now, though.

Around the house: Time to put away the school year.

Country Diary: May Flowers

Weather: Temperatures have been in the 50's and low 60's this week, with lows down into the 40's. We've also had rain almost every day -- not much in sum, but a regular drizzle.  Andy was able to plant two long rows of onions, but that's been about it.  We're supposed to get a steady rain today, and rain for the next 2-3 days. The kids have been saying, "May showers bring June flowers," which is actually how it works here.

  

Katydid took some pictures of flowers blooming in the yard after she and Andy came home from her birthday trip.

 

  

 

At a lower elevation, the crabapples and lilacs have already started to bloom. Ours are still in the bud stage... but swelling more every day.  Coming home from church on Sunday, I looked at our land from a different perspective, wondering why our blooms lag behind everyone else's.  Elevation is certainly part of it - we're at 1100 feet or so -- but I think the slope of the land behind and around us means that we may be caught in a mild frost pocket.  We always have more snow, too.

In the Garden:

Not much to report.  I've started about 6 flats of seedlings in the dining room window: 2 of okra (just done last night); 1 watermelon (all up and beginning to get their seed leaves); 1 winter squash (not doing so well, but a few are up); and 2 cantaloupe (not up yet).  I don't have room to start cucumbers.  I need a greenhouse.  (I say this every year.)  In the actual garden, Pip's radishes and chard desperately need thinning, since he dumped an entire packet (or two) out in the same place.  The spinach is coming up -- and probably likes this rain -- and the peas are beginning to grow quickly.  Two of five of the rhubarb plants we planted last year have made it.  No asparagus yet.

Gareth has started both of the mushroom kits I ordered: shiitake and portabello.

In the Coop:

We're down to 10 hens, and Andy has ordered electric poultry netting.  Our turkeys are scheduled to ship May 18. I have heard so many bad things about turkeys -- how fussy they are, how they'll crowd into corners and suffocate, how they're more prone to disease -- that I am not sure I'm looking forward to brooding them.  Andy wants to get a stock tank to use as a brooder because it has rounded corners.  At least they won't be in my laundry room this year.

From the kitchen:

Fiddleheads! 

They don't look very appetizing, do they.  I didn't forage these -- I have no idea if our ferns are the kind you eat or not, though it seems like they might be, since these fiddleheads here came from 30 minutes away -- I bought them at the farmstand we frequent when we can.  I had never eaten fiddleheads before, and I could only find two recipes in my books.  One was for a fiddlehead and morel risotto.  I didn't have morels or arborio rice, but I did have a nice big portabello.  So I decided to saute the fiddleheads and mushrooms in butter with garlic the way the first part of the recipe said to, and then I salted them with sea salt and gave them a few good shakes of pepper.  Then, tentatively, I ate one.

Wow! So much better than they look.  All the kids liked them.  Let me repeat that, in bold.  All my super-picky kids liked fiddleheads and mushrooms.  They taste a little like asparagus, except better.

Weird Happenings...

So yesterday night, Andy closed our bedroom door and the full-length mirror that hangs on it fell off and shattered into a million pieces.  Fortunately, whoever hung the mirror hung it on the wrong side of the door. It didn't fall on to Andy as he walked inside the room and shut the door; instead, it fell into the hallway.  Also fortunately, the little boys were all sitting at the dining room table at the time, and not trying to follow Andy.  So no one was hurt.

Tonight, as Katydid was practicing violin and I was making dinner, Andy looked outside and announced that the chickens were on the road again. "Stupid chickens."

Then a car hit one.

Unfortunately, the chicken was not killed instantly.  Instead, it was injured internally; its ribs were broken - or something. So Andy and Gareth are outside killing their first chicken. Have I mentioned that Katydid and Farmerboy named all the chickens and have tamed them so they act more like dogs or cats?

Of course, I am left wondering what is going to happen next. And relieved that I did not follow through on those plans to roast a chicken (from the freezer) for dinner.