I made another 8 jars of raspberry jam last night, but this time I ran it through a sieve to remove most of the seeds, and I used a low-sugar recipe. Still tasted plenty sweet to me!
When I made strawberry jam the flat made 20+ jars, but this time I only got 16 jars out of the flat of raspberries. I think the difference was all the seeds and pulp lost to sieving it. I gave the leftovers to the chix, so they weren’t wasted.
The new blue roos are making themselves at home. They seem to be at the bottom of the pecking order for now, but someone has to be. Might as well be the new guys.
The chicks are feathering out.
Once you have feathers you have to spend time preening them. Check out the guy bottom right 🙂
And they have discovered they can jump up on the chair and have a view over their entire future kingdom.
Cookie Bear says ‘yum’!It’s raspberry season, so I got a flat of local berries and made a batch of freezer jam last night. I’m going to make the rest tonight, but I’m going ot try the low-sugar recipe. This adds to the shelf full of strawberry jam already in the freezer, and I plan on doing some blackberry jam when our berries ripen. From what I can see now, it looks like we might have a bumper crop this year!
I have not one but TWO crockpots cooking today. I got up first thing this morning and prepared Chipotle Beef Barbacoa (hopefully close to the barbacoa you get at the Chipotle fast food place, which is very good, but there’s not one anywhere near here) and got it cooking in the crockpot. By dinnertime that beef should be falling apart! I also prepared pinto beans, and have them cooking in the little crockpot with bacon, onions, garlic, some spices, and one chipotle pepper left over from the barbacoa. The house smells terrific 🙂
I also have some beef marinating in the fridge and we’ll grill that for dinner, in case the crockpot beef is too spicy. Either way there will be choice of mild or spicy beef and lots of leftovers! Yesterday I made fresh pico de gallo for snacking on. I saw on TV how to remove the membrane from a jalepeno so it wouldn’tbe so hot, and it’s perfect (I’m a real whimp when it comes to spicy food)!
I read real barbacoa involves cooking a goat in a pit for hours and hours, carefully watched over by a guy drinking a beer – apparently that’s a really important part of the recipe. I would love to have food that was really cooked in a pit someday. Sounds so rustic.
Today I finished putting chicken wire around the orchard fence in an effort to contain my wayward chickens. Floppy the Hen has been getting out everyday, and we find her wandering around the backyard. This encourages the dog to chase chickens, and allows her to hide her eggs somewhere in the yard (so today I only got 2 eggs out of the coop). Of our 8 hens, Big Red is missing, Little Red is broody, the black hen is mothering chicks, so that leaves 5 hens to lay eggs – Penny and the four buff orpingtons. Since a hen lays an egg every day and a half or so, it about makes sense that I’m getting 2 or 3 eggs a day. I’ll be glad when everyone gets back into production, we have friends waiting for eggs.
Today I also put the new roosters into the orchard. I let everyone out into the yard together, and gave them scratch and slowly lured them back into the orchard. There was a bit of fussing and pecking, but I’m sure the new roosters will figure out their place in the flock.
Update: I haven’t seen a wandering chicken since I finished the fence – yay, and I’ve gone from 2-3 eggs a day to a steady 4 – seems like somebody WAS hiding her eggs from me!
Big Red, seen here with one of her chicks this spring, has disappeared. I last saw her on the 5th I think, she showed up in the afternoon when I put some scratch out for everyone. But I haven’t seen her since then. She is one of my ‘wandering’ chickens, who knows how to get out of the orchard and wander around the yard. Egg production has been down for a few weeks so I suspected someone was not laying their eggs in the henhouse to be picked up. Now I’m pretty sure it was her. So unless she wandered over to the neighbors and got eaten by their dog, or got picked up by a hawk, she is probably hunkered down over a hidden clutch of eggs somewhere. I guess if she shows back up at the end of the month with chicks we’ll know for sure!
I threw some bread into the pen and enjoyed watching the hens and chicks scurrying around gobbling it up 🙂 this is the FUN part of having chickens!
Today I got two new roosters from Sharon at SnoKit Farms. She had a couple extra blue cochins, and I thought Penny would enjoy having some other cochins waddling around the pen with her, so I said ‘bring them on over’! They have not been handled so I’m going to keep them in the chicken tractor a few days and see if I can make friends with them. I’d also like to finish the chickenwire fencing around the pen before I let them loose, else the other chickens might teach them bad habits and I’ll be stuck with even more wandering chickens!
As for Big Bird, he made his own bed, and I do not regret a thing. He is gone now, and we’ll hope these new roosters stay friendly and we won’t have to go through this again. Sharon, who has about 200 chickens of every color and size you can imagine, said that is one thing she will not put up with – mean roosters have to go. They can’t be retrained or reasoned with. So we did what we had to do.
Last week Dave was mowing the lawn while I was at work. Partway through the day he called me and said ‘it’s sitting in the driveway smoldering…’ Hmm, that doesn’t seem like something you want your lawnmower to do! He had doused it with water, and parked it out in the driveway far away from anything else flammable, and left it there while he came to the shop and traded places so I could check it out. I was thinking a wheel bearing had gone bad, but it turned out some grass debris had gotten into the front frame member and caught fire from the muffler being so close. We dug all the grass out and determined it was good to go and he finished mowing the field that evening.
Now, the lawnmower is in pieces again.
This time I took it apart because it won’t recharge the battery during use, so everytime we want to use it we have to plug the charger in a few hours before to get the battery charged back up. I suspected the alternator.
Last year I bought a new battery for it after replacing the starter (which was major surgery) and stupidly plugged it in backwards (the posts were reversed from the previous battery) and fried a number of things including a fuse and the original red battery cable, which I replaced last year. But it’s inability to recharge properly was still related to that incident.
This is the alternator. There’s not really much to it to go bad, but it turns out there’s a diode in the connector that acts like a one-way valve for electricity. I think it got blown out. At least it would make sense, and there’s no way to tell without an expensive test meter. So I ordered a new alternator for it, $30 from the John Deere shop, and hopefully I’ll have it back and running again soon.
Yesterday I finished putting chicken wire around the bottom of the chicken pen fence, and so I put the mama hen and her 9 chicks into the pen. All day they have been wandering around the pen as part of the flock. Mom doesn’t let the other hens too close, but when I threw some scratch in there everyone was one big happy flock pecking at the corn. The chicks are so cute to watch!
It’s great to see them out stretching their legs and enjoying the grass. The chicken tractor was too cramped for that many chicks for very long!
On the other side of the yard Big Bird is angrily stomping around in his chicken tractor by himself. I kid you not – he is pissed! Looks like he’d like to take someone out! I am so relieved to have him contained, I was able to go into the chicken pen and check on the chicks and take pictures without having to watch my back the whole time.
What to do with Big Bird is another question. Nobody wants a mean rooster, and most people I’ve talked to about it say that the only good place for a mean rooster is the stewpot. But would I have the guts? He is ‘chicken’ after all.
Steff Does Stuff! 