Wednesday 30 October 2013

"Good morning!"

One of our cockerels recently started crowing.  Then another decided to give it a try.  It's been an amusing few weeks of strangled squawks in the morning as I walk to the coop, but they would be very shy as soon as I pulled out my phone to get a video.  However, last week, I was victorious!

And this morning, he finally emitted a complete crow, with both notes at the end!  Good job, chicken!  I'll try to get that on video this weekend.

Of course, that also means that we have to hurry up and harvest the cockerels that we won't be keeping.  They're getting progressively aggressive with each other, and once they reach full maturity their meat gets tough and takes on a different flavour.  We'll give it a try this weekend, once we assemble all the supplies.

And sadly, this fellow is destined for the freezer.  However, I'm confident that YR and YO (the two we will be keeping; one for us, and one for Hal and Cathy) will soon pick up this morning greeting.  They are named based on the legbands they were assigned; I weighed each cockerel a few weeks ago and gave them all a yellow band as I went.  There were three over 5 lbs, who each got an extra band: YB (Yellow Blue) just squeaked over the 5 lb mark by less than an ounce, and YR (Yellow Red) and YO (Yellow Orange) were both over 5 lbs 3 oz.  Going back to my "large chickens make more large chickens" theory, those are the keepers.

This past weekend I also picked up a load of hay for chicken bedding over the winter.  I had hoped to get straw, but as there aren't many grains grown around here, I couldn't find any.  Luckily, Nicola (from the Rescue) has some hay that has too much clover for horses, so she's selling it at the low, low price of $1 per square bale.  There's two reasons this is awesome: 1. That's the cheapest price I've found; and 2. The money goes to the Rescue!  So I took the truck down to where they're being stored, and managed to stack 20 bales in the truck.  I've never stacked hay before, so I studied some stacking schematics the night before.  However, as I loaded the first bale, I noticed a problem: the diagrams were for long-box pickups, and ours is a standard box.  Hmmmm.......  Some quick refiguring and I was picking, tossing, and stacking again.  In the end, 20 bales is a fairly respectable number (I could have fit two more bales if I'd had longer straps!) and I made it home without any of my load shifting, loosening, or falling.  SUCCESS!!!!  To anyone who does this regularly, I'm sure you're thinking "Look, it's an ignorant city girl trying to hack it, how cute!" but I'm mighty proud of myself.

And Zim enjoyed the opportunity to jump and climb and sniff all the bales:



And of course, he had to inspect my work when it was done:
Apologies for the terrible lighting in our barn!

Now, for a bit of back-story:  Two years ago, we lived just down the road from the Rescue.  One fall day I got a text from Nicola, asking if I was able to come help stack bales.  At the time, I was having problems with my wrists (an old work-related injury) so I knew I wouldn't be any help.  However, it gave me a goal: get enough strength so I could help with haying.  This year, I have been thrice successful in meeting that goal: we helped Matt and Tessa get their hay in, then I spent an evening helping Nicola, and now I've loaded and unloaded a stack of bales for us.  So while it seems like such a trivial thing ("So you stacked some bales, so what?  I stacked 3000 this year.") it's a milestone for me, and one of the reasons I'm so darn proud of myself.

In other news: still working on the soffits/fascia, but we installed some pot lights (did I tell you this already...?) and they look amazing.  We noticed that our front window is no longer sealed, so we bought some thermal curtains to get us through the winter, with plans to replace it next summer.  We still haven't tilled in the garden, and we are supposed to be reaching lows around -8 this week, with snow at some point (I've stopped paying attention to the forecast - it's always wrong anyway).  I've plugged in the light in the pumphouse on a timer, as we woke up one morning to discover that it was +0.5 degrees in there.  Yikes!  The last thing we need right now it to have something go sideways with our water.  This morning it was a toasty +18 in there - about as warm as the house.  Awesome :)

Now, in order to encourage you to make this a two-way conversation (instead of just me, rambling into the wind): What is on your to-do list to get ready for winter (or summer, if you're in the Southern Hemisphere)?