Egg Dreams

 

 

You might remember that last June I hatched dark eggs from my Cuckoo Marans hens, in a very temperamental incubator.

 

My goal was to increase the occurrence of extra dark eggs from my flock.

Unfortunately we also increased the occurrence of Bobcat visits at the same time that the dark egg chicks were growing up, so I lost all but 4 of the pullets. The Bobcat caught mostly pullets and hardly any of the cockerels, so I ended up with 11 boys and 4 girls. Not the best ratio for egg production!

Because of time constraints (the cockerels were becoming roosters and driving the hens crazy) and illness ( a Yellow Jacket stung me when I reached into our mailbox on a warm day in February...ugh) I just couldn't think about butchering 11 chickens, so I took them to the local auction yard.

 I hadn't been to the auction in a couple of years and had forgotten what fun it can be. Dad came along and kept me company. And helped to catch the rooster that escaped.

 

People come to the auction from all walks of life. This week, there was a crazy assortment of animals to buy. Bantam roosters, cockatiels, fuzzy rabbits and geese, just to mention a few. It was fun.

I received a check in the mail a week and a half later, $7.80 for each rooster. Not top dollar, but all I had to do was haul them over, put them in cages and receive a check in the mail. And it definitely paid for the food they ate.

Now back to my original subject, dark eggs. To illustrate my (well, my hen's) egg progress, I dug through some old photos. Here they are:

 Cuckoo eggs circa 2011

Cuckoo eggs circa 2013

 Cuckoo eggs circa 2015

The 2014 pullets have finally started to lay their first eggs.

Hooray! I can see real success in the dark egg laying experiment. I am, of course, Eggstatic!
I am going to concentrate on selecting the size of the egg as well as the dark brown color this year, hatching only the very dark brown and large eggs.

Peep! Peep!

 

21 days is all it takes to make yourself a batch of chicks!

 

Well... 21 days of constantly messing with the temperature and humidity of a very temperamental and inexpensive incubator which was poorly situated in an uninsulated building just as a storm front came in.

As the movie below attests I did a decent job of being a momma hen, but I have to tell you, it is sooooo much easier to let a real hen do it.

The eggs have X's and O's on them because they needed to be turned three times a day and that is how I kept them all on the same turning schedule.

The temperature is supposed to be kept between 101 and 102 but I had problems keeping it warm enough and at times it went as low as 96 and as high as 104.
The humidity is supposed to be around 45 but I had to put two bowls of water with sponges in them before I could get it that high.

 

During all this fussing I had a lot of time to ponder the architecture of an egg. It is fascinating and a real testament to the miracle of nature.

 

Anyone who has ever peeled a boiled egg has noticed it has a big end and a little end and on that big end there is an air pocket.When eggs are being set on by a hen, she is turning them every few hours and this helps the chick to form in the proper position in the egg- with it's head at the big end where the air bubble is. This is the air that the chick breaths just before it manages to pip a hole in the egg shell.

In the end I had 19 hatch out of 30 eggs. Not fantastic, but not bad either. All were healthy and fit.

That night I put half of them under each of two broody hens and breathed a sigh of relief. Being momma is such hard work!

Incubator Chicks

 

As you know I LOVE our Cuckoo Marans breed of chickens. They are gentle, good mothers, good foragers- without being nuisances and they lay lovely dark brown eggs. They are dual purpose, meaning they can also be eaten, but I can't really tell you how they taste since the coyotes have been the only ones doing Cuckoo Marans taste tests.

We did actually butcher a few at the same time as some meat birds, but I lost track of them in the freezer. Someday we may eat one and we might be able to know it was a Cuckoo, but I doubt it.

When I ordered my original Cuckoos in 2009 from a mail order hatchery, it was clear such hatcheries no longer worry about the quality of their breeds. These days it seems it's quantity over quality.

I believe they used to be much more concerned with breed standards when everyone used to exhibit their birds in County Fairs and 4-H. But now perhaps there is not such a concern since most people  are primarily buying chicks for backyard flocks.

My initial Cuckoos had a mixed bag of faults, from the wrong colored legs to the wrong colored eggs. They are supposed to have white legs and some had yellow. They are supposed to lay very dark brown eggs and some of the first hens laid eggs that were barely tan.

In my search for better stock I found that no one in our area was breeding Cuckoo Marans, so I sent out several requests for hatching eggs from breeders I found through poultry swaps and poultry exchanges.

It turns out that because of new regulations for diseases and the low hatch rate of shipped eggs, no one wanted to sell me any.

What to do? Well, one breeder very kindly encouraged me to hatch my own eggs and increase my flocks' quality by selecting only the biggest and darkest eggs, because that is what she had done 10 years ago with great results.

Eureka, I could do it myself! So I started only letting my hens set on the very darkest of the eggs.

Then, a few batches of chicks later, I was using the roosters from those dark eggs, so I had the genes for dark eggs on both sides now.

Most of the eggs we get now are dark brown to chocolate brown, but my flock is dwindling. I have had most of this flock for about 2 years and it's time to replenish the hens and replace one of the roosters who was eaten by the coyotes.

Last June I put selected eggs under a hen and waited. When no chicks emerged after 21 days I reached into the nest box and felt under the hen. She was sitting on an empty nest.

Close inspection revealed that a something had dug under the backside of the pen, where the wire skirt had accidentally been folded under.

The varmint had eaten all of the eggs out from under her and the broody hen had stayed on the nest anyway.

I repaired the wire skirt around the pen, but everything was now riding on the few dark eggs I had left.

 

I decided not to leave it to chance and I got out the incubator.

In my next post I will have lots of photos and a little movie of the new chicks hatching, so stay tuned!

Our Homestead Anniversary, 5 years and 200 posts

Finally, all the raspberries I can eat.

That's right, this is The Reluctant Homesteaders' 200th blog post! And it has been 5 years, almost to the day, since Buck and I cautiously and at that time, a little reluctantly, took up the reins of my family's dilapidated and blackberry covered Homestead.

 

There had not been a major repair or replacement on the farm for over 30 years.  We had a huge job ahead of us and had enough house rehabilitation experience to know that the obvious visual signs of neglect were probably only the tip of the money and time iceberg. 

In honor of this momentous blip on the work work work timeline I have put together a collection of time lapsing photos of just some of the things we have accomplished here on the land. But there are many things that have gone by on the Homestead without a post or a picture because we are so busy with Homestead work here and $$ work in the world that it scarcely leaves time for writing about it.

 So, here goes my effort to collapse 5 years into our 200th post!

One of the first things we had to do was bring in something to live in. The house on the property had plumbing problems and a leaking roof. It was also completely infested with termites and carpenter ants and was not fit to live in, so we bought this RV off a friend of a friend and they moved it up to the Homestead for us.

What we don't dwell on in our blog is that we were sleeping in our cars until the arrival of the RV. We didn't just wake up one day and say "Let's be Farmers!" Instead we were faced with 3 burglaries of the property in 2 months and the last one was to pull the wire out of the buildings, as Meth addicts are prone to do. We did install a beefy security gate, but it was broken down and then after the third ransacking it became very evident that the pillaging would not stop until someone was physically there to stop the thieving.  So there we were, instant Homesteaders.

Early developments included building a chicken pen, which was meant to be a "tractor" but never was.

 Another thing we did right away was to put in a garden.

May 2009

May 2010

and to plant some apple and pear trees.

 

Then we really got into it and learned how to graft our own fruit trees.

 

Many hardships befell our little trees. Including a bigger tree falling on them and killing 4.

 

But 9 made it to their third year and I finally got them planted on the hill this spring. I would have liked to have gotten them in the ground last year, but it just didn't happen. Most had to be cut out of their pots because they had taken root in the garden, but they transplanted fine and are growing very fast.

 

We started the Hay House pretty early in the process since a Homestead needs somewhere to store feed and hay. The Hay House was literally still standing because I had shoved a 4x4 under the low corner, the year before. That casually placed 4x4 ended up keeping the whole building from shearing sideways and falling down.

2009

2010

2010

2009

2010

2010

2009

2010

Shortly after the Hay House was finished the Loafing Shed

was constructed to keep Rio dry.

Then Chiquita came to keep him company. 

Then Long John Silver moved in for a little while.

Fun times are often had with Rio, the funny mustang, who never tires of finding things to make us laugh.

For those who don't know, he has turned his halter sideways somehow and thinks it is very funny.

We learned a lesson about raising Heritage turkeys. Just don't.

2010

 Although we would have missed out on knowing Gimpy McGimperson if we hadn't tried raising those delinquent turkeys.

 We have had great success with raising meat chickens under our Cuckoo Merans hens.

And we pursued a harebrained idea I had about making a Micro House out of this 8x12 granary and a 1958 Oasis travel trailer. We named it the Art Shack.

2009

2010

2010

2011

2011

2012

2013

2013

2014

Last month. Starting plants for the new garden at the Art Shack.

The tub at the Art Shack is getting good use.

I discovered that a hedge trimmer does a very good job of getting a giant wall of blackberries down to mowing height. Mowing has been our number one organic method of keeping down the invasive weeds. Without mowing we would make zero progress around here with Herbicides.

I also learned not to leave these tip-rooted plants to just regrow a new wall.

I built my first Top Bar Hive and filled it with bees.

2010-I built my first Top Bar hive

I built 2 more hives and then got stung on the face and had an allergic reaction. Thus Buck became my Deputy bee helper even though I don't think he would have ever pictured himself doing such a thing 3 years before. The same goes for our son Jake.

 

 

I got an idea I might want to roast my own coffee while I was in the middle of nowhere, miles from good coffee and invented a roaster out of a George Foreman Rotisserie Oven.

Since then we have drunk gallons and gallons of home roasted coffee and our son has started an online custom coffee roasting business, Black Market Beans.

 

I planted raspberry plants in my Blueberries and wished I hadn't. Then I planted Raspberries in the back of the garden.

2010

2010

2011 we had only a hand full of berries

2014 more berries than I could eat! QUARTS AND QUARTS.

And I finally achieved my dream of having all the Raspberries I could eat and extra for the freezer.

2014

Now we are expanding the garden with cattle panels to make room for more kinds of berries and to have room for winter squash and cucumbers this year.

We found out that our 2 dogs adapted very well to the farm life.

While our farm dogs grow old, we seemed to keep adopting Rescue dogs that love the Homestead but are not really farm dogs.

Mr. J

 

Ms. Bonnie

 

There is talk here of making a move to adopt a couple of farm dog puppies before our beloved Mr. B (12.5 years)

 and Mrs. B (14.5 years) die of old age.

 If we could afford it, we would clone them!



We also have had to deal with many years of accumulation of what I'm sure seemed like a good thing to save at the time, but was not so great for us, the ones who had to clean it all up.

 The Smoke House is the last existing building from the original Land Claim Homestead. It is very close to collapsing and so it is slated for a renovation. We can't let this piece of history just fall into a pile! Stay tuned for the details.

 

There are so many things that need to be done for this land to function as a real working Homestead. There are also many buildings left to be rehabbed or salvaged. Like this out-building which was originally built for chickens but which now holds an amazing amount of salvaged building material and future usefuls.

 

 I call it the "Junk Zoo" because each category of item is in its own chicken cage inside. Windows in one cage, pressure treated lumber in another and so on. We walk down the center isle looking into each cage to choose the item we need and then unlock the cage door to pull it out. The roof is still good and it's structure is sound but the walls are just chicken wire with old plastic and even though the roof does not leak it is damaged and covered in 5 inches of fir needles on the north side.

 

2014- there is a gate in there if you look closely. There is a pasture past that...I think.

Five years have flown by and we have accomplished a lot, and yet, there is still much to do.
We have, literally, miles of fences that need be repaired or built, acres and acres of land to be cleared of invasive Blackberry and Scotch broom, and some big decisions in the future about the ultimate use of the land.

Do we graze beef cattle or plant orchards or plant alfalfa to be sold on the feed market?
Or do we just realize that a hill of rock is no farm and create a space to be used for workshops and peaceful retreats.

But these decisions are another 2 or 3 years ahead and right now we are keeping our nose to the grindstone and moving in the right direction, "Slowly but surely" as my Granny used to say.