Baby duck Cupcake turns 1 month old

It's hard to believe this little duck is only a month old!  She is now as big as the adult chickens.

Cupcake and her mamma are beginning to separate.  Mamma is often seen nearby but doing her own thing.  If Cupcake begins to chirp for some reason, Mamma's head pops up.  She knows that sound and checks to make sure everything is ok.  

Most of the day Cupcake roams around on her own in the yard.  She spends some time in the baby pool, forages for food, lays in the sunshine, and chases chickens around.  It's a good life :)

In the evening Cupcake returns to the coop with the chickens.  For a few weeks she and Mamma were sleeping snuggled up together on the floor of the hen house but now Mamma goes in and perches with the other chickens.  Now sometimes Cupcake sleeps in the straw underneath the hen house and sometimes she goes up the ramp and inside to sleep on the bedding in with the chickens.  It's nice because we don't have to chase her down like we do the adult ducks.  I wonder if she will always go in with the chickens or if she will eventually start to hang with the ducks.  Seems like it would be good for her to mix with her own kind, but it is awfully convenient to have her act like a chicken.

She is getting her little tail feathers in and her voice is turning into a deeper squeak.  We should be able to tell sometime soon with more certainty if "she" is a boy or a girl.  Keep your fingers crossed for a girl.  We want more duck eggs!

Happy birthday little Cupcake.

  

In the garden

I've been busy busy trying to get the garden going now that we are safely past frost. It's starting to green up as my seeds germinate and grow. 

The two rows in the foreground here are radishes. I've never grown radishes before but recently had a watermelon radish I really enjoyed so I ordered some seed to try this year. 

The four types of beets I planted about a month ago are thriving. I thinned them out a couple weeks ago. 

I got these a pack of broccoli seedlings to try. This is another new vegetable for me. 

My sweet potatoes are doing well in their buckets. Need to move them to a larger container soon to give more room for the potatoes to grow. I also planted purple potatoes and Yukons in two large garbage cans. 

I got the first two pepper seedlings I ordered from seed savers last week. One is a small sweet pepper and the other is a jalapeño. Should be getting several more plants here soon. 

Butter crunch lettuce is lush. We had a nice salad for dinner yesterday made with this and radish sprouts from when I thinned my rows of radishes. 

Carrots have been slow to germinate but are starting to pop up. 

The boys and I planted this garlic last fall. It's huge!

I have two kinds of kale - curly lead and lacinato. I did see a cabbage moth caterpillar last week but sprayed that plant with Captain Jack's (an organic insecticide) and haven't seen any bugs since. 

My first two rows of corn are up. I planted another two rows yesterday. My plan is to do two rows every two weeks until I fill that side of the garden. 

I also ordered tomato seedlings from seed savers. Look, one has a blossom already!

This time of year it feels like the work is never done in the garden but it's so exciting to see the plants popping up. Next on my agenda is cucumbers and beans. 

What "vacation" from the farm looks like

It's really hard to get away when you are raising animals and caring for acres of land.

This past weekend my husband and I went up to work on our cabin in Michigan.  We were only gone for a few days but leaving for any stretch of time requires both preparations and a recovery period when we return.

Before we left we had to stock up the feeders, fill the waterers, lay down fresh bedding and straw, put some food and water supply down by the duck house, empty out the fridge to make room for lots of eggs, and write out and go over all the plans with the neighbors, who would be watching the birds for us.

We decided for this trip just to leave the ducks in their pen the whole time.  We thought trying to gather up the ducks might put our generous neighbors over the edge.  We can't have that!  We need them!

So, we finally got everything arranged.  I watered my garden and checked on a few plants.  We packed up the suitcase and the car and we were off.  We had a very productive work weekend up north.  It wasn't at all relaxing, but at least we got a lot done.

The night we got back, the chores began again.

We had nearly 200 eggs to wash.  Since we wash all our eggs by hand, with lukewarm water and a scrubber pad, this alone was a loooooooooooong process.

I had almost every surface in the kitchen covered with eggs drying on tea towels.

While the eggs air-dried, I went back outside to check on things in the coop.  The feeders and waterers needed filling again.  Cupcake's baby pool needed a scrub down.  The bedding needed refreshing.  There were more eggs to be collected.  The food and water by the duck house needed to be put away....

Having a farm, even a small one, is real work.  It's work I enjoy, though, and that makes the difference.  People ask me: How do you work full time and do everything you do at home??  My response is: Well, I have to work my job and I love to do the farm stuff so I make time and try to find the energy for it.  I won't lie; sometimes it's tough, but it's worth the effort to make the life we want for ourselves.

"The Homestead Heritage of Mason Jars"

Read my latest article for Countryside magazine: "The Homestead Heritage of Mason Jars."

http://countrysidenetwork.com/daily/lifestyle/canning-food-preservation/homestead-heritage-mason-jars/

The article begins by talking about my own recollections of Mason jars and canning in my family then turns to a more recent collection of jars I inherited from a friend.  Finally, I share some of what I learned about dating the jars in my collection and how you can do this with yours.

Enjoy!

A new nest

You never know where you will find eggs when you let your chickens free-range.  

I wrote yesterday about the struggles we've been having with getting the chickens to use all the new nesting boxes we put in and the challenges that have arisen with so many trying to get into just a few of the original boxes.

Well this weekend I went out to my potting bench to get some tools for working in the garden and I discovered three broken eggs tucked in an old garbage bag that I had stuffed in the corner.  The girls were trying to nest in the bag, but it didn't provide any padding so the eggs had all broken.

Though we want them laying in nesting boxes in the coop, if they are inclined to lay eggs on my potting bench, I'd at least like them not to break so I decided to put a portable nesting box in the corner.  See it there towards the right corner?

Well, the birds loved it!  By end of day Saturday, there were three eggs in it!

Sunday morning, one hen ran over to the lean-to and immediately laid her egg in the box.

It's like Easter every day, here on the farm.  You find hidden treats all over!

Growing like a weed - an update on Cupcake

Our little duckling, Cupcake, turned two weeks old on Sunday.  She's already almost as tall as her mamma broody hen when she stands upright!  It's amazing how fast she is growing.

For the last week or so we had been letting the new family out to range each morning and then shooing them back into the baby coop at night.  Saturday night, though, Josh and I went out for dinner and his mother closed the birds up for us.  I figured I would get the pair moved over when we got home, but Cupcake made her way up the ramp and they snuggled into a corner of the adult hen house so I left them there.  Now they are mixed in all the time with the other birds and seem to be doing fine.

This morning when I opened the door, Cupcake ran out and started playing in a puddle.  I decided it was time to give her the baby pool so she could swim more extensively than she's able to do in the basin in the coop.  I got it down from the rafters in the garage and filled it up.  I put some bricks in it so she'd be able to get in and out.

When it was all set up, I picked her up and put her in the water so she'd see it was there.  She promptly ran out and went back to her mud puddle.

I guess it's true of children from any species: the mud puddle is always the most fun place to be!

Curtains for the coop

Our coop expansion project has lasted longer than expected, as usually happens when you're trying to do construction in the spring and deal with weather delays as well as "life" delays when other things come up.  

Part of the expansion entails moving the nesting boxes so that they can be accessed from outside the run.  This has thrown the girls off in a couple ways.  For a while we simply had fewer nesting boxes available.  Then Josh made more, but they were in a different spot and no one seemed to know they were there.  In the meantime, the baby chickens commenced throwing all the straw out of the new nests.  I would fill them back and up and by the end of the day, they'd be empty again!  It was exasperating!

So the result was that all the adults were attempting to lay in just four nesting boxes.  As you can imagine, this created new issues.  In the morning, when most of them lay, there would be birds trying to climb in two to a box and sometimes they would even peck and squawk at each other.  The nests were overflowing with eggs and, as a result, some got cracked and broken.  Then the birds began eating the eggs...

Bad news all around!

So I researched what to do with some of these problems, and I kept coming back to nesting box curtains.  I suggested this to Josh and he laughed out-loud.  But I decided to try it.  Nothing fancy, just an old sheet stapled up and cut in the middle of each box so that it could be tied back.  

The idea is that it blocks the entrance a little, making the nest darker and not so readily visible.  The hens like the privacy for laying their eggs.  It also makes it harder to see what's in the nest when a chicken walks by.  A lot of the reason they eat eggs or go broody, is just seeing a nest full of eggs sitting there.  I'm hoping that it will also help hold some of the straw inside.  

I made the curtains for all of the nesting boxes, old and new.  I also stood there for a while and any time a chicken hopped in one of the four that they all prefer, I moved her into a new nest.  Eventually they began to push the straw how they like it and some even laid eggs in the new boxes.  I'm hopeful that we are headed towards a solution.

And, the curtains are cute if nothing else!