The great rooster lottery

From the day we brought our ten chicks home we have been asking the eternal question: how many hens and how many roosters?

Some chicken breeds produce chicks whose sex can easily be determined. Our neighbour bought some Red Rock Cross chicks (a cross between Rhode Island Red and Plymouth Rock) and it was easy to pick only pullets because the male chicks have a white spot on their heads. With the breed of our chicks, Buff Orpington, there is no way to tell other than waiting 4 or 5 weeks for the physical and behavioural differences between the genders to start appearing.

That hasn't stopped Kim. It's easy to tell she used to be a Science teacher because every day she has performed an in-depth comparative analysis of the chicks. At first she distinguished the larger chicks from the smaller chicks. But could she conclude the larger ones were male? Not necessarily. Then she distinguished the birds that were developing their feathers more quickly from those that matured more slowly. Then the more curious chicks from the more timid, and the more aggressive feeders from the ones that allowed themselves to be pushed out of the way. The problem was, we didn't know what any of these meant or whether they were even linked to the chicks' gender. So every day the verdict changed, ranging from 9 roosters and 1 hen to 9 hens and 1 rooster, with everything in between.

It looks like all we needed to make a more accurate assessment was a bit of patience. The chicks are now more than 4 weeks old, and regardless of their maturity (which we are judging by the completeness of their feathering) differences are becoming apparent in their tail feathers and their combs. It looks like the cockerels (the roosters to be) are developing bigger and redder combs, and have tail feathers that at this point look like a fluffy bunny tail, while the pullets' tail feathers are straighter.

We think this is a hen. What big feet.

We think these are roosters.

Today's count: 6 roosters and 4 hens. And I am absolutely sure of one thing: that the count tomorrow will be different than the one today.

I have learned through this process how hard it is to take a picture of a chicken. They will just not stay still long enough to zoom, focus and shoot. And if they're not running away from the camera they're making for my toes, which apparently are tasty (or maybe look like worms...)

It's hot - really hot

Was it last week I was complaining about the fact that summer had yet to appear, after a spring that was unbelievably cool and wet? Someone must have been listening, because the sun came out this week and now we're sweltering. It's 35 degrees in the shade on the verandah today.

Such hot weather has forced some changes in work routines around here. We have been painting our outbuildings this week (workshop, chicken coop and tool shed), something that is not generally advised in such sunny, hot weather because the paint dries too quickly. So we've been up-and-at-'em much earlier than usual, trying to get a coat of paint on while the air is still cool. Then I move to garden tasks dictated not by what's most urgent, but by which tasks can be done in the shade. One nice thing is that the spring flush of weed growth has slowed right down, and for the first time since March I feel almost on top the maintenance of the perennial beds - almost.

I pulled up our garlic today, and it was a moment to celebrate: our first Mucky Boots crop grown from Mucky Boots seed - or, in this case, bulb. I'm not sure how much seed saving I'm going to do in the next year or two - I feel like my hands are quite full already. But it's awfully nice to think that this garlic is ours, from top to bottom.

Vegetable update (and some poppies)

You have kindly given me free rein to post as many blog entries about poppies as I want. To celebrate, here's another one. This gorgeous variety has looked just like this for a few days - I initially thought it was just on the verge of opening, but if that's the case, it's either stuck or has had second thoughts.

Some of the poppies I have shown you (like this one) are practically as big as dinner plates.

But Mother Nature is never dull or boring, because here's the poppy I discovered today in the middle of the herb bed.

And just in case the chamomile and lemon balm leaves don't give you enough of an idea of scale, here's a close-up.

Is that not the cutest thing?

I spotted that poppy while I was in the vegetable garden harvesting a few things for supper. Carrots, for one. At the risk of sounding insufferable (or jinxing next-year's carrots), my carrots are a masterpiece. Long, straight, blemish-free, tasty as anything. This has been a good year for carrots.

And a good year for lettuce, too. Day after day of cool and rainy weather may depress me, but the lettuce couldn't be happier.

This time last year I was having trouble keeping the lettuce from bolting, but this year it's still crisp and juicy and fresh.

Unfortunately it's not me who is finding my cabbages crisp and juicy and fresh. I haven't had a chance to, yet, because something else is getting there before me.

The heads are just starting to be formed, as you can see, but if you looked closer you'd see pretty gross larval kinds of blobs tucked in among the leaves. Now that I've noticed I've started flushing them out every day with water, but I'm not entirely confident I'm getting them all. There could well be little surprises waiting for us when we eat these cabbages...

Convert

I haven't exactly been enamoured of our gooseberry bushes. We have six or seven of them and last year I was completely confused about when to pick them - they tasted awful when they were green and they tasted just as awful when they were red. Plus, as I wrote here, weeding around them was an occupational hazard. I wasn't sure these bushes had a future at Mucky Boots.

Well, I never did get around to taking them out, and last week I noticed the beautiful (if awful tasting) green berries hiding beneath the leaves and decided to give them one more chance. I went looking on the Internet and found Tigress in a Jam, who had a recipe just for me: Golden Jelly. It called for a couple of pounds of green gooseberries (which I learned are full of pectin) and some lavender sprigs, which are in plentiful supply around here these days. Perfect.

Except that when I went out yesterday to pick the berries, I found the birds had been there before me, and the most I could scrounge was about 3/4 of a pound. The end result didn't even fill a jar (which is why you can see the foam on top - normally this would be skimmed off while it cooked, but I didn't want to lose a single drop). But oh, it is lovely! Soft and fragrant and not too sweet. I am now a convert. I may even plant more gooseberry bushes, just for this jelly.

On the way back to the house after taking the jelly photo I saw this: William and Petunia. Bookends.

Anti-ouch ointment

I've been cruising around the Internet looking for things to do with some of the herbs and flowers growing here at Mucky Boots - in particular, ideas for using calendula, which I grew from seed this year and which has just started to flower.

Calendula is good for helping skin irritations, abrasions and burns heal, so some kind of salve or ointment seemed a good bet. Comfrey is good for the same thing, and it's growing everywhere here. The recipe I eventually found used both, plus lavender.

The first step is to put an ounce each of calendula blossoms, lavender flowers and comfrey leaves in a jar and cover them with about two cups of sweet almond oil. That's what I did today. It's going to sit in the sun for about two weeks to infuse, after which I will strain out the vegetable matter. The infused oil will be gently heated with some beeswax and the result, when cool, should be a nice salve to use on all of the bites, scrapes and burns I seem to accumulate.

The big move and the pleasures of chicken TV

Yesterday we moved the chickies to their grown-up home: the chicken coop. This was not as simple as it sounds, because the coop needed significant work before it could be deemed habitable for our chicken family.

We began with a major cleaning. The previous owner had removed all the used bedding before she left, but the coop hadn't been scrubbed in a long, long time. So wearing masks and rubber gloves and long sleeves and pants, we spent the day with the power washer and scrub brushes, cleaning out all the petrified chicken poop stuck to the walls and floor.

The worst (if you have a sensitive constitution you may want to skip to the next paragraph) was cleaning behind the nest boxes: there was a gap between the boxes and the wall where the chickens would sit and shit, so there were about six inches worth of poop needing removal. Yuck. Kim being Kim, she fixed the problem by attaching an extra board (a nicely rustic one) to cover the gap. It looks so good you can hardly tell it's a recent addition.

The coop took about three days to dry out, at which point it was time to whitewash. Whitewash is the traditional way to paint the inside of animal enclosures: it's cheap, easy to make and apply, and when it dries it fills all the little holes insects live in. There are many recipes for traditional whitewash, some with 12 steps and many ingredients, and some with one step and two ingredients: hydrated lime (not the lime you would use in the garden) and water. We opted for the simple approach. It took us a bit of trial and error to get the proportions right - it ended up being thicker than water, but not as thick as paint, which made it very messy when we slapped and slopped it all over the inside of the coop. Goggles, hats and gloves were important, because it can be irritating to the skin. It didn't look so white when we applied it, but when we came back the next day it was practically blinding.

Yesterday Kim spent the day covering assorted knotholes with hardware cloth to keep out rodents that might be attracted by the chickies' food, fixing a few loose boards, replacing the rusted out hinges and latches on the people door and the chicken door, installing a full-size waterer and feeder, and stringing a 100 foot extension cord from the workshop to provide the power for heat lamps. About supper time we moved the chickies from the chicken tractor where they'd been hanging out for the day, into the coop. The photo at the top of the blog makes it look like they're huddled under the heat lamp for survival, but in reality they were just a little freaked out by us treading in their territory, trying to adjust the height of the waterer. When we checked on them at bedtime they were busy eating and pecking and scratching and pooping, just like little chickies should.

Now, this business of chicken TV. Not chickens on TV, but chickens being TV. When you pop by to see how the chickens are doing and then realize it's two hours later and you've done nothing but watch the little birds as they go about the business of being chickens, well, that's chicken TV. I didn't fully appreciate the phenomenon until two days ago when Kim spent most of the day in a Muskoka chair parked beside the chicken tractor...just watching.

Little chickies' big adventure

Today was a big day at Mucky Boots: the chickies went outside!

This required some planning and preparation, since the chicks are only three weeks old. We needed to keep them warm but not too warm, and safe from anything that might like to eat them, like the resident eagles. Kim has been thinking about this for a while with her builder's thinking cap on, and a couple of days ago we started building a chicken tractor.

I don't know how chicken tractors got their name, but they are a kind of moveable coop for chickens. The idea is that you move the tractor to a different spot of grass every couple of days, giving the chickens the benefit of grass and bugs. In fixed coops, the chicken yard tends to turn into a dust yard, and fresh greens and bugs are good for chickens and result in more nutritious and tastier eggs. Some people just let their chickens roam free, but with a dog, two cats and a resident family of eagles, that isn't an option for us.

We built the tractor for about $60. It is screened with chicken wire on three sides, and has a plywood wall with a hobbit door on the fourth side. Half of it is covered with plastic, to provide more shelter from wind and rain, and half of it is open to the sky. It has a heat lamp to help keep the chickies warm for the next week or two until their feathers are more fully developed, and a waterer and a feeder. Everything a chickie could want.

We finished construction this morning, and by about 11:00 it had warmed up enough we decided it was time to bring the chickies out. They were very hesitant at first, sticking close together and doing a lot of goose-necking. But pretty quickly they started to explore, pecking and scratching at the grass and even catching and eating some bugs - good little chickies!

They're back indoors now, in their plastic crates in the bathroom - sleeping, the last time I checked in on them. Tuckered out after their big adventure.

It will be another week or so until they make the big move out of the house and into the chicken coop. They'll have lots of fun exploring the yard attached to the coop, but we'll continue to use the tractor, too.

I have to say, these little chickies are not at their most attractive these days. Kim says they're at "the dinosaur stage." They remind me of myself when I was thirteen: gawky, big feet, funny hair. I turned out alright, and I expect these chickies will, too.

Er...poppies

Yes, I know I promised the end of all the poppy pictures. But you just had to see the supernatural one that flowered this week. Wow.

The one below is growing right next door to the one shown above - it looks like it has had a nervous breakdown on top of a really bad hair day.

Now that I have broken my promise, here are two more poppies at the other end of the spectrum. No nervous breakdowns here - just simple, cool elegance.

Peas

I'm having a few issues with my peas. You might remember I struggled with mice eating the newly planted seeds - I thought I might not end up with any peas this year. Ha. Ha ha.

There is a chaotic jungle of pea plants in the pea bed. Part of it is my fault and part is the mice's fault. It turns out the mice didn't eat as many of the seeds as I thought they had. So when I planted them for the second (and the third) time, I was creating some trouble for myself. It would have been okay if I had thinned the plants once they started to sprout. But the seedlings were getting nibbled (mice again) and I thought I would keep them all a while longer for insurance. Only I sort of forgot to get around to thinning them until it was too late. Much too late.

So I have way too many plants in the bed, making it hard to spot the peas for picking. The other problem is that I planted three kinds of peas: snow, snap and shelling. Of course I planted them in orderly sections so I would know what was what. But I think the mice did a little shuffling - probably laughing all the while. I'm serious: I know they carried newly planted peas to other locations, because I now have pea plants growing in the oddest places. So I think the mice are responsible for the fact the three types of peas have crossed my carefully planned boundaries and are happily intermingling. That would be okay - I'm not that anally-retentive. But it means I don't know what to pick when.

The snow peas are meant to be picked early, when they are beautifully thin and svelte. The snap peas are meant to be picked when their pods feel plump and juicy. It's the pods that are so tasty - any peas inside are irrelevant. But the shelling pea pods need to be plump, too - only they need to be full of peas, because you don't eat the pod.

So there's a bed full of wildly mixed up pea plants, and I'm staring at what I think is a snow pea. But is it really a snow pea, or is it really a snap or shelling pea that I should leave until it plumps up? If I leave it, I might get a tough, aged snow pea that's not worth eating. On the other hand, what a waste if if I guess it's a snow pea and pick it and it's really a shelling pea.

To complicate things even further, I clearly have something to learn about when to pick shelling peas. I managed to find a pod in the midst of the pea chaos that I was quite confident was a shelling pea pod, and it looked in its prime: plump, firm, just ripe for picking I thought. There it is, in the picture at the top of the post. Here's what it looked like when I opened it up.

Not quite what I was hoping for. You practically need a magnifying glass to see those peas. They were tasty, though.

I did manage to locate, correctly identify and pick a handful of snow peas yesterday, and they wound up in the salad I made for supper: leaves picked from the still growing cabbages (shredded), garlic scapes (sliced), the snow peas (slivered), and green onions (cut up fine), all from the garden. With a dressing made with good mayo, curry powder and lime juice. Yum.

Mystery herb

I need some help. Please. I can't identify this herb that is growing in the vegetable garden. There's a lovely, healthy clump of it and at first I thought it was chamomile, until I grew some myself and realized they look very different.

The flowers are about an inch across, and the plant itself is about two feet tall. The leaves taste unpleasantly bitter, so that can't be the part of the plant you use!

Any and all suggestions welcome...

Also flowering in the herb garden is a clump of sage - how lovely!

June glory

My favourite flower, hands down, is the peony. I love how gorgeously blowsy they are, how they bloom with such abandon they need help to stay upright. They give me all the pleasure of an impressionist still life with no artist required. And they make me think of my of my grandmother who grew them in her West Vancouver garden.

Usually it feels like I don't have enough time to appreciate them while they are blooming - after all, June is the second busiest month for a teacher, after September. Now in my post-teaching life, I have had more time to enjoy the peonies in the garden this year - but still not enough time, since they don't last very long. But that makes them even more special.

There are lots of peonies at Mucky Boots, and every day they bloom I thank the gardeners who came before me who put them there. Especially the one who thought to surround them with purple scented geraniums.

Carrots

You may remember that one of my gardening resolutions for the year was to grow better carrots. Last year's carrots were pretty much pathetic: stunted, forked, riddled with black lines. Ick. We ate some, but it wasn't the pleasure it should have been.

Today I turned a corner in my development as a gardener: I pulled the first two carrots from this year's garden and they are perfect! Even though I picked them early, they are long, beautifully tapered, and completely unblemished. Of course now that I write that, an infestation of some weird bug will descend tomorrow and turn them all into the mutant carrots I had last year....

But for now they are wonderful, and I am feeling quite tickled with myself.

The secret? Using row covers from the time I seeded until the greens were about 8 inches high (I would have left the cover on longer, but it was needed elsewhere). And I think planting in a bed where I grew potatoes last year helped, too - all the digging and re-digging and digging again for all the little AWOL potatoes meant the soil was deeply dug and beautifully loose, perfect for growing long, straight carrots.

We are big chicks...

... and we have wings - and even the start of some tail feathers!

Now that our chicks are a fast-growing reality, instead of just a plan, we have had to hurry up and finish the repairs to the chicken coop - those little fuzzballs are going to outgrow their plastic crates pretty darn quick, and the coop needs to be ready. So we have been unloading all the garden furniture we stored there over the winter, and finding new homes for the other odds and sods we have housed temporarily in the coop. This week we'll scrub out the coop and whitewash it inside.

And remember the new gate Kim built back in March?

Since then Kim built the new gate for the orchard, and another one for our neighbour, and now the chicken gate just doesn't look so good anymore: earnest, sincere and solid, but lacking a touch of whimsy. So while I was weed-whacking out the chicken yard, Kim got busy building, and here's the new gate. Much better!

First strawberries of the year

And did they ever taste good!

Chicken nursery renos

If you have come to know Kim at all through this blog you'll know she's a builder at heart. Take those builder's instincts and add a newly hatched love for her little chicks, and what do you get? Renovations to the chicken nursery.

The nursery started as a perfectly adequate plastic box with wood shavings in the bottom, a waterer and a feeder. Everything a young chick could ask for. But not good enough for Kim.

She started to worry that the chicks didn't have enough room. So we added a second plastic box, a second waterer and a second feeder, plus a rotating schedule of swap-outs from box to box so the chicks would all continue to be comfortable with each other.

Then she read that chicks need to learn how to perch on a round stick of some kind. Apparently that's how grown birds sleep at night. So she added a roost in each box. The chicks initially viewed it as an obstacle in their path from one side of the box to the other, but some are now getting the hang of it.

Some are even learning to fall asleep on it. These chicks are about to do the beak-first nosedive into the wood shavings we now recognize as chicks' usual way of falling asleep.

The chicks are very active, and flap around a lot, so the last addition was a screened-in lid for each box, to keep the chicks safe where they belong.

So far we can't tell any of these chicks apart except for one. This one is noticeably lighter in colour than the others, bigger in size, and seems to have a different temperament as well: calmer, friendlier, more curious. This little chick has quickly become Kim's favourite, and we have decided that if it turns out to be a little rooster, it will be the one we keep.

Scapes

Toady we had our first real meal of the season from the garden. Not completely, but substantially. It was prompted by the discovery of garlic scapes in the garden.

Scapes are the flower of the garlic plant, and their appearance tells you the garlic is getting close to being ready to harvest. When they curl around in a full circle you can either wear them as bracelets or cook with them. We did both.

We made a frittata with chard and spinach from the garden, seasoned with the sliced scapes, onions and feta, and had it with a salad - also from the garden - decorated with nasturtium petals. Yum.