Poor Chrissy
As I shared before, one of our chicks has cross beak (also known as scissor beak). Apparently, this is a know genetic issue with Easter Eggers. We named her Criss-Cross and call her Chrissy.
There’s not much you can do for a scissor-beaked chicken. The misaligned beak effects their ability to eat and drink, making it hard to impossible to pick up seeds and bugs. If the deformity is mild to moderate, the chick has a good chance of survival.
As you can see, Chrissy, has a severe deformity.
Chrissy has been doing okay so far, but she is quite a bit smaller than the other chicks. When she gets older, I will need to figure out how to continue her on crumbles, instead of pellets, and a bowl waterer, instead of a nipple waterer like I have for the big chickens. She will not be able to eat and drink the way the other chickens do. At the same time, I don’t want the other chickens to get into the food and water designated for her.
I read that you need to trim the upper beak frequently to prevent overgrowth, so that was one of the projects this past weekend. The beak is made of keratin, just like finger nails. The instructions were to identify where the quick is and trim tiny bits of beak without cutting into the quick.
Well, as usual, things did not go as easily as the instructions made it sound and we all ended up a bit traumatized.
I don’t know if she twitched, or I did, but I ended up cutting into the quick. There was a lot of blood and, just like a person will shake a hand after smashing a finger, Chrissy shook her head. That meant there was blood everywhere – blood on us, blood in the sink, blood on the Chrissy, blood on the wall. Fortunately, I did have styptic powder on hand. I dipped her beak several times until it at least slowed enough to start clotting.
We put her in the bathtub to recover. Later, I gave her a bath to get all the blood off her feathers. Chickens are attracted to red and if a chicken has a bloody wound the others can go berserk and peck the chicken to death. So, I needed to be sure there was no visible evidence or smell of blood.
After the bath, she did as any bird does – she groomed herself. This, of course, broke open the barely clotted scab and she groomed herself with her bloody beak. Time for another bath.
Is there a happy ending to this story? Yes. Chrissy is fine and is back with the other chicks.
A task that should have taken five minutes to complete ended up taking several hours, counting the clean up, giving her time to recuperate, watching the action of the other chicks when we put her back with them.
It will be awhile before I try that again!
Potato Harvest
Growing potatoes in containers was one of my experiments for this gardening year.
I planted one seed potato each at the bottom of two extra-large containers. As the plants grew, I covered them with more dirt, leaving only a few inches of the plant exposed, and kept doing that until the container was filled with soil. I read that when the plant dies back, it’s time to harvest.
What I didn’t do was note the planting date, I just know it was sometime in March. About three weeks ago one of the plants started to die. However, it only started dying back and never seemed to die completely. That prompted me to look more closely at harvesting information. At that point, I realized that the potatoes had been in the ground about 16 weeks, longer than the 12-15 weeks I was seeing as an estimate. Based on my reading, I was afraid they might have rotted, so, today was harvest time.
The nice thing about harvesting potatoes from a container … no digging. Just dump it out and paw through the nice, loose dirt to find the potatoes.
From two seed potatoes, I harvested around five pounds of potatoes.
Many of the potatoes are very small. The plants obviously could have been left in the ground longer. I’m still pleased with the yield and consider the experiment mostly a success.
I need to “cure” them for awhile before storing or using them. The dirt is going to the compost pile and next time I will start with fresh dirt to discourage development of potato bugs.
Other things learned that I need to do next time: 1) do more thorough research about growing and harvesting potatoes before planting, 2) Yukon Gold reportedly do not keep well, so, try a different variety like Pontiac Red, 3) use potato grow bags and free up my extra-large containers for a different crop, 4) more than one seed potato could have been used in each container, 5) figure out options for longer-term potato storage so larger crops don’t go to waste.
There was one bonus element to the day – a treat for the chickens!
No Ping?
I had noticed that I was not seeing canning lids on the store shelves this season, but shrugged it off as I had only looked in three stores. I didn’t realize that last year’s Great Canning Jar and Lid Shortage has extended to be this year’s Canning Lid Shortage.
I have plenty of jars, so didn’t have a problem with that last year and I found lids on-line so I felt fairly secure. Unfortunately, I was duped by the website into thinking they were branded Ball lids, only to find out they are off-brand. They seemed to work well enough for the small amount of jam I made but I was very leary about potentially wasting my time and food and canned nothing else last year.
It was fortuitous, then, that one of the You Tubers I follow posted a video about the shortage of canning lids. Check it out here:
NO Canning Lids!! Is it Time to REUSE Them??? – YouTube
I had forgotten about Tattler Reusable Canning Lids. In truth, when I first learned of them years ago, I disregarded them as an option. I was comfortable with what I had and the Tattlers were just too different from what I was used to using. Besides, the disposables were cheap and inexpensive.
I feel re-assured by Sara’s video about these reusable lids. Further, she is right that, by continuing to use the disposable lids, we are still overly-dependent on the store. Besides, a dozen Tattler lids cost $11.99 a dozen for wide mouth lids and rings; the least expensive branded lids I could find on-line were $13.99 (compared to the $2-$3 price of a couple of years ago).
The stars are aligned: this is the year to give Tattlers a try. My order is on it’s way and should be here just in time to use on the peaches we are picking up next weekend.
I sure am going to miss the “Ping!” though.
You Are Enough
I don’t know about anyone else but I need this reminder on a regular basis.
First Pepper
Everything’s exciting when you have a garden growing. Today, while watering, I noticed my Cowhorn Pepper plant has an actual Cowhorn Pepper on it!
This was an accidental purchase – I thought I was picking up a Coolapeno. I was intrigued by a pepper that has the jalapeno flavor without the spiciness. When I got home, it turns out someone had put a Cowhorn Pepper plant in the Coolapeno tray.
That’s okay though; the Cowhorn Pepper sounds interesting, too. It grows around 10″ long and at 2500 – 5000 on the Scoville scale, it is similar to or a little less hot than a jalapeno. One online article claims it is “a perfect pepper to add a slight bit of heat” to a dish. Now, I’m just waiting for it to ripen and turn red. I look forward to trying it.
Amazon had Prime Day this week and I acquired two new preparedness tools.
Trail Cam. I’ve been concerned about security on my property; however, I have struggled to commit to buying a security camera. Finding a camera with the features I think I need at the price I’m willing to pay wasn’t going well. It was just too much money to make a mistake on.
Someone suggested I look up “trail cam” instead of “security camera” and wouldn’t you know it, trail cams tend to be less expensive. When one I’d been looking at was reduced to just $25 on Prime Day, I snagged it. It will be a great way to begin to learn what features I really need and how useful it will or won’t be to have video surveillance on-site.
Cast Iron Skillet. I’ve been wanting to learn to cook with charcoal. It’s something I haven’t done for decades and I was not good at it. I was a member of the use-a-whole-bottle-of-lighter-fluid-to-light-the-charcoal club.
There is value in adding this to my catalog of Emergency Preparedness skills. Did you know that it takes only fifteen 20-pound bags of charcoal to cook one hot meal a day for one year? In an emergency situation, having a hot meal is not only nourishing to the body but to the spirit.
Unfortunately (or should I say, as usual?), my aspiration in this regard has had a lot of false starts.
I bought a Volcano Grill way back in 2010. (Yes, I’ve been dragging my feet for over 10 years). I felt it would make a great tool to have in an emergency situation because it’s portable and it can use charcoal, wood, or propane as a fuel source. However, I never even took it out of the box.
I bought a bag of charcoal in 2019 so I could start learning how to use it … I’ve been shifting that unopened bag of charcoal from one room to another for the past two years.
Last summer I told Oscar he needed to get it out of the barn so “we” could start using it. (I said “we” but actually mean him.) He never did, though he did say he found it.
Then I realized I didn’t have appropriate cookware for cooking on charcoal or wood – I had given away my cast iron cookware a long time ago.
Now that I have a cast iron skillet I will hopefully come up with no more delays/excuses for starting this endeavor.
Plan B
One thing that has been consistent since beginning this journey is the application of Plan B: “Well, that didn’t work. Next?”
The priority project of this weekend was to revise the brooder. Yes, the brooder box we just put the chicks in last weekend.
When we originally built the brooder, we put the door on one end. The day after putting them in it, while doing our daily handling of the chicks, we realized the placement of the entry was problematic.
First, my knees don’t squat that low anymore. Well, I can get down, but someone has to be there to restore me to an upright position. That is actually a multi-step process that requires me rolling around on the ground until I can get on all fours, and then kneel on one knee, and then get pulled up. It’s not the least bit dignified. Sitting on a footstool wasn’t a solution; I still needed someone to pull me up.
The second problem we discovered was, when we appear at the door of the brooder, the chicks run to the other end of the box – 4 feet away. Oscar had to climb into the box to retrieve the more stubborn of the chicks. Then he had to wiggle himself back out of the box: not an easy feat for a 6-foot person. After that experience, he wasn’t laughing at me anymore.
So, except for that day of discovery, the chicks did not get handled all week. I want the chicks to be well socialized to us so they need to be handled daily. The entry had to be changed.
Our Plan B was to build a top lid. We removed the chicks from the brooder. Yes, Oscar had to climb in again to accomplish it. While we were working, the chicks sat in the lime green bucket I use for mixing soil.
Chicks in a bucket
We built and attached the new brooder lid, cleaned out the brooder box, put DE under the brooder, and put fresh bedding in it. Then the chicks went back in. Now we have it set up so I can take care of the chicks myself if necessary.
The chicks are three weeks old. They have begun feathering out and changing colors, making identification even harder. Here are their three-week-old pictures:
Thor
Chrissy – see how her beak is misaligned?
Toast
Chipmunk – I love her speckles and eyeliner!
HIDK1
HIDK2
HIDK3
HIDK4
HIDK5
(HIDK = heck, I don’t know)
Until next week … 😉
Persistence
Nature repeatedly amazes and impresses me with it’s persistence.
One of the bare-root boysenberries I got this spring arrived dried out and it looked dead. I planted it though and it surprised me by sprouting a couple of little leaves. Recently those leaves died off and I was certain the plant had finally perished. But no, it’s trying again. Tonight I found new growth!
Such an inspiration for our own lives to find out what we are meant to do in this life and to keep on keeping on!
The Chicks are Gone!
Yesterday was moving day for the chicks and they are out of the bathtub and into their brooder box in the chicken run. Just in time, too. Besides the jumping out of the tub trick that a couple of them had discovered, the smell of nine chicks in an enclosed area had started to kick up a notch, so it was time for them to go outside.
I’m sure it was scary with all the new night noises but they came through just fine. Until this morning, when it started raining. Apparently the sound of the rain on the tarp that covers the run was just too much. It was the first time they’ve heard rain and it was loud. I could hear the chick who has proven to be a drama queen screaming from all the way inside the house. (It was the same one who screamed bloody murder when she jumped out of the tub the other day.) That chick has got some lungs on her!
Unfortunately, that chick also has scissor beak – her beak is misaligned. It wasn’t so bad at first but has progressed to a worrying degree. Often chicks with scissor beak have to be put down but sometimes they manage fine so I’ll keep monitoring her. In the meantime, the crossed beak makes her recognizable and she’s been re-named Criss-Cross, or Chrissy for short. She is also the friendliest of all the chicks.
The others that are recognizable are Chipmunk (Monkey for short), Thor, and Toast. The others look too much alike to figure out who’s who. I warned the boys when they named the chicks that the names would likely be changed as each developed more recognizable traits. Their legs have thickened so much that next week I’ll be able to band them. That will really help identify the rest of the crew.
I cleaned out the last of the carrots and a few more peas from the other half of the raised bed. Minus the six or eight used in tonight’s dinner, this is what my final harvest of the spring garden produced:
Next week I’ll prep that end of the bed and plant more green beans.
The beans and squash have been growing like crazy. The borage and nasturtiums have started showing above ground too. After only a week, this is what the bed looks like:
Look how much they’ve grown in just a week!
Just a little bit done this weekend but it’s still progress and I’m grateful for that little bit of progress. 🙂
Continuing Onward
The chicks, as chicks do, are growing both in stature and curiousity.
This morning, Thor somehow managed to jump out of the bathtub and onto the bathroom floor. I think she surprised herself and she started screaming bloody murder until she was returned to her brooder-mates. Last year’s chicks didn’t start escaping from the tub until they were three or four weeks old. I think it’s a good thing these munchkins are going into the brooder box (in the chicken run) this weekend.
I was thrilled to see that some of the seeds I planted last weekend, have started sprouting. New growth in a vegetable garden is always exciting! This weekend I will clear the last of the peas (I did harvest quite a few peas after all) and carrots from the other half of the raised bed and will plant that half in more green beans.
Another plan for this coming weekend is to get pavers to put the three remaining pots of boysenberries on along the part of the fence we put up so they can start vining on it. One of the bare root boysenberry plants has completely given up the ghost. I’m not completely surprised – this was the one that had arrived all dried out and dead looking. It did sprout a couple of small leaves but it did continued to struggle until those leaves finally just disappeared this week.
It’s supposed to be hot this weekend so the only other project is to finish sterilizing the small coop so we can separate the darn rooster from the hens. I had wanted him to be out of sight of the coop, which is in the backyard, but now that summer is here it is just too hot to put him in the front yard. I know the separation will be hard for him but the hens need a vacation from him!
It was kind of hard to go back to work this week but this is how I’ll be able to keep moving forward with my “farm” plans, so, back to work I went.
The Cheeps are Well
The two visiting grandsons and I have done a few things this week but not much as I had planned/hoped. It’s been hot and/or rainy and since I wilt in the heat and melt in the rain we’ve only worked in between the two.
The chicken coop got cleaned out but not painted. The fence got started but we had to take a few days to flatten the cattle panels so it didn’t get finished. Half the garden got cleared out of the spring plantings and I’ve planted two kinds of squash, borage, mini bell peppers, oregano, nasturtiums, along with a few pots of flowers that somehow made their way into my cart at Home Depot. We even went and visited the baby goats at Wilding Acres Farm.
I’ve actually made decent meals while they’ve been here. Not coming home from work exhausted certainly has it’s perks in that department. Along with that, they’ve enjoyed the carrots and peas from the garden, the strawberry jam made earlier this spring, and the peach jam made last summer – but aren’t really impressed that it’s all been homemade.
Of course, the highlight was getting the new chicks. The boys (including Oscar) have been playing with … um I mean, getting them used to being handled by humans. They are still in the bathtub brooder and have settled down nicely. I’ve switched them from the red heat lamp to the Brinsea brooder heater and they have become used to that now.
The hatchery marked the blue layers with orange on their faces but I don’t think that will last long. I got leg bands but can’t put them on until they are two weeks old. So, I took pictures of their heads and backs to, hopefully, help identify them later. The boys spent a good hour naming each of them.
Let’s meet them:
I already have my favorites.
Two Chickens Homestead 
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