Author: sanebishop

Misfit farmer, humor writer, keeper of bees, seller of honey, etc...
chickens, Pleasant Hill Ponderings Blog

Against the Ropes – a chicken saga, part 1

sanebishop

Once, there were two brothers who worked together as a team. They took care of their flock, played together, and often dust-bathed in the same hole. One brother was the leader and the other brother was okay with being number two……and then one day, everything changed.

Andy & Mini

It’s a sick feeling when you go out to the chicken pasture and realize that no one is there…..that feeling of apprehension merely heralded in the roller coaster of emotions and events that would soon take over our entire weekend and continue throughout the coming weeks.

As I searched for my flock, I found my boys covered in blood and could only imagine that my worst chicken fears had come true….that we had an intruder. I quickly discovered there was no intruder…..just that the days of calm brotherhood were over.

Mini, a Golden Comet, had been head rooster since the brooder box days, and Andy, our enormous, gentle, White Langshan had always just accepted “roo number two” abuse with easygoing grace…..never rocking the boat. Well, that Friday the boat capsized, and I found myself out in the middle of a wet pasture, in my pajamas, standing between two fighting, mad roosters.

There were few options available to me. Take one boy out and call it done, accepting the fact that he could never go back…..and how could I choose between my boys? My other option was to let them fight it out in hopes that they could come to some sort of rarely heard of rooster peace.

For better or worse, I made my choice. I moved back and stood next to the pasture fence with the hens, who had been hiding in a spare barn stall, scared of their own protectors.

Watching roosters fight, no holds barred, is one of the most distressing and painful things I’ve ever seen…..and maybe this was worse because these were MY birds. Though we had trimmed their spurs just two nights previously, it didn’t make much of a difference since the boys were prone to biting rather than spurring.

Once the dust settled, it was obvious we had a New World Order in chicken land. The excitement that usually comes with spring had quickly vanished, and the stress of the coming weeks seemed likely to overcome us all….human and chicken alike.

chickens, Pleasant Hill Ponderings Blog, This Old House

My morning on the farm…..

sanebishop

I love days where I get to spend a little extra time on the farm, before the other responsibilities of my day start knocking on my door. This morning was particularly nice, as the horrid wind had stopped, the sun had come out, and Mini was in one of his rare good moods. Since it was so nice….I decided to share.

Decked out in my farm gear, which translates to Stephen’s sweat pants and coat, old shoes, and armed with two buckets.
Out to the chicken pasture I go to let out the tribe, gather any eggs, fill up the feeder and waterer.
The chickens run to their favorite morning spot by the barn to dust bath. I’ve actually caught Mini in a rare moment of relaxation – the boy never cuts loose.
While the chickens enjoy the sun, I climb up into the barn loft to get some fresh hay for the nesting boxes.
Taking a short cut through the horse corral, I manage to step in a big pile of poop.
Which reminds me that I can’t leave out the chicken’s buddies, Cody and Jill.
So far we’ve had a two egg morning…..thanks to Josephine and Pearla
Chickens are as happy as ever…..piled up and enjoying the morning.

This is what mornings on the farm are like – chickens, eggs, poop, hay, dirt. All the nice things that, despite being dusty and outside, make you feel real clean.

~ Natalie

garden, Pleasant Hill Ponderings Blog

Starting Seeds

sanebishop

Last week, we started our garden indoors with onions, lavender, and rosemary. Both lavender and rosemary take almost a month to germinate, so starting them early is a necessity if they’re going to be ready for planting by April 12, the date of the average last frost. To start them, I’m using little two inch pots made of strips of newspaper. I made them with this wooden pot maker: http://www.amazon.com/PotMaker%C2%AE-The-Original-Pot-Maker/dp/B00062ZNXQ  Once I got the hang of using it, the pot maker worked really well.

our newspaper pots

Although onions germinate quickly, they need an extra-long growing season, often five months or more, so giving them a head start indoors can ensure plenty of time to develop from seeds to scallions to nice, respectable onions. This year, we’re planting Red Creole Onions, an heirloom variety well-suited for the South.  I was surprised to learn that the South’s most popular onion, the Vidalia Onion, is actually a hybrid, not an heirloom. Although Vidalia Onions taste great, I wouldn’t be able to save seed from year to year if I grew them.

okay, worms look gross, but their castings are black gold.

For starting the onions, I used plastic cell trays, and out of 72 seeds planted, 68 germinated. I should also give kudos to my red wigglers. They’ve been working hard all fall and winter eating vegetable scraps, and I now have enough worm castings to fertilize my seedlings in a few weeks once dampening off is no longer a threat. Dampening off happens when new seedlings shrivel up due to various fungi. To prevent this, gardeners use sterile soil media to start seeds. This sterile soil media lacks any nutritional value for plants, so gardeners often water with a weak liquid fertilizer or compost tea to meet the seedlings’ nutritional needs. In a few weeks, I’ll use a compost tea made from worm castings—that is, my own natural MiracleGro 😉

Uncategorized

it all goes dark

sanebishop

Anyone that knows me probably knows that politics are not my “thing.” Oftentimes I find it depressing and just prefer to keep out of it all together. Today, for me, is not that day.

I would like to quote a co-worker of mine, Dan Jolley, who has expressed this concern in much better words than I can:

“A number of Internet sites will not be available tomorrow, as they will go dark in protest of the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) legislation pending in Congress.  I personally agree with SOPA opponents that both bills represent an egregious assault on free speech. This is to let you know some of the sites that will be blacked out tomorrow (censoring themselves the way our government will be able to arbitrarily censor any site if the legislation passes).  Some will be going black for most of the day (such as 8 am – 8 pm), while others will go black for 24 hours.”

Several popular sites include wordpress.com, wikipedia.com, The Internet Archive, and Mozilla.com

As a librarian, archivist, and fiber artist, I know many sites near and dear to my heart that would be shut down, impeded on, or penalized by this legislation (etsy.com, North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, and other archival research websites).

I believe in copyright and the right of a creator, and I also abhor purposeful and harmful plagiarism. But in the academic community, we support fair use of information for the growth of research, education, and critical thinking.

As a librarian, I am not supporting mayhem in the streets. A proper and appropriate balance can be met between protecting copyright holders and educators/artists/researchers. In the words of the Library Copyright Alliance, “There are millions of Internet users who are neither criminal infringers nor content conglomerates, and policies to punish the former or protect the latter can affect broad swaths of innocent users.”

I hope a happy medium can be reached in the future…..and that I won’t lose the joys of etsy anytime soon.

I now, respectfully, descend from my soap box in order to get back to other things….and don’t worry, this is probably the last time you’ll ever hear anything political from me again….after all, this blog is mostly about an old house and chickens. 🙂

Natalie

garden, Pleasant Hill Ponderings Blog

Sultry Sunflowers

sanebishop

Recently we’ve had plenty of rain and wind, even tornadoes, in our area, and last week the sun disappeared altogether. This week the sun is predicted to return, but I’m ready for the return of sunflowers and the warm weather that accompanies them.

Last year, Natalie and I planted sunflowers for the first time and found them very easy to grow. In fact, the sunflower seeds we planted came out of a bird seed mix, and they germinated and grew quickly. Once, I read in some gardening book that you should always plant sunflowers in your field to act as a watering gauge. If the sunflowers start wilting, other crops will soon follow.

Garden box sunflowers

We planted our sunflowers in a garden box facing south where they received the hottest afternoon sun. Even in the heat, they were slow to wilt and seemed to thrive without much extra water, so I don’t know— maybe sunflowers aren’t the best watering gauges.

I do know that our sunflowers were a big hit with gold finches and bees. The gold finches would often eat the seeds hanging upside down on the flower head. Although I saw a few honeybees on the sunflowers, they seemed more popular with a small brown and yellow bees. At any one time, fifty of these little bees might be gathering pollen and nectar off of the same sunflower head.

There’s an online project called the Great Sunflower Project (www.greatsunflower.org) in which you’re supposed to count the number of bees, during a fifteen minute timespan, that you see on a sunflower each month. This year, I think I’ll do that. It will be interesting to see if my new honeybee colonies work the sunflowers like the little native bees did. I’m going to plant a lot more sunflowers this year, so hopefully there will be enough pollen and nectar to go around.  I saved the seeds from last year’s sunflowers, and I’ve also ordered some new heirloom sunflowers seeds called the “The Evening Sun”: http://rareseeds.com/flowers-n-z-1/sunflower/evening-sun-sunflower.html

Well, even though it’s cold outside, all this sunflower talk has at least got me thinking warm thoughts.

garden, Pleasant Hill Ponderings Blog

Old Tradition for a New Year

sanebishop
cash money

In keeping with tradition, I ate collards and black-eyed peas yesterday. The collards represent cash money, and the black-eyed peas represent coins. By eating them on New Year’s day, I’ll supposedly bring in a lot of cash and coins this upcoming year.

I grew two types of collards this fall: southern and Vates’. The southern collards are the ones I remember growing up, and by remember I mean remember smelling. The smell of cooking collards can linger in the air and memory, and it was this pungent smell that deterred me from eating them. When I’ve actually worked up the nerve to eat collards, I can say they taste a lot better than they smell, though I still prefer black-eyed peas on New Year’s day.

Both the southern and Vates’ collards grew well, and both made it through several hard frosts to New Year’s day. Last year, our neighbor grew a big garden of greens, but he lost most of the greens early because it was such a cold winter. Southern collards have thick, leathery leaves and are renown for their hardiness, but the Vates’ collards have also withstood the cold nights.

As far as taste goes, I wasn’t able to tell much difference in taste between the two varieties. The biggest difference was in appearance. The Vates’ collards have a crinkly leaf margin and the southern collards have a smooth, spinach-like leaf margin and texture. To most people though, a collard is a collard, and you either love them or hate them–regardless of the variety.

Southern collard on left; Vates collard on right

History, Pleasant Hill Ponderings Blog, This Old House

Farmhouse Haunting II

sanebishop

I should have knocked on wood.  Lo and behold, a few days after I wrote a post about ghosts, I had my first ghostly encounter. Of course, it was at night, which seems to be a prerequisite for paranormal experiences—at least according to horror movies and ghost hunting TV shows. What time of night it was exactly, I’m not sure, but I woke up to the sound of laughing.

The laughing wasn’t the ghostly part, but it was strange. Natalie occasionally talks in her sleep, and she was apparently laughing in her sleep then. But instead of her normal laugh, it was a child-like giggle. I asked her if was she was having a funny dream, and she responded, obviously still asleep, with the following: “I’m counting without numbers.”

“Okay, that was kind of funny,” I thought, and knowing she was so averse to mathematics, it seemed reasonable to believe she was dreaming about bypassing numbers. I should have gone back to sleep.

Instead, I rolled over and opened my eyes, and what I saw was an old woman standing beside the bed in front of Natalie. The woman just stood there. I couldn’t see anything except her outline and silhouette, in a smoky-gray color. There was no detail to her face or texture to her clothing, but her outline resembled that of a woman in a traditional dress with an apron tied around her waist, with her hair pinned up in a bun (like Granny, for lack of better example, from The Beverly Hillbillies). A few seconds later, the figure just dissipated.

For the two of three seconds I saw or imagined the figure, I didn’t feel scared or threatened, and the woman didn’t look real enough for me to wonder if an intruder was indeed in the house. It was just strange and surreal. Eventually, I closed my eyes and refused to open them again. The next morning, I asked Natalie if she had any dreams. To my surprise, she said she had a funny dream, but couldn’t remember what it was about.

Why a ghost would appear next to Natalie while she was dreaming a funny dream, I don’t know. Maybe the ghost has a sense of humor. This could explain why she appeared a few days after I wrote about never experiencing ghosts in the house. Or, maybe I had been thinking too much about ghosts and imagined the whole episode. Whether or not it was a figment of my imagination, the woman’s figure had a striking resemblance to  Natalie’s great-great grandmother Ponola. Thankfully, Ponola seems like a very pleasant lady in the pictures of I’ve seen of her.

Of course, we’ll keep you posted if we have any other paranormal activity.

Ponola seems happy enough
chickens, Pleasant Hill Ponderings Blog

I’ve got sand in my shoes

sanebishop

As a chicken keeper, I’ve learned chickens don’t handle change that well. It’s one of those things, like flock integration, that just takes time.

Recently we’ve had a lot of rain, resulting in a soppy chicken pasture and a soppy chicken run. In an effort to remedy this pile of muck, I thought a change in the run flooring was in order.

Well, over the weekend (while planting 3,000 trees ….with lots of family help….at Stephen’s grandmother’s home in the sandhills of SC) I came up with a genius idea that I knew would be perfect. We would simply take several boxes of sand back home with us!

“The chickens will be so excited!” I thought, “They love scratching around in Stephen’s compost pile…..sand has got to be way better than that.”

So in went the sand, in one big, happy pile…..just waiting for chickens to come scratch, wallow, and play. The chickens approached and stopped at the door. No one went any further. They backed away wary. Not even their favorite treat could bring them close to the pile of sand.

The chickens were terrified. The floor was different. The poor chickens didn’t know what to do!

All great changes are preceded by chaos –

Eventually nighttime arrived, and none of the chickens could bring themselves to walk past the pile of sand to get in the coop. Stephen and I caved, and we walked down to the coop and helped each chicken past the sand and into the house where they sleepily went to roost.

My guess is that they’ll have to figure out what to do with the sand tomorrow. Like people, chickens apparently need time to adjust to big changes, sand being a “big change” in the eyes of chickens.


History, Pleasant Hill Ponderings Blog, This Old House

Farmhouse Haunting

sanebishop

Occasionally, after people learn that Natalie and I live in an old farmhouse, the topic of conversation turns to ghosts. Apparently, ghosts and farmhouses are closely linked in people’s minds. To date, Natalie and I have never experienced any supernatural behavior in the house, except for that of Chip Coffey (if you’ve never watched Chip Coffey, check out some episodes of Paranormal State or Physic Kids—you’ll laugh.)

Occasionally, the house does smell like Natalie’s great-grandmother, Vicie, or tobacco smoke, yet no one’s smoked in the house for decades. Although the house  creaks and cracks at night, I no longer attribute these noises to dead folks. Still, the noises can be a bit spooky. For me, it didn’t help knowing that Natalie’s great-grandfather was “laid out” in our bedroom. Back then, since they didn’t have funeral homes for visitations, a body was laid out in the home till the funeral. We’ve had quite a few family members laid out in our house…..uncle Abner, however, was resigned to the front porch, that is a funny story for another post.

Great-great-great grandpa Joe Camp standing beside the coffin of his brother Abner

Perhaps the saddest death that occurred in our house was that of Claude, the twelve-year-old son of Natalie’s great-great grandparents, Lawson and Ponola. He died at night of an unknown ailment that caused “flying rheumatism,” or severe pain that “flies” from joint to joint. The very next day, his grieving mother gave birth in the house to another son, Burl. I can’t imagine the emotions that family must have experienced in such a short time.

An addition from Natalie:

Though many people cringe at the number of people that have been laid out here, and that at least one person has died in the house – it really doesn’t bother me. My Poppaw and his father were just two of the many babies born in this house, my mom spent time here as a child, I used to play in the back yard when I was little. This house has LIVED, it’s seen life through multiple generations, joyous times, sad times, hard times. This house’s story is so complete, yet so circular and never ending, and I take comfort in the fact that it’s been here all this time observing, watching us change – we’re all so different, yet still so much the same.

chickens, Pleasant Hill Ponderings Blog

Thankful for Andy

sanebishop

Andy is a very special chicken for quite a few reasons, not all of which are a credit to his character. Just saying.

As a wee chickie, Andy suffered some sort of childhood illness….which will remain nameless because we never figured out what it was. The long and short of it was our smallest chick had pulled out most of  his underside feathers, refused to sit down or eat, and cried constantly.

Andy – 1 week

Andy cried loudly. Andy cried all the time. Andy cried in his sleep. We could hear Andy crying from our bedroom. We could hear Andy crying over the TV. Andy liked to watch TV and that seemed to help sometimes.

In my attempt to “save” Andy on one particularly awful night, I very nearly killed him. After much reading (on the oh so reliable internet) I had narrowed down Andy’s illness to a few things – and promptly decided on a treatment involving a bath and Vaseline.

The bath wasn’t so bad, but the Vaseline was a huge mistake. So at 3 am in the middle of a lightening storm, my husband woke up to me sobbing next to the bed with a trembling and crying chick, because I KNEW deep in my heart, that I had just consigned Andy to an early and painful death.

It was all my fault.

Stephen dutifully got up and gave Andy another bath, toweled his little raw body down with a flannel square cut from his own pajamas, gave Andy back to me, and went right back to sleep.

Doc Martin

With the storm and my medical experiments behind us, Andy and I settled down on the couch with a heating pad and sugar water. We both watched a few episodes of Doc Martin, one of Andy’s favorite shows, and we resolved that I was, obviously, no doctor and that we should go on  to bed.

I set up Andy’s heating pad and flannel on a chair next to our bed. He seemed pretty content, but still very weak. I closed my eyes fully believing that he’d be gone by morning.

As the sun rose the next day, we found Andy happily attempting to “fly” from the chair into our bed – he was lonely. Thankful doesn’t begin to describe it!

Last week before Andy’s bath

Today, Andy is our largest chicken. He is kindhearted and still a little dopey. He can’t run in a straight line, occasionally makes poor decisions, and still needs the occasional bath…..don’t worry, Vaseline is no longer part of his life.