Spring Ahead!

If you know me then you know that I'm a fan of the rainy weather.  I mean, who doesn't love a cloudy day?!

Portland makes me happy because just when I'm starting to get in that winter funk (which takes a while!) spring starts hinting that it's just around the corner!

Days are getting longer, flowers are blossoming, the chickens are laying eggs again, and the sun starts peeking out from behind the clouds.  I tend to get started on garden stuff a little too soon because I just can't wait to get things growing!  

Bring on the garden!

Time of the Season

Sauvie Island Pumpkin Patch 2012

Summer is officially over! I've always loved season changes and fall has always been my favorite. I love the change in temperature, the occasional drizzle, and of course my favorite is the beautiful colors on the trees! That being said I am definitely going to miss being out in the garden and hanging with the chicks! It's sad buying tomatoes in the store, and our egg carton is running a little empty. Baby Bird (Shelly) is almost full grown and she is gorgeous, and the shorter days and chilly weather has started Martini's first "molt". It was alarming to go in the yard afer a few days and see her featherless neck and missing tail feathers. She is supposed to be even more beautiful when her new feathers come in but right now she looks sick! Egg production stops and all of her energy is put into making new feathers so only Layla is laying currently. Eggberta never started back up since she became a mom, and Shelly has 2 more months until her first egg.
We have a couple fall crops in the works ~ brussel sprouts, peas, broccoli, lettuce, arugula, turnips, spinach but they aren't looking too promising. I actually didn't realize we had the much left until I just wrote it! The garden looks so empty compared to how it looked just a month ago. I'd say the cherry tomatoes were the biggest hit. They grew so big and produced so much! Cam's never been a tomato fan but he is now after eating them off the vine. 

Last week we planted some orange and yellow mums in the front yard, along with ornamental kale in purple and white to celebrate renewing our lease. Yup, that's right we're in PDX for another year! We love it here but who knows what's on the agenda for 2014. Hopefully our credit will be back on track so we can look into buying a home again. I'd love to live on a farm with chickens and goats and cows! Maybe even a pot-bellied pig?

 

Martini's first MOLT!

The bright side to the chillier weather ~ seasonal brews!!





Plant it and it will grow!

I love being in the garden.  It's just so peaceful.  Having recently moved from the desert and originally being from New York I am just so amazed by it!  It's hard to believe that just 4 months ago we had a 12x6 raised bed of dirt and now pretty much every day we can go out and get something to eat from it!  The tiny little seeds that I planted in the dirt have become towering bean stalks, and broccoli, and radishes and lettuce.  The little 1ft tall corn starts and pea starts that I bought at the Farmers Market have turned into 6 foot tall plants with beautiful veggies on them.  The corn isn't quite there yet but it's getting ready to flower.  We have at least 6 different types of tomatoes that are all starting to come in, as well as different varieties of peppers. 

On a walk to the park a few weeks ago we found a couple of seedlings sitting out by the community garden.  I wasn't sure where we were going to fit them but I couldn't just leave them there!  We thought for sure that they were tomatoes so put one in the topsey turvey and bought a couple of containers for the other guys.  When we checked on them yesterday they are doing SO WELL!  We think one of them might not be a tomatoe though..looks like more of a cucumber or something in the melon family (maybe a pumpkin)!  I love that we don't know what it is right now and can't wait to find out!

I think my birds gone crazy!

UH-Oh!  I've heard of it but thought it was just a myth!  EggBerta's maternal instints have kicked in and she is determined to sit on her (imaginary) eggs and hatch them into babies!  I've tried explaining to her that we don't have a rooster so none of they eggs are fertilized...I've even removed the eggs from the nest but she still sits in her roosting box all by her loneseome ~ and she is ANGRY!  We noticed that she was missing a lot one day (longer than it takes for her to lay an egg) and when we went to the box she squawked at us!  She sounded like a dinosaur so we were calling her the Jurassic Park chicken.  She's stopped laying altogether because in her mind she already has her "clutch" and she's even slowed the others production because they are afraid to go lay next to her!  It's very tempting to buy her some fertilized eggs and let her carry out her motherly roll...stay tuned!

Eggs. So amazing and fun!

Layla has been producing a lot of double yolkers.  It's fun to see how big they are in comparison to the regular ones.  Since they just started laying recently their eggs are on the smallish side and they'll reach a normal size in a few more weeks.  But the double yolkers that LayLa has been laying are about the size of the ones you find in the store, only we don't have any of them on steroids ;-)

Heeeerrreee Chickie Chickie!!

The ladies are laying pretty consistently now ~ we get at least 2 eggs a day and most days 3.  But they are getting smart those little ladies, especially Martini!  I realized that she wasn't producing recently and had read somewhere that some hens may find different spots to lay because they want to protect their eggs (and wisen up to the fact that every day they lay an egg and it goes missing!  She was acting extra funny one afternoon and was pecking at the sliding glass door to go in the house while we were out in the garden.  She was so persistent that we finally let her in and she layed an egg behind the curtain! So I wasn't surprised to find that there weren't eggs in the nesting box over the next few days.  I went in the yard one day while she was "missing" and took a broom stick and was going through the bushes to see if I could find her...and wouldn't you know she came out from UNDER THE DECK with a broken eggshell in her mouth!!  Then I looked under the deck and saw that she had laid 3 other eggs under there!  I took the broom handle and nudged them out so Cam and I are going to have to work on getting under the deck blocked off.  For the next couple days I made sure to just keep her in the closed run until she was done laying the egg, this way she had no place else to go. 

We have an EGG!

The circle of life!

Can you guess who laid it?!  The gals are a week shy of 5 months so we weren't really egg-specting any so soon!  I went out to feed the girls some cherry tomatoes and couldn't find my Tweety Martini!  She's the Speckled Sussex and is ALWAYS the first to greet me...and here I was feeding Layla and EggBerta and she was nowhere to be found.  I panicked.  I called in the house to Cameron and told him I couldn't find her.  I asked my neighbor who was in her backyard if she had seen her (her response was that she had and she tasted really good...which wasn't very comforting!) and Cam calmly walked over to the coop, opened the door to the nesting box, and lo and behold! 

Thatta Girl!! You did it!!

There was Martini crouched in her nesting box :)

What an amazingingly great day :)   We celebrated, gave Tweety Martini some milk and chicken scratch, and went in and tested it out!  They yolk was so orange!  I'd heard that it would be since they are allowed free range and can eat bugs and worms, but still it was a nice treat :)

Carton Egg on Left ~ Backyard Egg on Right



The Proudest Hen :)









Happy Friday the 13th!!

Had a pretty crappy start to this 13th...I failed my written Oregon drivers license test....DOH!  But nothing a little 5 mile run can't cure, and a deep clean to the house ~ and of course my Hens, Husband and Dogs. 

They will make mostly anything better :)

Time Management!

I want to publish to my blog more frequently but never feel like I have enough time.  I've been unemployed for 6 months and don't have any kids...but I still don't have enough!  I don't necessarily want more in a day (well okay of course I do :) )  but I feel like i'm not sure if I want to live the day or come in here and write about it!  I mean do I come inside from sitting in the backyard with my husband and the dogs and beautiful chickens while I'm watchin the garden to come in and write about how relaxing and rewarding it is?  But if I don't, then how I am supposed to remember all of the joy that it brings when I start losing my marbles :)
Questions questions.  SO how is it that I am writing now?  The chicks are not yet in the coop because the sun hasn't set, the dogs are on the bed, and Cam is in the living room.  I used the bathroom and decided to pop in really quick because although I may be missing a minute or 2 I think it's special to pop in and write about our simpleton lives (at the moment).  We built a cage (took about 2 hours but it FLEW by..no pun intended) to keep the chicks out of our newly planted garden (carrots, beets, red onions, green onions, and radishes), learned how to "blow out" the Duck and Goose Eggs that we bought at the Portland Farmers Market yesterday (we're about to make a spinach goose egg casserole for dinner!) and had some brews while enjoying the sun and wind on our deck little porch...  Really looking forward to the spring when everything is in bloom. 

We have a Speckled Sussex!

I'm new to Portland and everything that comes along with it...and I'm in LOVE!

Less than a month after we moved in November I got baby chicks, and being that I'm new to chicken keeping I read up and learned as much as I could! I went to the store with 3 birds in mind...a Plymouth Rock, and Americauna, and a Silver Laced Wyandotte. The gal who worked at the store steered me away from the Rhode Island (not sure why I hear they are great birds) and talked me into getting a Barred Plymouth Rock who we named "Lay-la". They had Wyandottes but only Blue Laced Red and we named her "Tweety Martini", and the Americauna we named "Egg-berta" (since my maiden name is Egbert!). The were all so cute such little balls of fluff! I loved so much watching them grow!

A few weeks ago though I was looking at Egg-Berta and she just wasn't turning into what I thought she would look like but she is SO PRETTY! And Martini was confusing me because Wyandottes are supposed to have such a pretty pattern and hers wasn't coming in. I had also read in a few places that people who own Wyandottes consider them great layers and pretty to look at but not very social with humans and Martini is the exact opposite of that! She runs right up to me when she hears my voice and is the only one of the three that will tolerate me picking her up! I went back to the store and showed them pictures and Egg-Berta is the Blue-Laced Red Wyandotte and Martini is..yup, a Speckled Sussex! I was a little disapointed at first because without the Americauna we won't be getting pink, blue, or green eggs - but the description of the SS fit Martini to a T!  So now I call them my "imposter" chickens.  Out of the 3 breeds I wanted I only ended up with one, but I love all my ladies!