Ninja Rooster (encore)

7/7/2003 Ninja Rooster has died. That was a tragedy from our perspective but a comedy from everyone else's. He had gotten to the point that not only did he attack every small person he saw, he attacked Evelyne every time he saw her. He would run up to the fence in his attack mode and slam right into it if she was on the other side. She got to the point she wouldn't go into the pen without carrying a big stick (but she didn't walk softly so she'll never be President). He often threatened me but he always backed off at the last moment when I told him "NO!" and never actually attacked me. I was giving Ginger some medication and was totally engrossed in getting her taken care of when Ninja saw his golden opportunity. He attacked full force from my blind side and drew blood. Fatal Error on his part. I went to Evelyne's house and told her he was either going to be stew or Coyote food. Rick decided he was in the mood to go ahead and kill him and dress him out. This is where it gets sad. Rick chased him with a large box and Evelyne chased him for several minutes with a broom (or maybe it was a rake), finally got him cornered, grabbed him by the tail and as she maneuvered for a better grip he took off again. I had been tending the burning trash cans to keep the grass from starting on fire. She came to me VERY irritated with the bird by now. We traded places and I went to chase the bird. He obviously knew he was in big trouble as he started running as soon as he saw me. I finally cornered him with the help of an industrial sized mop, grabbed him by the wings and we were off to the chopping block. As you all know, I don't handle blood well and it is very hard for me to kill creatures (with the exception of the rodents who all have it coming, especially those damn pack rats). So as Rick got ready to chop his head off I looked away. I heard a "thump" but it was more of a "thud" than a clean sounding whack. Obviously his neck was stronger than Rick had anticipated. Another shot should do it. The bird is now lying perfectly still so it is OK for me to leave him with the gutting process and return to tending the fire. WRONG. The bird lifts its head and starts off again, albeit in a staggering drunken fashion. We catch him again and by now Evelyne is back to see what the commotion is all about. I hand the stunned bird to her and leave the task in their hands. The rest of the story: we baked him in a slow oven over night. Great flavor for shoe leather. So after lunch we boiled him and took the rest of the meat from the bones and made chicken and noodles...still a little on the "firm" side but quite tasty. Evelyne's comment is: "We aren't doing that again." So I guess I need to start looking for a butcher for all these roosters I have out in the pen.

Turkeys vs Cats

There haven't been a lot of interesting things happening here recently. Just more of the same entertaining events I have written about before and I hesitate to repeat myself for fear of being accused of senility. However, the turkeys vs. the cats is an amusing sight to see. The turkeys are the dominators. I don't blame the cats. If something that much larger than me was threatening me, I'd leave the area too. But I did feel sorry for Golden Boy. The cats often sleep in greenhouse #1 overnight. They prefer to go outside to relieve themselves as opposed to using their litter box and generally do a good job of waiting until we let them out. Once out, they immediately seek out a good spot to take care of that business. GB had located what he considered an appropriate spot. The alpha hen turkey disagreed with his assessment. She strutted around him and jutted her head (and beak!) toward him. I suspect it made his task considerably difficult. He finally gave up and went off to find another spot. The turkeys go to Bad Goose's pen every morning and have a discussion with him. That is also a funny thing to watch and listen to. They are quite independent birds. Good thing they are pretty...well, pretty for turkeys, anyway.

Dirt Devil Broom Vacuums--AAAARGH

Christmas has come and gone for another year. I hope your holiday was all you hoped it would be. I treated myself to a Christmas present this year. A Dirt Devil broom vacuum. It seemed like a great thing to have around the house to pick up after the cats. It was delivered in a huge box stuffed with brown paper. It is pretty...dark blue color with silver trim. It was easy to put together. Simply screw the handle together at two spots. Plug it in and charge it for 24 hours and sweep like crazy. Great idea. But it doesn't work. The vacuum won't suck up anything, even small dirt particles. I am very disappointed...and almost angry about it. The closest repair center is in Benkleman, NE. I guess there is a road trip to someplace besides Colorado in my future.

Winter is here. The calendar said so today, but I've known it for a few weeks now. Since it has been below freezing for most days of the last two weeks. In spite of winter, Evelyne and I had a great afternoon in the greenhouse transplanting lettuce. It should be ready to eat in another month. The spinach we transplanted earlier is looking really great. We have had to turn the heater on overnight. With the added heat the greenhouse stays above 40 degrees even with the temps dropping below zero. I think it was well worth the aggravation and expense of getting it ready to be used. The cats are always jealous when we are in the greenhouse. They sneak in the door with us whenever they can, but when we shut them out they climb on the roof which is a real challenge unless they stay on the wooden rafters. It doesn't seem to bother them too much when they slide off and slam into the ground. The chickens have slacked off and aren't contributing as much to the table and farm income as this summer, but we are still managing to have enough for ourselves and get our regular customers their eggs, but we do sometimes have to limit them to only 2 dozen at a time. I feel sorry for the creatures in this cold weather, but they all have nice shelters to get out of the wind and keep dry. We may have made a fatal error with the cookies we made for them last week. They EXPECT cookies every time we approach them now. Spoiled, aren't they? Aunt Jo

Cookies for the Kids

Evelyne and I spent one whole afternoon making cookies for the kids. Not the two legged kids, our four legged kids. We made several different kinds. Some with carrots and applesauce, some with bananas (peelings and all) and sunflower seeds, some with peach skins and apples and all with molasses, oatmeal and oil. Our creatures really love these things. The bunnies think they are better than those crummy alfalfa pellets we give them (which are delicious IF they can't smell the cookies). The goats stand at the gate waiting when they get a whiff of these yummy treats in our pockets, the chickens don't hesitate to eat them all gone, and even the cats must think they are pretty good, as they will help themselves to the cookies in the container when the lid isn't put on tight enough to keep them out. We are very glad we made them. Since the weather has been below freezing for more than a day and below zero for a couple of nights, the extra nutrition in the cookies is good for the creatures and a lot easier to feed than some store bought supplement. The creatures are glad we made them too!

Garlic! Garlic! Garlic!

We had about a half bushel of generic garlic in the shop at the end of the season. We sold a lot, but that is way to much to try to carry over until spring. Last year I peeled it and kept it in the refrigerator which was really convenient as when I needed some it was ready to go. Only problem with that was by spring it had started to grow some really nice roots and was well on its way to having stems. We planted those and they grew quite well. This year we decided to again try drying some. You may remember my experience last year with the garlic slices and resulting chemical burns that ate the skin off my fingers. I was a bit hesitant to take on the task again. I have cautiously washed my hands frequently while getting the stuff ready to dry and this year I decided to slice it with the food processor. It didn't make nice, tidy, even slices like last year, but it was a lot quicker and I still have skin on my fingers. We also learned from last year that you don't dry garlic in the shop. Even a die hard Italian food lover couldn't have handled that scent. So we put the dehydrator in greenhouse #1 while it dried the garlic. That actually worked better, as the greenhouse was cooler than the shop and the garlic dried nicely instead of "roasting". The final results are terrific. I went to the store to get an idea how to price this for the coop. It is pure garlic, sustainably grown with no additives or preservatives. It was hard to find a comparison. #1.)ALL the garlic powder or granules I found were a product of China. Yes, CHINA! #2.)All of them had other stuff added as preservatives or anti-caking or additional flavoring. The results from this research make this garlic powder taste better than ever! If you are headed out to Whole Foods or some other "organic" grocery store, would you check on their powdered garlic and see if you can find some PURE garlic, grown and processed in the USA and tell me how much they want for it? Aunt Jo

mmm-mmm-good

Last night for dinner I had fresh lettuce picked just before eating right from the raised bed cold frame as well as fantastic yellow heritage tomatoes from the greenhouse. It was a little slice of heaven. It will, however be the end of the tomatoes for this season. Several nights ago, the vent on the greenhouse blew open in the wind, the night was cold, and the little propane bottle ran out of gas. These three things all conspired against the tomatoes and peppers. I think they could have handled 2 out of 3, but the triple whammy got them. Most of the other things in the greenhouse survived, as it only got down to 29degrees. The lettuce, spinach and rosemary are perfectly happy and thriving and a couple of the peppers are still hanging in there. After that incident, we decided we needed to hook up a larger tank to the heater in the greenhouse. And, it wouldn't hurt to have a spare, either. To make a long story short, we now have two 20 pound and one 40 pound propane tanks sitting outside the greenhouse. This is becoming an expensive proposition, however. The larger tank was the one which belongs with Earl's propane heater-a heavy duty job for garages. Unfortunately, it was the older model valve and in order to have it refilled we had to put on a new one. We finally found a place who would order the valve and replace it for us. I was shocked when I picked it up. It cost $75 to reclaim the tank...$35 of which was labor. Either it was a lot more complicated than it looked like it should have been or that was one slow laborer. It is now snowing outside, and this morning when I went out to water the animals it was 6 degrees. We are expecting it to warm up to today of a whopping 20 degrees. I think we will need to put the heater in the greenhouse on high just to keep it above freezing...forget tropical! Guess it is a good thing we have all those spare tanks. Hope you are keeping warm. Aunt Jo

Our chickens have been one of the most profitable parts of Prairie House. The eggs from them have provided enough income to pay for lots of things here. Production normally drops in the winter but ours recently had dropped too far. We looked for a hidden nest but couldn't find one anywhere.

Today one of the chickens was making lots of noise and carrying on. I went to check to see what the problem was. I guess I'm a little nervous since the bold coyote incident last weekend. Apparently another chicken was on the nest she wanted. The best nesting sight there is, obviously. Sure enough there WAS a hidden nest. Apparently they have been hiding them there for quite a time as there were more than a dozen eggs--some previously frozen and broken, most currently frozen.

The hidden nest is way back in the corner of the barn under a shelf. There is no way to collect the eggs without getting down on hands and knees and crawling there. Almost makes it tempting to just leave the eggs there, but we had NO eggs left in the refrigerator for sale today after our customers came. We even sold a dozen of the "dirty" eggs which we save for ourselves to be able to meet customer demand.

I couldn't see them, but I think I heard the chickens snickering while I was crawling on the ground! Those tricky chickens.

Sneaky little birds, aren't they?

Coyote vs. homely but sturdy house

My sister and I often build unconventional things. For instance, we have built several cages from scraps of lumber, remnants of wire and windows which were left over and stored in a building when we moved here. They don’t look pretty, but they are functional. Our Bantam Chickens sleep in one of these houses overnight. Apparently it is a pretty sturdy structure. You may remember we lost several ducks to a predator recently when a gate was left open overnight and the ducks weren’t put away behind closed doors. I am now convinced it was a coyote that decimated the duck flock. Why? Because I came face to face with him behind the house this morning. He had tried and tried to get to the Bantams, apparently. All the dirt was dug up around the cage, the tarp we use to protect them from the wind was lying on the ground about 10 feet away from the cage. The cage was overturned, with the door facing the ground. My heart sank when I saw it. But the heart rate increased considerably when I saw movement by a tree and looked up to see the coyote standing only 5 feet from me. I think he was more frightened than I was…but I was certainly startled by his presence so nearby. He turned and scuttled under the bus and away. With a still heavy heart, I turned the cage back upright expecting to see a the remains of a massacre. Amazingly, the door was still fastened shut, the wire still holding fast and all the chickens inside were physically unharmed. I’m not sure of their mental state. I didn’t open their door as I didn’t know for sure where the coyote had gone. I proceeded to the other chicken house to see if things were OK in there and then on to the barnyard to check on everything there. The goats were very nervous and the chickens didn’t want to come out of their house, but nothing was injured so I was relieved. As I walked back toward the house, the coyote was standing on the far side of the highway staring at me. I think I heard him say na-na-na-na-na! Then I remembered the turkeys. I went to the area where the rabbits are (who were undisturbed, fortunately) and called the turkeys. Only one answered me. Bummer. We haven’t even had them a month yet. The one on the rooftop continued to talk to me, but alas, no other sounds were heard. Then I looked up and the others were safely roosting in the tree. They appeared a bit nervous, not moving at all, but none the worse for wear. I opened the door so the cats could come out of the bus and they refused. Apparently they suspected danger was still lurking just outside their door. I knew the coyote was gone, for now at least, and had to go to work this morning, so I opened all the doors and let the creatures out, hoping all would still be alive when I got home this afternoon. Good news! They were.