First Weekend in May, 2021: Life and Death and Balance

Friday went perfectly according to plan. I picked up eggs from a friends house, then went for two bags of rabbit feed on sale at the feed store, took a load to the dump, and then went for pig feed. I'm nearly certain the half ton of hog feed and 200# of chicken feed is the most weight this truck bed has ever carried. But she carried it.

Fair warning: there's some mild gore in this post, as is natural to life on a homestead, or life in an ecologically authoritative position. Proceed with caution if you're queasy.

Happy Nate, feeling like an official farmer

Half a ton of feed, stacked in the apartment. We'll call the apartment the feed barn now.

Happy rows and stacks of fresh eggs*

I got home about 2pm, and we left around 3pm for Kansas. We list a chicken that night, and it got thrown to the pigs who promptly crunched her down. No waste. I didn't have time to do anything else about it, so that would have to wait til we got back.

Dead chicken

Pigs crunching the dead chicken

Question: what are the gun laws in Oklahoma and Kansas?
Answer: irrelevant

A good friend volunteered to watch the kiddos for us while we were gone, so Melissa and I got in some good road tripping time together. Farmer Sam was put in charge of feeding animals, with help from our friend only when feeding the pigs.

While in kansas, Melissa got to spend quality time with her family and say final goodbyes to her aunt, who was celebrated all weekend. She's not doing well, and not expected to be with us much longer.

We came home to blackberry blooms and work to be done. Another chicken was lost while we were gone, and the flock is now down to five. Melissa says that since we have access to good eggs through our farmer friend, she doesn't want another flock. So the pressure is on to preserve this one.

Blackberry blossoms on all the canes. We'll be sharing these with friends to make jams and wine.

Some kind of mushrooms growing on one of our border logs. @sketchandjam, any idea what it is?

First, I put up some extra chain link over the run. Tied to the walls with baling wire, and supported in the middle with a piece of our old home plumbing. That'll help in case it was a hawk, and it'll serve to keep the chooks in. Next, I set conibear and coil spring traps on top of the coop. These are leg traps that aren't safe to put on the ground where chickens can access them. I caught a chicken by the leg once by misusing a coil spring trap. They work great on chickens. By the front of the run, I baited a dog proof (and chicken proof) raccoon trap because it's a safe ground trap when there's domestic critters about. It's a tube with the trigger down low in the trap. A raccoon reaches down and trips the trap when it pulls the bait across the trigger. The spring at the top of the trap catches the animal and holds it til Nate can get to it in the morning with his gun.

That's how it went. I slept so soundly that I didn't hear any sounds it may have made last night. It knocked over the ply wood that I was using as a chicken run gate, and the wood was laying on top of her. In her thrashing, she dug up the peas that I'd planted there. Gotta go out destructively I guess. I maintain balance in my ecosystem, and balance was executed this morning. She will be made into a hat.

Soon-to-be-dead raccoon

Dead raccoon

Raccoon being turned into a hat

The plan was to keep the chicken in the run for a while, but of course they had another plan. That's okay, they can go eat bugs around the garden. I thought we'd keep em locked up for fear the predator was a hawk, but since we got the raccoon, I think that was probably it. Hawks usually carry off their prey, and both the dead chickens were found nearby the coop, dragged maybe 10m off to a quiet spot, the same spot both times. Without my work yesterday, there would have been a third. And probably a seventh.

We have a friend that hatched some chicks with the help of a broody mama. There's a couple of roosters, and they've promised us one when they reach sexual maturity. I'll probably get a small incubator after that and start hatching some chicks to build the flock and to help cover the cost of the chickens. The incubator I saw holds seven eggs. We could harvest any young cockrels and build the flock back up to right layers, then sell small started flocks to friends with a small investment like that. I'll have to do more looking before I buy one, I'm not even sure if that's a decent one. But y'all know how my mind grabs an idea and runs with it...

For now though, I need to settle into a solid routine with what we have. That's how it goes here. Make a change, adjust to that change. Make a routine. Make a change, adjust to that change. Adjust the routine. On and on, and one day I'll have a fully functional farm here on our suburban half acre.

Well, that gets us through to Monday morning. I'm back to work tonight, and there's plenty to do here before then so I'm gonna call this a wrap.

Love from Texas and the freshly balanced ecosystem of Foxfire Homestead

Nate 💚