It’s been a while since I did an odds and ends post, but it seems appropriate since I don’t have any complete ideas right now.
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If you haven’t seen Nita’s post about why her grass fed beef doesn’t take even 10% of the water to raise that CAFO beef does, you should. She articulated better than I ever could (and with math!) why her beef isn’t water intensive. Of course, her numbers don’t apply to every farmer raising grass fed beef, but if you ask around I bet you can find someone whose practices and impact are similar, even if they are bringing in hay from somewhere else.
Insights like that are why I don’t feel guilt when we eat prime rib, steak or stew or pot roast.
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The pullets that we got from Chance (hi Chance!) in November are apparently just starting to lay. They are extremely friendly, but also quirky birds. This morning Mike came in from putting the horses out and asked me if I’d left an egg on a hay bale in the barn. Now, I’m likely to leave eggs all kinds of odd places (pockets, purses, car) but knew I hadn’t left any in the barn recently. He handed me a perfect chocolate brown pullet egg and said he found it in a nest in the hay. I knew immediately it was a Cuckoo Maran egg. How fun!
I was already headed out to let out the chooks, get them some water and spread cracked corn for them. I decided to hang out and watch the two new Cuckoo Maran girls.
Sure enough, immediately upon being let out of the shack, one of them made a bee line for the barn. She looked all around for George and Jake and then squeezed under the stall door in the groove that George uses to get in and out. I headed over and rounded her up. As I took her back to the hen yard her twin passed me going the other way. I headed back, grabbed her and locked everyone in the yard for the day. I also put an egg back in one of the nest boxes to try to persuade her/them that the shack is the place for laying. Think they’ll get it? I somehow doubt it.
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It’s still cold here, 18F when we got up at 7:30 this morning. It’s supposed to hit 39F, but I imagine that will be for just a few moments in the late afternoon. The project of the day is to bundle up and head to the neighbor’s at the end of the road. Joe runs a tree farm down there with some of the prettiest Christmas trees around. It’s time for a bit of holiday cheer around here!
Somehow I never posted this photo from last year, when we tromped down in the snow to pick out a tree. There’s no snow today, so it won’t be quite the same winter wonderland experience, but we’ll likely still have fun. Plus, there’ll be hot buttered rums waiting for us when we get back!
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Fun fun! I bought our Christmas tree last week at the UW farmer’s market of all places. How cool is that?
I had the same thing with our girls when they started laying a few months ago. They would lay in the recycling bin, under a rhody, in the window wells and one kept laying from the top roost so her eggs broke in the coop. I finally put a few golf balls in the nest boxes and within a week they had all figured it out.
Chickens. It’s like they aren’t really laying those eggs for us or something…
Hope you had fun getting the tree! I was passing by a local farm selling trees and the area was *jammed*. Good luck with the “hen training”