Yahooo, We Snagged a Biggen Off the List

Not sure where that list is now, but I had a list of things Vicktory Farm and Gardens needed, oh wait, I think it was in a post, not my side bar, any who, we can cross a big need off that list.

We went up to Bellevue in Dirt's big fat truck (that is important information because Bellevue is about as skinny as it's snotty women and Dirt's truck is big and fat and loud like a good hearted country wife) and picked up a cabinet style incubator.

We have been searching Craig's List for a while now for an incubator that held more than a couple of dozen eggs at a time. Weeks before Christmas there was a fellow in Ellensburg who was selling five. I called, I emailed, I got no response. The ad disappeared from Craig's List.

I kept threatening to jump in the truck and drive to Worley, Idaho to get another incubator that showed up on Craig's List, or down to Eugene to get yet another one that showed up but was way more money.

On Saturday, on the phone I was talking a friend down from a crisis, while I had guests in the living room and sure enough a 509 number showed up on caller id, I didn't think I could handle one more thing, and I sure as heck wasn't thinking "incubator man from Eburg", so I let the call go on to voice mail.

Sure nuff, it was the fellow who had them on Craig's List just before Christmas. His message: he had a few phone calls to return and I was one of them. He still had the incubators did I want one.

I called back. I got his terrible message thing. I left a message.

I got no immediate response.

I thought it was a cruel joke.

I called one more time.

He called last night. I made Anna interrupt her phone call and answer it.

He had two left. I wanted one.

He was bringing two to Bellevue in the morning, could I drive up there?

Better than driven to Eburg across the pass!

So there you have it, the not verbose story of how I came to spend my day in Dirt's truck instead of planting peas and how we now have four-hundred less dollars in the Vicktory Farm and Garden's start up account, but how we now, finally, have an incubator that holds something like six hundred eggs. Really? Let me check.

The GQF 1502 will hold:

1488 quail eggs
354pheasant eggs .
270 bantam to chicken sized eggs
180 extra large eggs (Turkey, Duck, etc.)

Not sure where I got that whole six hundred thing goin' in my head, just a lot of numbers that's for sure and fourteen hundred quail eggs sure as shoot is a lot.

But any way even a hundred eighty turkey poults or ducklings at one time is a lot, a heck of a lot more than the couple dozen that fit in our old incubator.

So consider Bet's turkey and meat bird operation good to go. (She'll do some layers in there too but we don't want to mention it out loud).

We will even quite possibly have some chickies or something for our opening day April 22.

Talk about some exciting stuff!

Have a good night or a good morning or a fantastic afternoon, whatever it is that lay ahead of you right now Dear Reader, I know it is going to continue to be a humdinger for all of us here at Vicktory Farm & Gardens. Who knew this year could hold so much stuff. Daily. Since, oh, say, August! God has not only knocked our socks off He has knit us several pair in a rainbow of colors so that we can have a new pair knocked of each day!

Tomorrow, peas, both garden and my favorite of all time thing to grow, sweet peas! I'll be late a day by the signs but a girls gotta go for the incubator when the incubator calls.

Farm Tours Restart

Welcome back for more tour of Vicktory Farm & Gardens! Didn't mean to let nearly a year go by. Today we will be strolling in the Barn Garden and talking water and weather, hope you wore your boots. Anna could run to the kitchen and get some bread sacks to go over your shoes but those stilettos your friend there has on definitely won't do.

In the scheme of things this garden sits west of the house, I can see parts of it from my new big bedroom window (the lilac hedge blocks a full view). In past posts you have seen the South Pastures that sit just west of the Barn Garden and share a pond, and in Hang Out Spots tour you saw the yard that is just the other side of the east boundary fence for this garden.

Let's get started, come off of the driveway here and come through the gate in Dirt's special fence.

You'll see a lot of plastic 5 gallon buckets around the Farm, they come in super handy. I use them to pick up my weed piles so I can throw the weeds to the chickens, easier than a wheelbarrow I gotta get up more often than a wheelbarrow load or I won't be able to unkink my legs.

There is a little strip of garden that separates the driveway from the main Barn Garden. We'll come back to that at the end.

For now we are going to go on through this second gate, gate way actually, because the gate is old and needs fixing. This walk way is rather muddy because the rain off of the big barn roof comes through here and out into Barn Pond. This issue is in the process of being solved, unfortunately it isn't at the top of the list.

I do a lot of ditching around here, no the "d" is correct, I dig a lot of water ways. I'm a hydrologist. The biggest issue about keeping someone out of the garden early in the year in the PNW (Pacific North West) is water and soggy soils.

This is what the soil looks like this time of the year when it gets walked on. Not a good look for garden soil.

That is the reason nearly every gardening area here at VF&Gs is a raised bed that has hidden electrodes around it so that you get blown to the next county if you step on the bed. Well, not really but a girl can fantasize about things, can't she?

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A raised bed is one of the basic season extenders here at VF&G, one I wouldn't do without. We make them simple. No treated boards, no plastic "lumber", no concrete blocks (the poison they all leach has a way of undoing that home grown goodness plus they harbor slugs, bugs and fungus) just a three to four foot wide bed not much longer than twenty feet (otherwise you find yourself cheating and jumping the bed to get to the other side). They are sometimes straight and other times they go with the contour of the landscape. We employ them not only in the "vegetable" gardens but also in the ornamental gardens as well.

The soil in these beds is nice and fluffy and can actually pass the soil lump test just fine right now, if you took a similar sample of some other areas like the lawn or the market garden strip in the pasture rotation, it would not pass the test for a couple of months. It is also warmer than soil that is all soggy and wet because it can't drain.

Being able to get into the garden at this time of the year is a real bonus, and in spite of my being slightly jealous of those areas that get real snow and ice for winter, it is why I love living here in the PNW. With a few season extenders PNW gardeners can produce food for most of the year. So yes, our tomatoes are a challenge and fresh corn is barely a month long treat but if well attended to, a PNW garden can provide very well.

It also allows for gardeners to stay ahead of weeds. I suppose that ice and snow has a damper on weed growth but being able to weed during the slower growth months of winter really helps this procrastinator stay ahead, okay, a few steps behind the weeds.

Winter weeding is an art all to itself. I should tell you all about it soon. I hope you noticed a specific pattern to the little garlic plants coming up, it is called equidistance planting.

But for now lets look at another season extender, my cold frame. It sits just to the left and forward as we came through the last gate (the gate way). The area around it is trying to find itself, the beds just in front of the glazing side is becoming Bet's herb garden area but this funny spot back here is having some serious identity issues.

Here is the front glazing side of the cold frame, it is oriented exactly to the south. Not necessarily always the best choice, sometimes it is better to catch the sun a little earlier and orient it slightly to the east, but when you only have one and you can't make decisions well, you go with normal and average sometimes just to get the job done.

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There are some things inside, lets lift the lid and see.

A few flats of last year's left over onion seed, onion seed like just a couple other vegetable seeds is only really viable for a year, but I hate throwing things out so I went ahead and dumped the packets into flats just to see what I could come up with. And I think the showing was worth my trouble. This week I will be seeding flats with this year's main crop of onions and in a couple more days these guys in here will be ready to come out and head to a garden bed. Most likely in the North Garden.

So this is the view looking west from the cold frame area. We rather went crazy with the garlic this year. It will be interesting to see just how much we really need to be planting. Even though Dirt eats lots of garlic, with the varieties we end up growing he doesn't eat as much of it as when we get it from the market. So it will be interesting to see how sales of garlic go this year and how much we really need to plant. Yippee I am so excited about our new adventure. But we'll talk more about that later.

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For now let's go over and look at Bet's two new peach trees.

The names escape me at the moment, I'll get back to you on that in the morning here, They are semi dwarf and won't get much over fifteen feet or so. Bet says she is looking forward to coming out here with a good book and a saddle pad and taking her breaks from work under her peach tree, she has a few years yet before that vision actually fleshes out but I love her patience and I admire her faith. I now understand what it means to have the gift of faith, Bet has it. In spades. About absolutely everything.

Here is the other peach tree, the two trees line up with a spot she has picked out for some other trees. They are semi dwarf and of course deciduous, so the fact that they sit in the center of the garden isn't a real problem. The sun will climb up in the sky before they have their leaves and there will only be a lovely dappled shade underneath them, just perfect for somethings that can't take the heat of our dogs days of summer, five days in August.

This is our hoop house made from livestock panels. It has been a lot of things, a gourd arbor mostly, a cold greenhouse in the late winter/early spring and a great spot for the mums to get their early boost if it is a super cold winter.

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Most recently it served as a chicken coop so that Bet could separate out some of her breeds. It may be that again soon. There is supposed to be a chicken coop built along the west wall of the barn, it will serve to keep the water from the base of the logs of the barn and house Bet's breeding stock but the Hot House/Market Shed complex comes first and then we might collapse for a month before we tackle this project.

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If stock panels weren't so stinkin' expensive at the moment I'd have more of these, I'd anchor them a little differently, but this one was hard to do because there is a concrete slab we were spanning with the hoop.

Standing up here at the hoop house and peach trees looking south we can see Bet's duck house. It finally got its front doors on and so the ducks got kicked out of the big barn and now Bet comes out and locks them up out there at night and lets them out in the morning.

They were being pretty good at staying on their side of the fence until the last couple of days. Something will need to be done to keep them from coming in here and pulling up the garlic and onions. They seem to be attracted to the green, go to pull it out, taste it as they are pulling it out of the ground and decide they don't like it. Unfortunately Bet hasn't successfully trained them to replant it!

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They really like their pond and they can wander all over on the other shore and up around the turkey pens but they seem to like to dabble in my garden this time of the year. I think its the green shoots of the garlic, I haven't seen much signs of slugs and other treats, besides if they are in here the slug and bugs are also out there.

Bet and I have been doing a bit of research about dealing with grey water, specifically the water from processing poultry, for when we apply for our license to process. We have come across some interesting info about cleaning water by running it through bogs planted with cat tails and some other specific water plants.

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The heavy stalks in the water in the center left of the above picture is a little colony of cattails. I am really drawn to cattails and would love an excuse to have a larger planting of them up around the Barn Garden.

The boggish place just to the right of this fence line has been filtering and dealing with the grey water from the farm house every since there was inside plumbing here. It is a great system and rarely puts off an odor, some compost piles smell more than our little un-designed bog.

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The pond just beyond the bog supports bull frogs, cat fish, occasional escapee trout, and the ducks of course appear to thrive here. Not to mention the resident river otters and beaver clan along with clearly healthy pond side flora.

Here's a view from the far southwest corner of the Barn Garden. The fact that the majority of our grey water has its own system and doesn't go through the septic makes our septic all that much more healthy. Besides in a septic system the grey water would pretty much end up doing what it is doing right now. Go through a soil/plant root filter before eventually ending up in the pond.

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It is all so freakishly green I can hardly speak of it. Funny, things on farms were green long before now and old farmers knew how to protect the water and soil supply. They didn't really need the Birkenstock, or black nail polish crowds to tell them how to take care of the earth that they depended on.

Here is a big view of the south west side of the barn and the hoop house. In the foreground is one of the gazillion weed piles. Lots of my weed piles, stuff the chickens would rather not eat or just the stuff that is more than they can handle, are cold compost piles.

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They eventually rot down and no, the weed seeds aren't burned up, but man that takes a heck of a hot pile and I'm just not that into doing that at the moment. The hot compost will come when we have to start dealing with poultry offal from the processing. But as for the weeds, I'm beginning to think they aren't so stinking bad, I really feel strongly, come 'round July or August especially, that we actually ought not to weed any more. But that's a discussion for another day. Right now I love weeding.

And I love tossing the weeds to the chickens so that Bet doesn't have to put alfalfa in the hay rack that you see the hens sticking their little head in (the bluish green square on the right half of the coop. This is the winter housing and where the breeding stock hang out. In the summer the eggers and the meat birds head out to the pasture and will become an integral part of the pasture rotation that we will be incorporating this year. MiG. Managed intensive grazing. Making the most of less land. And something Dirt and I are very excited about. But... you guessed it, we'll talk about that another day.

If we turn around and look east we come across my aronia berry bush. I have some more up at the nursery beds that will be coming down here this month during transplanting days.

I have no idea yet if this moon signs planting business is really effecting the plants and bugs and weeds (there are days for dealing with everything!) But it sure is doing a good thing for making me get stuff done and not get sidetracked with a bazillion jobs all at once. I need a way to keep me focused or I end up not getting anything finished because I am doing too many things.

A better view of Bet's herb beds in front of the cold frame, the bright green little tufts off to the left of the picture are her chives, a lavender and a sage is just beyond that.

The bed between that one and the cold frame is filled with lavender starts from a plant that I rooted in place by heaping soil up around it and in the middle of it. Each branch then became a rooted plant. It is a great way to multiply several different types of shrubs and herbs especially when they have been neglected of seasonal pruning and get all out of shape. A "do over" of sorts.

These are a examples of raised beds that are not straight. I would like to do more large gardens with not-straight beds but that will come later in my life I think. Right now I just like to get it done and get them planted. Soon I will have more time to shape and have fun with different geometrics in the garden.

These big lumps here on the far left are not more weed piles, they are my enormous comfrey plants that if I have time will be busted up this year and dispersed through out more areas of the farm. Comfrey is an amazing plant in the apothecary and out in the garden. Its huge leaves are great in the compost and add some really good extra nutrition, because of deep roots it can pull up lots of minerals from the sub soils.

I can't think of a plant that doesn't like to be near comfrey or have its big leaves as a mulch during those five hot days in August. It is another great bog and pond edge plant and has tremendous water filtering abilities. It is just simply a must have plant.


This for me is a dreamy view. I like to look far across the pond to the other bank and the white barked aspen. To me they are like the paper birch in the painting by Carl Larsson of his family picnicking or the one where they are fishing. Sometimes I like to think I live in Carl's world.

This is the little gate way and walk that Bet takes to let her ducks out. This spot is also in need of an identity and restructuring, something I hope Bet and I can get to and get into process later this spring or at least by early summer.

We turn around and head back for the gate by the barn. Our raspberries here on the right on the fence line await their annual trimming and tying up session, hopefully this year I will get to it before the leaves are out, that makes a tough job tougher. I'm utilizing a bit more of my wonderful black weed mat, Water goes down through but weeds are really discouraged from growing and it is even impervious to armor piercing quack grass.

On the right side of the weed mat walk way you can see a couple of step in black plastic posts. Those mark where I think I want some climbing roses to go up over some hoops toward the raspberries, forming a arbor-ed walkway here. I like secret little walk ways and such so we'll see. The fence post in the fence line are old creosote and I keep the raspberries back from them for the most part but I would like to move the raspberry operation some place slightly less toxic entirely.

As we head back out the gate you can see the walkway, between the barn wall and the chickens, becomes a holding place for my mums in pots and the fruit trees awaiting their new home spots.

Sometimes I get a little crazy with the old and makeshift things we've got going on here but then most of the time I just embrace the character of it all. And then, I am thankful that God has placed me here and not in a modern home on an uninteresting, history-less plot of land.

Like the stories this little garden by the driveway holds for us.

Some where in that center bed lies the first casualty here on VF&Gs. A murdered sheep was buried by yours truly about our second or third year here. Back in '88. Dale's flock of sheep had come out here to live but not before the pet lamb of the wife of one of his worker fellas had been mistaken for a locker lamb. So after the flock had been here a while Dale dropped off a sweet little Cheviot to hang with the group, replacing the mistaken identity lamb.

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Well, sheep are flockish, and they did not accept her, She spent most of her time many yards from the flock, she ate separately from them or after they were done and had moved on she would come and clean up the leftover. She was excluded from coming in the barn to get out of the rain or the heat.

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Then one day it was particularly rainy I was glad to see that she had obviously gotten to go in out of the rain because she wasn't in the barnyard. But when I looked over the door I didn't see her. Well this is turning into a long story and has nothing really to do with gardening so I finish it up later.

Along with buried sheep and my second oldest's pet goose being buried in here, down by the lilacs there, was where the out house stood for the former resident and now neighbor and old work buddy of Dirt's. All another long story about just how small the world is and confirmation on God wanting us here.

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But as for the outhouse part, Dave says that when he left home for the Korean war the out house stood right about where the lilacs are or maybe a little over to the right where the path goes out onto the lawn. But when he came back there was a new addition on the house and indoor plumbing.

Well that's the end of the tour, long one for such a small space, you can come in and take advantage of the indoor plumin' if ya need to and you can stay for a cup a tea ifn' you'd like. I gotta get on with the hallway project but you can pull up a chair and keep me company while I paint.

The Middle Part of Christmas

Before an entire week blows by, I thought I would recount the middle of our Christmas; Day Six through Day Nine. My camera has a hard time finding its way out of its case lately so the only pictures I have for you are of The Fifth Day of Christmas and bringing back the Orange Tractor to the Farm.


The Orange Tractor Returns
So indulge me in a bit of back tracking. Dirt and Mike did a little equipment swap this summer, Mike brought out his back hoe and took our Orange Tractor in. Orange Tractor is an Allis Chalmers 1950 WD. It came to live with us nearly the first year we were here at the farm, it came here in the spring of 1986, from the Huckleberry Mountain range in Eastern Washington where my brother had spent some time raising buffalo.

When we first had the Orange Tractor we were warned that the tricycle type of tractors were dangerous as they tended to roll easily on hills. Not to worry, we farm flat land, low, wet, flat land. Not only is it hard to get parts for a tractor made in 1950 it is extremely hard to find the wheels for the front end, so Orange Tractor has been limping along in one front wheel for a long time.


The back wheels got a treat while in at Mike's. Mike bought Dirt tires for the back wheels and because the wheels were off and tire-less, Mike insisted that Dirt paint them up. Problem is now, the back wheels look new and the rest of the tractor looks old, including the bumper sticker on the cowling (the long upper part of the tractor where the exhaust pipe comes out of). The bumper sticker? ReElect Dan Evans for Governor. Which would mean that the bumper sticker has been there since 1968 or 1972 take your pick. Either way the bumper sticker has been on there a long time and the Orange Tractor is long over due for some tangible love.

I say tangible because trust me it is loved, well loved. The day my brother brought it here and I learned how to drive it I fell in love with my tractor and quite frankly green just didn't matter anymore. Orange was the color to be if you were a tractor. I think quite frankly that I would rather be orange, persimmon really, but orange for ease, than green any day. If like me you are getting weary of hearing about how we ought to be green, rebel against the established nonsense, be orange!

So I feel way better now that my tractor is home, it came home because it has some work to do, it has a lot of work to do, but hopefully Dirt can plan a time where the Orange Tractor can have some more beauty treatment.

Wednesday, the Fifth Day of Christmas found Dirt and Anna shearing some Romney sheep in town and Bet and I down in Sumner at McConkey's and McLendon's Hardware. McConkey's is a warehouse for nursery and greenhouse supply, I needed some sterile soil, a germinating mix, and to chat with the poly film expert about my poly tunnels and the best choices for them, be looking for a post on what I learned, it was pretty fascinating stuff and a real eye opener.

Anna managed to shear most of one ewe, they are big and Anna hasn't been out shearing in a while and wasn't in shearing shape, so her dad finished it up for her. When Bet and I got back up the hill to pick them up Dirt was almost done and his customer was advising him on an accounting program for when we go real this year.

Thursday The Sixth Day of Christmas and New Year's Eve was one of work, Dirt rebuilt one of his creep feeders, I'll post a few pictures of them and tell you all about creep feeders. Bet and I ordered her chicks and poults, and some turken pullets for my silkie rooster and future show girl chickens. We ordered from Welp Hatchery this year because they had everything we were looking for and they are not sold out 'til June like a lot of other hatcheries are already of those said birds we were looking for.

Bet is determined to produce her own meat hybrids and pasture raise them, so we ordered White Laced Red Cornish and Partridge Plymouth Rocks, a rather dark combo for a meat bird, dark pin feathers and all, but we will be marketing to a heartier type of consumer who won't be put off by a few dark pin feathers on the birds.

She also ordered some replacement turkeys for her existing flock, five Narragansett and five Bourbon Reds, her slates are doing just fine, and one new breed, Midget Whites. The Midget Whites are...you guessed it Dear Reader, smaller than most turkeys and therefore a bit more usable for families year 'round and not just a holiday overindulgent roast-a-rama, but they also were named most flavorful turkey followed by the Bourbon Red in a taste test cited somewhere out there in cyberspace the location of which I have forgotten.

After we ordered chicks and poults we went out and measured up the dormant plant storage shed for the possibility of using it in its off season (Feburary to November) for a chick brooder shed. It looks like it will work out just perfectly. Now to find a GQF Digital Sportsman 1502 incubator on Craig's list a little closer than Worley, Idaho, so that Bet can incubate and hatch out birds to provide six families with their all their white meat year 'round, which is her 2010 goal as poultry manager of Vicktory Farm and Gardens.

We spent a little time tidying up a bit around the building and making tentative plans for the surrounding area. But I'm glad I didn't plan too much as I found out on Friday that Dirt has his own set of plans for the area. Not a huge conflict just a little terrain changing and so I get to rethink my plan and perhaps expand it.

Friday the Seventh Day of Christmas and the New Year, found me prepping some germination flats for onion seeds - I am attempting this year to stick to the moon and planet signs for planting and such at the Farm, I'll tell you more about it but for now, suffice it to say that Tipper and Momma Coulter are responsible.

But the bulk of the day, not necessarily in hours but more in enjoyment, was spent at the Bowerman's. It was a great late afternoon and evening, chowing down on a little brisket barbecued (slowly) earlier in the day by Dirt at the Farm, some wonderful beer selections and followed by a lovely pasta dinner and some good hearted fellowship. However, during the afternoon my balloon was burst when Dirt gained support for not playing along with my idea on how to do a second bathroom in an attached solar heated green house on the south side of our house and so I am greenhouseless for yet another year. Or more really, as I am not keen on the idea of having my back yard tore up in August, the suggested date of beginning the revised and "practical" doing of said project. So who knows if it will ever get done and if I will ever move out of the cramped spaces of the laundry room and into a real hot house leaving the laundry room for a revision into a fiber arts shed.

The Eighth Day of Christmas, Saturday, Dirt went to the lumber store for the second creep feeder and while he was in there he purchased, along with more beer,an accounting program. I may not be blogging nearly as much as I would have hoped after the holidays as my computer time will be taken up with paper work and setting up our books. But you have gotten by without my shenanigans before Dear Reader, I am sure you will do just fine without my planned daily postings, no really, I did really think I could get back to daily posting. Perhaps I still will, I do have a lot to record. I just need to learn to write shorter post, today is not one of those learning days however.

Our wonderful friends from the north came down for yet another great day with us. They are so accommodating to our not being able to leave the Farm easily, that it really makes me feel like a schmo when we always seem be the ones to ask them to travel this way for our get togethers. So we spent the day schnick snacking our way to dinner, steaks grilled (quick) by Dirt, the pronounced red meat guru by said northern friends, when the Bowermans joined us for another wonderful but abbreviated beef and brew fest. Yum. We really must figure out how beef can work a little more strongly into the Vicktory Farm and Gardens scope of things, we are running out of Chuck (our last briefly visiting steer) and he wasn't even the provider of the majority of our recent red meat rendezvous.


And now here we are at the Ninth Day of Christmas, Sunday, I have coffee, shortbread and computer and I am looking out my big beautiful new window in my new still-small but wonderful room at work to do. So I'm going to slug down the rest of my coffee and head out soon. Yesterday I had Anna bring in my box of garlic from it's storage place in the well house and my Shandong harvested this fall is already sprouting, so instead of letting it go to waste I am going to go find a bed where I can put it. "Why?" you ask Dear Reader. 'Cause who can have to much garlic growing in one year. Ahhh... two more problems to solve, where to plant garlic, and where to store it next year so I won't loose my eating garlic to early sprouting. Where did I store it before when I didn't have this problem? Ahhh the mysteries of living in Lanny Land.

Hope you don't find too many irritating spelling and grammar mistakes in this post Dear Reader, but I am sure if you do, you will find a clever and tender way of telling me you did.

Hip hip hooray for the coming long days of holiday-less winter, dark and bleak and wet. I am not looking forward to the end of the Christmas holiday season, I for one wish the holiday was longer or at least situated a little farther into the heart of darkness. Yes, I know, the days have turned around, we are on the upswing of longer days and more light, that is if you don't live in the Pacific Northwest, where the sun may very well be behind the iron curtain of grey but you really couldn't bank on it for the amount of light your eyes detect.

Yes, Dear Reader, if you caught a smidgen of winter doldrums and sarcasm you have made it to the end of this post awake. I will go and look at the calendar that tells me yes, we are headed for sunshine and dry land, in spite of my feelings of eternal damp and dark accursedness. My brain clearly is not one of the more evolved ones and I am stuck back in ancient superstitious times where uneducated dolts like myself thought for sure that this, December and January, was indeed the end of my small world and that the evil cloud gods have taken over and they will never let go now that they have gained control. I am going to go out and build a bonfire and see if I can burn them away.




Actually I am going to read a bit of His Word and pray a good while, while I lite that bonfire that I need to have to burn up rotting scrap wood, not the clouds. Please, feel free to comment about my spelling and grammar or the tractor etc. but could you be so kind Dear Reader as to resist telling me what I already know about winter depression made worse by the anniversaries of death and soul abusing events. I know what I ought to be doing nutritionally and in other ways to help my brain snap out of this spot, part emotion and part actual physical chemistry. I promise I will be better in awhile for I have not lost heart, I appear to be troubled on every side, yet I am not distressed; feeling very perplexed, but not in despair; cast down, but not destroyed. I can do all things through Him who strengthens me, including making it through these next few months of darkness and remembering.

I Did It!

In spite of the bicyclist riding four to six abreast on a county road; in spite of heading into the sun with commuters on my rear; in spite of some knucklehead peaking out from behind me on a double double yellow even though I was up to speed, I made it down to our favorite chicken seller (Oh My, Oh My ). No, I really do mean our favorite chicken seller.

After last Wednesday's fiasco with dreadlock boy, Oh The Plans They Are A Changing, we tried again the next day with a different Craig's List ad. This fellow was a Chicken Hunter's dream, a former APA judge, former Poultry Person of the Year at the Junior Poultry Expo (a few years ago). Ex APA Judge had lots of many beautiful, well cared for chickens, so all the girls, EBet, Anna Colleen and the Chicken Hunter's A. Grace and Anne Pants picked up some darling bantams to use for fitting and showing at the Jr. Poultry Expo.

But surely we did not go all the way down to the Orting Valley to pick up more chickens in the horse trailer with Holly (Anna's horse) inside. No, we did not.

As it turned out Former APA Judge not only has the prettiest birds we've seen, but he raises Quarter horses and has a beautiful stallion. Who happens to be a Palamino! Last week he and Anna talked about breeding and how she was looking for just that sort of fella to breed Holly to. Well Anna explained that she had less than half of his fee and Former Judge cut it down to what seemed more than fair.

Yesterday Anna determined that Holly was coming back into estrus and called F. J. With Stallion with the sad news that she did not have even enough at the moment for his gracious decreased fee.

He said, "Bring her on down."

Well, now Anna is without a horsey to ride this week but she is walking four feet off the ground anyway. She will be (hopefully) a horse grandma this time next year.

I am walking at least two feet off the ground because I drove that rig as if I had not taken a thirty, almost thirty year break from independent manuvering and driving my daddy's big trucks.

But just in case Dirt (are you reading today Dear?) thinks this means he can take a break from changing my oil, rotating my tires and driving the trailer. Think again. There are a zillion-kabillion reasons I am married to you Dirt and those are three of the top twenty.

See you soon Dear Reader, thanks for having confidence in me. I gotta go water those demanding Brugs before they start whining and knocking on my door.

Oh The Plans They Are A Changing

What! Are you talking no moon pies tomorrow (today)?

Whoa! Hold on there a minute, moon pies were not the only thing on the list for the last half of this week. Tomorrow (Friday, which is now today), barring anything drastic like a volcano, earthquake and hurricane hitting Roy, Washington all at once, tomorrow I will be making more moon pies.

So what is the change? Last we talked Dear Reader I did say that I was going to begin taking my summer cuttings for some propagation of the vegetation sort. My favorite rose, now unavailable is the top on the list. And my projected day for that was Wednesday and here it is Thursday night (Friday morning) and I have not yet gotten to it. (Although the last few days of morning marine front, cloud cover and cool air, is more conducive to taking cuttings than the blast furnace heat we had earlier this week.)


Mrs. Mike called and got a hold of Anna and requested that we change days for the little girl's riding lessons (my girls, big girls; her girls, little girls), something about needing to go to Olympia to get chickens. So my Wednesday became my Thursday and my Thursday became a crazy-man-with-a-hat's Saturday and now here we are, Thursday night and no cuttings taken. (I threw that crazy man thing in to see if you were listening.)


No cuttings it is true, but oh do I have a story for you!


You can read my dear friend, the Chicken Hunter's, perspective on this whole thing over at Suburban_Hedgerow and she'll warn you not to read it if you're a hippy or if you're a liberal or if you're a liberal hippy, but don't worry, I am all three of those things and what I am about to write is way more scathing to the type than what she's got, she is nice, I am mean.


So the story really begins when she gets to the Farm, Vicktory Farm and Gardens, throws her girls out the car door by the barn and swings by to let me jump in whilst she continues around the compound's circular drive at a moderate speed.


Somewhere about Yelm, nine miles into our drive, after we have solved the world's problems, I ask what gives for the trip.


She explains that this guy has some RIR (Rhode Island Reds) for sale, they are laying and they are only ten bucks.


Hey, good find, I say. This now has taken us to between the turn off for Lake St. Clair. and the turn for Hawks Prairie. In there she did manage to also say that we were headed to West Olympia. The phone rings. Her cell phone. She answers it.


"Yeah, hi Jordan," she says in her usual sweet and inviting lilt. "I am on my way there right now, almost to Hawks Prairie and I-5 so it won't be long. No, we hadn't talked about that last night. Oh, I see. Well I was only expecting forty dollars. Okay, I see, well fine, yes, good, we'll see you in a bit then." Snap. (She shut the phone closed and that says snap, not click like hanging up an old fashioned phone.)


I'm looking at her with that so what is up look. She says, "How old do you s'pose Jordon is?"


Well just wildly guessing and wanting to think that folks who sell chickens, even on Craig's list, are at least as old as I am but realizing that there wasn't a Jordan within seven hundred miles of my childhood, I knew he had to be a product of a generation no older than that one where everyone and their puppies were named with 'J' names, as long as all the family members' first initial matched whether the last one did or not. Thirty-ish.


"Why," was what I actually said.


"So after a couple of e-mail exchanges on what he had and where exactly he was located, I e-mail him and ask politely if I could come and get them on Wednesday and he pops an e-mail back fast that says, 'hey, they are all gone.' Then he phone calls me, just a few hours later, and says 'four hens just came out of the woods' and he would hold them until Wednesday."


"Mmm," I say, really meaning, "wow, this is odd."


"Just now he has called to say that he has to charge me fifteen dollars for two of them because that is what he paid for them and he can't take a bath on a couple of chickens."

Mmm so we go from coyote bait to valuable chickens in one day?


Now mind you, hindsight has it that this was Mrs. Mike's and my signal to turn around, turn around now, and go home. But no. We are trusting, hope-filled girls, wanting laying hens. How is it that you take a "bath" on chickens? Stock market, yes, land deal, okay, but two chickens with the price difference of five bucks that you have had for how long? That's a bath? What's he bathe in, a cup? A tea-cup?


So finally we are climbing the back road to this fellow's house, speculating on what kind of person we are going to find at the end of our rope, we should have been prepared. I am rufflin' up my hackle feathers, or so I thought, ready to strike at the idgit that switches prices on a person while they are en route to buy the product. The bummer was, too bad I wasn't better prepared.


Maybe it was the "hey, this place doesn't look too bad" feeling when I got out of the car. But just imaging that scratching ripping the vinyl-record with the needle sound as I wheel around to match a face to the "hi, I'm Jordon, welcome to the farm."

Yikes! From the forty-five pounds of dread-locks, right down to the questionable foot wear. Oh no, we've landed in Greenland!


I take the offered hand, telling myself, "Give the kid a break. Don't be judgmental little missy, you're sporting an eye-brow ring and grey hair for crying out loud. You were here once (not literally, figuratively)."


But the farther we go on this, the more it is just rubbing me the wrong way, like a wire brush on tender skin. He yaps on and on about how the girls free-range and he only brings them in at night and in order to get them in gives them just a little grain and that the grain is only organic. Which by the way folks, I would love to state here that organic does not, absolutely does not, equal nutrition. It can be nutritional, often it is, but it doesn't necessarily follow.

That they go in real easy should have been a tip off that he says whatever strikes his fancy. Because if they go in real easy why did these four "come out of the woods" miraculously one day? Go in real easy should have also been a tip off that perhaps they were not finding enough food. Oh the little voices in your head you don't listen to in time to prevent tragedy.


Right away I can see who the ten dollar chicken is. Dread-lock boy "farmer", who probably works part time at the Organic Nursery and Vegetable Stand we passed on our way up here, where there is an odd mix of patchouli soaked, toe ringed, underwearless, twenty somethings mingling with the fifty-something-cancer-paranoid-granola returnees who both flirt like mares with him, the first because their life-sustaining trust fund is about to run dry and the second because they miss the thrill of living life without a trust fund, has now really gotten under my skin because he is having to hoick his pants, read that, juvenile shorts, up to keep the waistband from hitting his knees and the hem from dusting the dirt just under his non-farmer sandals.


So I let him have it, "Where did you get these chickens and were they the ones who told you they are Rhode Island Reds? Because they are not, true Rhode Islands are mahogany, a deep mahogany color; you have at best production reds." I was thinking that this would just be the begining of my grilling of this yahoo.


He blows me off and continues to insist to the Chicken Hunter that two are ten a piece and two are fifteen a piece. And I just let him go, worried that the Chicken Hunter who is a tender and sweet person will be mortified if I go for it. So when she says, with twenty dollars stuck out to him, "Well I can only afford the two that are ten a piece," the vessel bursts in my head when he says in a vaguely conciliatory tone, after a long pause, "I can let you have a deal, I can give you three for forty."


What?! No, really, what!?! Do you think she is so nice and I am so grey-headed that we are going to fall for that or have you snorted so much incense into your wee brain that you can't do math?

My tongue is on fire by this time and I dare not open my mouth. I want to say, in a nasty, momma-has-you-by-your-hair-you-better-straighten-up tone, that what you can do is, you can let Chicken Hunter have the four for forty like the ad said it would be and didn't get changed when they first came out of the woods and you called to tell her to come and buy them. That is what you can give her!

So even though Jr. has zero business sense and changes the price on folks, and even though he clearly cannot add well or whatever operation it was that took me five seconds to see that his "three for forty" meant that now he didn't want just fifteen dollars for the ten dollar chicken he wanted twenty dollars for a ten dollar chicken, even though we now had all that information, we still proceed.

Why? Because the Chicken Hunter and I never worked out signals that's why. Next time we gotta have signals. Like: I take my sunglasses off the top of my head and put them on would mean, hey, I think you should ditch this joker and his deal. Chicken Hunter waving her money would mean, No, I've come this far I'll just take the stupid things. They are chickens and they will eventually give me the sixty eggs I need to pay for this transaction.

Then I would have felt better about all this, as it was, no signals, we didn't know what the other was thinking.

Now, let's get back to reality.

He insists that we bring our cage over to the pen so that he can transfer the hens from his cage within the pen into Chicken Hunter's cage. He is not offering for Chicken Hunter to look over the hens he is about to shove into the cage and we are too shocked at this point to ask for the privilege.


And that is how we got all the way back to Hawk's Prairie and the lunch parking lot before we discovered the first set of horrors, how really stinking ugly the one hen is. She may be ugly but clearly she is well trained to hide her face on the way to the car!


When we got to the house I had already decided that we would switch one of our production reds with Chicken Hunter's deformed one. She was so ugly I knew that she would polish off forever any desire the little girls had for doing poultry.


I enlisted Bet to help CH and I, while Anna kept the two little girls occupied. When I handed the bird to Bet I was floored by how light it was. Paper light. It was Bet who immediately discovered the tick on her neck. Ah yes, free ranging in a bone dry conifer forest and organic feed, most likely she had not been dusted for lice since leaving the real farm she previously lived at.



Bet flipped her over, gently, to show us how bad this hen's skinny really was. That thing at the top of the pic in the smack dab middle is not her shank; it is her keel bone (breast bone). It looks like she had been de-meated and only thing left were the bones and feathers.

Can you see how little flesh is around the keel? I've never in my life seen a chicken this skinny. Or feather and downless. My chickens molt but they don't go into final stage alopecia.

Part of her problem is debeaking. Not so much that she was debeaked, although it is offensive to the eyes and if done wrong can cause chronic pain for the chicken who is debeaked (however the chickens that where being pecked to death by the one now debeaked no longer have their chronic pain). Her problem is more that the last chicken on earth to be made to free range with just enough cracked organic grain to lure her into her pen is one that has had her beak clipped.

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I wish folks would quit rescuing things. I wish I would quit accidentally rescuing things.

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A debeaked chicken cannot forage like their non-altered kin. Along with not being able to gather much in the way of food they also cannot pick up the tiny pebbles it takes to hold in their crop to help grind what they do find or grind the cracked organic tid-bits thrown into the pen ahead of them at night.

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I beg you, do not go out to a poultry farm that houses their birds together in such a manner that would require the birds to be debeaked; get horrified that the movie you saw in Junior High to make you hate farmers is true really true; think you need to rescue as many of these poor things as you can afford to buy; take them home and let the be happy free ranging. They won't do well.

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Debeaked chickens need a crumble feed, fed in a fairly deep trough. They will need all the supplemental vitamins and minerals that they will be missing by not scratching and successfully picking up tid-bits off the ground.

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I have been tapped on the shoulder tonight and given the what-for for wanting to lump a lot of folks together right now and be absolutely unforgivingly brutal.

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Not everyone who uses the word green, and doesn't really mean the actual color, is bad.

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Not everyone who yaps endlessly about only feeding organic is a hippy, fake farmer with unsheared shedding sheep and naked fleshless chickens. (Oh yes, he did.)

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Not everyone who doesn't reside in Jamaica but wears dread-locks anyway is an idgit.

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And not every pair of women, out looking for some nice laying hens at a decent price, are foolishly bamboozled.

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Oh, I need to relax now, and I am sure you do too Dear Reader, sorry if I got you all stirred up either way.

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I know, I have a lot of issues to work through. I will need to take folks in very small doses for a few days while I try to regain, and gain more, nice-ness.

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I was going to publish Jordan's address and last name, flag him on Craig's list, report him to the authorities, and barrage him with scathing e-mails daily for a month from a new address each day. Instead I will be satisfied with hitting publish post after I go back through and take out all the over the top unkind things.

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I do understand what is like to live confused, lied to and ignorant. You end up believing all sorts of whacky illogical manure.

And now for relaxing and a more soothing picture to end this hideous and frightening post, here is a picture of my Veronica spicata growing among my soon to be divided Iris germanica.

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See you soon with the results of today's (yes, I am finishing this up Friday morning) Moon Pie test. Today is the fortieth anniversary of the splash down of the lunar landing crew!

Clearly, Clearly I've Changed

Clearly Dear Reader, you are not confident that I would not give you things like lamb tails. But really I would only do that if you were that type of person. Oh, oh, I feel a story brewing up....

After reading her posts about her sisters' visit and the pranking that went on, this one is inspired by Kathy at Spot on Cedar Pond, now and also when the story first unfolded. And if I were still the same woman I was in this story, yes, I could understand your reluctance Dear Reader, to take me up on my offer of a prize. But honest, I've been rehabilitated, it was the shock therapy, I am no longer the same pppperson.

Kathy and I used to be in 4-H, as leaders, project leaders, superintendents of barns, moms. This meant that we were at the county fair and sleepless for days. Now I am not blaming the sleeplessness for my actions mind you, I'm just saying when you leave Lanny up all night you have to expect that many more hours of shenanigans.

Kathy superintended the Poultry Barn, I can't remember which job I was on at the time, but Terry, my partner at the Sheet Diet, was helping in the Cat Barn, yes, you heard correctly there is a Cat Barn at the County Fair. I had swung by and was hanging out with Kathy while she locked up her barn one night during the fair.

She always had terrific educational and inspirational displays up at her barn, one of them was a brooder of just hatched out chicks.

Time out here in the story for a little lecture: Next time you are visiting a fair, primarily run by volunteers, and you come across a brooder of hatching and just hatched chicks, remember that the volunteer had to time it just right, tend a incubator at their home for the better part of a month just so that you could have the delight of seeing baby chicks hatching and running around in a brooder.

Kathy did that every year along with collecting entries, dealing with the paid staff of 4-H and the fair, making other educational displays, grooming some of her own birds for said displays, talking her husband into building things for or fixing a building that they did not own and the fair/park service didn't care to help with. Dealing with kids, (usually fun) and their parents (not usually fun), making sure that the judge she hired earlier in the year showed up, setting up for the show, keeping kids on task while their do birdsmanship..... Okay I'm done with my lecture lets get on with the story.

She was tiding up her barn and had just collected up a chick that didn't make it in the brooder box. "Ahh, too sad. Okay, what garbage can is safe to chuck it into?


Then the wheels began to turn, with Kathy's help I am sure, I'm positive she had the first thought of it. You know she really deserves the credit here.

Terry was in charge of putting up prizes on this big board displayed down in the Cat Barn. The prizes were for the kids who did herdsmanship, they were allowed to pick a prize when they were done. Many of the prizes were different cat toys that "Fluffy" might like for his/her owner to pick.

Terry had told me just that day that she had to arrive early in the morning every morning of the fair, open up the Cat Barn and put the new prizes for the day up on the board before the kids arrived for the day with their kitties. She had to get there early so she could finish before they began to hover around her, because they wanted to know right away what they were working for and she doesn't do hover. So I knew that she would arrive before anyone else. I was confident.

So Kathy locked up the Poultry Barn, while I held little flat chicky in my devious paw. We walked down to my trailer and grabbed a zip lock bag for chicky, just like the bags that all the other "cat toys" were placed in. We sat around and waited to make sure that everyone was gone from the cat barn. The Cat Barn superintendents don't have animals to deal with at night like up in the livestock barns, all the cats and children leave the cat barn at nine at night, so when they were gone, they were gone.

Well the time had come, all was quiet in the cat barn, the adjoining rabbit barn and there were just a few non-curious stragglers in the Fair Office through which we gained access into the Cat Barn with the deception of "I have a note I need to hang on Terry's board so that she will see first thing in the morning."

"Oh Terry, I cannot wait, I wish I was this little leftover plastic mouse so I could see your face in the morning." I pinned that dead little chick now a "cat toy bar none" right smack in the center of the award board. Kathy and I giggled a little as we envisioned the shock on Terry's face and all that she would say as she took the dead chick down. Ooops, did I say dead, that was rather calloused wasn't it, "the deceased chick" is what I should have said.

The next morning I was busy at work setting up the arena for what ever small livestock was showing that day when I got called to the Office.

There stood a very stern looking Cooperative Extension 4-H Program Assistant. Okay, truth be told I still had no idea that I was really in trouble because she always looked stern especially at me because I was constantly causing trouble, mostly in the form of "why can't we accomplish this or that, it really can't be that hard can it?" I was one of those thorns that "they" alternately wished they could get rid of and then had to give awards to for all I got done. Burn out comes quick and hard to us types by the way if we are not well fed and cared for. Any who, I really couldn't think of what I had done now so I stood dumbfounded in front of her.

"LeeAnn, did you do something in the Cat Barn last night?"

"Uh, maybe." I sorta 'fess with a smirk building in my countenance.

"Well we have some crying sobbing children in the barn now this morning. They were quite shocked."

I immediately felt bad. That was not my intent. Yes, I think it is grandly silly that we have a Cat project and a Cat Barn, but my own kids had at times shown cats, well mostly just Michelle (it explains a lot), but really I don't not like the Cat Kids, its not their fault that they don't get to show real animal. I wouldn't want to make them cry. I figured that they couldn't handle dead stuff, it really wasn't my intent for them to find it.

But then I wasn't sure, was that a tale tell smirk on Nancy's face, where, by the way, was Kathy?

"But what happened to Terry?" I blurted out. "Terry was supposed to find it. Not the girls."

"Terry was late this morning. So the kids found it themselves." Man if this is a double back trick on me she is good at keeping a straight face, but I am positive that I can see a little smirk, but maybe I just want to see one.

Do you know how hard it is to apologize seriously and not laugh at the same time. Come on. Really how bad could a flat chick be to see in a bag. It wasn't bloody. But on the other hand I know that my kids are unusual and mercenary and yeah I get it, I'm sure some of them will be scared for the rest of their lives and I am sure that their parents will indulge the "horror" of it all. All I can say in my defense was that I had no intention of the children seeing the flat dead chick in a bag. But I guess it is people like me that give people like Bee phobias for the rest of their lives (see her comment about birds on my post One Of My Favorites Return ) . I oughta get a kick back from all the therapists in the area I tell ya.

So I promised never to pull a stunt like that again and I left the Office a whipped pup with my tail tucked between my legs thinking I will never get this whole adult business down but secretly wondering if Terry and Kathy were hiding somewhere having a giggle of their own.

"Lanny, have you reformed?" you ask quizzically Dear Reader. I understand your reluctance in believing that I have. But let me reassure you beyond a shadow of doubt that I have reformed. To the core. I am no longer the same woman. Yes, I am reformed, I no longer volunteer.