Creeeeeeeeeaaak

Well, the hinges on the door seem a bit rusty, and there's definitely a lot of dust on the windowsills, but I'll get the blog shipshape in no time...
It's been a busy summer.  After endless soul sucking rain in June and a good bit of July, the sun finally came out.  And then it got too hot and humid to breathe.

So, a summary of summer:
Madman heard a report that we'd had 21 days of rain in June.  I honestly don't recall there being 9 days without rain - I'd put it closer to 3.  Maybe 4, tops.
So the garden is an abject failure this year.  What didn't wash away, rotted in the ground.  The soil was usually too wet to work (and was always too wet to work on my days off), so the only thing growing out there is grass and ragweed.  And 6 corn plants.  And I found a beet the other day.
Not a banner year for gardening.
The goldfinch finally gave up around the end of July.  My guess is he finally suffered a terminal concussion.
Something has been eating our laying hens and got one of our adult turkeys.  We're not sure if it's a skunk, a raccoon, or a fox - all have been seen lurking around here at one time or another.  We've revamped fencing.  Again.
There have been numerous sheep escapes - some more harrowing than others.  (I'll share a few in a later post.)
We lost a mama rabbit, but gained 12 baby rabbits. 
All 12 of our Barred Rocks have survived, and are almost ready to join the remnants of our laying flock, once we're certain that we've thwarted whatever carnivore is out there.  There are several roosters in the crowd, who don't know that they're auditioning for the role of Only Rooster in the Coop.  (The ones who get voted off the island will end up in the freezer.)
All 15 turkeys are also still with us.  They've still got some growing to do.  There's been some gobbling starting to go on out there, so we're hoping there's a male or two for our future breeding flock.
I had a lovely vacation, with family visits, yarn, bubble blowing, and a RenFair.

And I had a major milestone birthday.  One of those that end in zero.  There weren't any party hats or balloons, but my daughters kidnapped me and took me on an adventure.  And, as with all really good adventures, I got to wear a superhero costume.

Anyone care to hazard a guess?

Peeps and Sheeps

Another sign of spring is when we do this:

It was really hard to get a picture, since they all move so fast. 

This year's choice for our Chicken of the Year is the Barred Rock. 
It occurred to me last fall that if we got a different color of chicken each year, we would be better able to keep track of how old each chicken is.  After years of getting Rhode Island Reds, we had no idea which hen was from which year.  And we've still got a bunch of them in our flock - they could be anywhere from 4 to 7 years old.  Now when a chicken inexplicably drops dead (and they do) at least we'll be able to figure out whether it's from old age or from some chicken health-threat. 
And Barred Rocks are really pretty...

Anyway, the little dark chicks are the Rocks, and there are 12 of them all together.  Straight run, so they'll be a mix of boys and girls.  We plan to keep one of the roosters, since our previous rooster inexplicably dropped dead.  (Oh, hell, there's one of those plans again.)

The lighter chicks are actually baby turkeys.  We got 15 Bourbon Reds, which is the same heritage breed that our present two turkey hens are.  (We didn't really want that many, but that was the minimum order.  Given the fragility of turkey poults, it may be just as well that we start with extras, though.)
The plan here (there's that word again) (and I can hear that giggling, ya know) is to keep the best tom turkey out of the group for breeding purposes.  We'd really like to be able to hatch our own turkeys. 
BTW, I might need you to remind me later that I thought that was a good idea.

In sheepy news, all the girls are 'making bag' - which means that lambing could start any time.  Onyx looks like she's getting ready to feed the multitudes - if her udder gets any bigger, she'll be stepping on it...
I hope she doesn't have triplets again.

I don't remember buying any gargoyles...

On my way out to do chores tonight, I glanced over at the chicken coop, then ran back inside for the camera.
Because this:

 The chicken coop roof doesn't have lumps.  Or gargoyles.  Though apparently, it does have turkeys.

Getting a little closer:

"Hey!  You birds get down from there!  Go back inside!"

You can see how well they mind...

I remember saying recently that I liked raising turkeys.  Oh, yeah - right here.  What was I thinking?

And me without my camera...

Sorry, y'all.  Because it would have made a great picture.

I was on evening chores tonight, since Madman did them this morning.  Everything went smoothly, especially considering it was snowing hard, with high winds.  (It was raining when I left for work this morning, then the temperature plummeted and it was snowing when I was coming home.  Because it's Vermont, and that's how we do things up here.)
Smoothly, that is, until I got to the chickens.  I filled their feeder, then was excited when I found two eggs in the nest boxes.  (We've only been getting one egg lately, so two was just great!)  I held them in my left hand while I checked the waterer.
Madman had given them a full one this morning, but hadn't pulled the other one, so both waterers were in the coop.  Since we'd need one for the morning, and there was no sense leaving both of them to freeze overnight, I decided to grab the one that was sitting on the roost and head for the house.
Unfortunately, there was a sleeping turkey perched on top of it.  Now, in hindsight, I probably should have grabbed hold of the turkey with both hands and set her on the roost, then picked up the waterer.  But I had one hand full of eggs, so I just reached up and tried to nudge the turkey off with my right forearm, figuring she would just step back onto the roost.
Wrong.
I've mentioned that turkeys are pretty mellow.  Just 'everything's hunky-dory' sort of critters.  But apparently that's not the case when you wake them up out of a sound sleep, while wearing a headlamp that's shining brightly in their eyes, and start pushing them off their perch.  She went just the other side of bonkers and jumped up onto my forearm, while flapping wildly.  It was sort of like having a falcon on your arm, if the falcon weighed 15 pounds with a 4-foot wingspan and was having hysterics.  She kept whacking me on the head and shoulder with her wings and wouldn't Just. Let. Go.  I was trying to encourage her to step off onto the roost, but she wasn't having any of that.  It was somewhere along this point that I put my thumb through one of the eggs.
So now I've got an hysterical flapping turkey on one hand, and a dripping mess of busted egg in the other.

And me without my camera...

Yep. This one's gonna stick.

Crap.

The sheep, shown here happily munching on hay, have a light dusting of snow on their backs.  Cuz, why would they go inside a shelter when there's a perfectly good snowstorm to stand out in?
.

 The ones who seemed ticked off by all the white stuff are the turkeys.  They're too young to have experienced it before, and they spent most of the day stalking around making loud "Pwweot!  Pwweot!"  noises.  Apparently this is Turkey for "WTF?"

They spent the latter part of the afternoon perched on their gate.  I think they were tired of walking in the white stuff, and why would they go inside their shelter when there's a perfectly good snowstorm to stand out in?

I think they've been taking sheep lessons.

No NoBloPoMo

For the first year since I started the blog, I'm not going to do NoBloPoMo.  I'm having trouble posting once a week - once a day is totally out of the question.  Though I will try to post a little more often.  The activity level of summer has tapered off, though we still have sheep, chickens, turkeys, and rabbits to tend. 
We butchered our original turkeys, selling one and putting the other two in the freezer, but someone gave us two pretty Bourbon Reds, which is a heritage breed..  They're not old enough to tell what sex they are yet (and after the loop one of our first turkeys threw us, we're not going to guess), but we're hoping for a male and a female so we can try raising some of our own.  With our luck, that won't happen, of course, but we can still hope.  The same person also gave us two young female rabbits.  Our sole surviving rabbit, Stiffler, is verrrrrry excited to have new girls in the neighborhood.  We put them in a cage next door to his, and he's been combing his hair and practicing his pickup lines ever since. 
Soon, Stiffler, soon...

Hey! What happened to August?!?

And how did it get to be September already...

So, what have I got to show for the summer?

Here's the sum total of the knitting I got done:

Wingspan.  (This is the best of a bunch of really bad pictures.  I can't get the colors right and the focus defeats me.)  I love this project.  Though if you count over to the fourth and fifth wedges, starting from the right, you'll see that the color sequence went south.  Minutes after I posted about how the colors were transitioning perfectly for the pattern, I hit a knot in the yarn.  *sigh*

The garden pretty well went south this summer too.  What with the sheep getting out and eating most of it, there's not much left but swiss chard and green beans.  And the tomatoes are being eaten nearly to the ground by a sudden infestation of hornworms, which we've never had before in all our years of gardening up here.  Growing up in Kansas and upstate NY, I was familiar with them, but Madman was all "WTF?!?" because he'd never seen one before.  Picture a caterpillar the size of your middle finger, chomping on your tomato plants and pooping the equivalent of elephant droppings.  The only good thing about them is that they explode rather spectacularly when you stomp on them.  (Just be careful not to point them at anyone, as they go off like a cannon.)

One of the few bright spots is that my lovely Black Austrolorps have started laying eggs.  (*sniff*  They grow up so fast...)  They've now been moved in with the main laying flock, though they spend most of their time next to the fence between poultry pens, gazing at their beloved turkeys.  The turkeys are also now spending all their time pressed up against the other side of the fence, gazing right back at their little chicken friends.  And this morning, Madman found the hen turkey in with the layer flock - she must have climbed the fence since she's now too fat to fly.  We foresee trouble, but the turkeys' days are numbered (because Thanksgiving.  And possibly Christmas.  You know.  Don't tell them.) so it will all work out in the end.   Because it would be just great if something on this little farmlet would just stay where it's supposed to.

But I'm not holding my breath...

Of Poults and Pullets

I've been so caught up with the shenanigans of the sheep this summer, that I've been remiss in reporting on the turkeys and the Black Austrolorps.
Let's just fix that, shall we?
Here's a photo of the Lorps in the pen they share with the turkeys.  They're definitely a Gang of Six - they travel as a group, and rarely stray more than a few feet away from each other.

(I just wish I could get closer to them to get better pictures - they're not particularly friendly...)
I'm especially intrigued with their legs, which are black, instead of the almost-yellow of all our other chickens.

As for the turkeys, we thought we had one tom and two hens.  But late last week, one of the 'hens' suddenly started looking more and more male.  We don't know if this is normal or if he's just a late bloomer.  So, we've got one tom, one hen, and one puzzle.

Here's the tom:

He's in full-tilt Proud to Be a Turkey mode.  Tail feathers fanned, wing feathers also fanned and wings held down and slightly out to the side, all his feathers fluffed up until he looks twice his actual size, chin tucked and face colors blazing.

The funny thing is that he's been doing this since he was a week old - even before he had feathers to fluff.  He would assume the position and strut the strut.  "Oh, yeah, dude.  I'm a turkey.  Watch me now."
As for the other guy - here he is with the hen.  Up until last week, he looked just like her.  Then suddenly his neck started getting redder, that funny droopy nose-thing started growing, and he started doing the tom-turkey-fluff thing.  It was a surprise to us...

And I can cheerfully report that turkeys are just as dumb as we'd heard.  Maybe even dumber.
(You're starting to sense that I'm getting ready to tell one of my animal stories, aren't you?  Yep, you're right.  Grab a beer or a cup of tea and settle in, cuz here we go.)
This whole turkey-raising thing is new to us, if you'll remember.  It's this year's experiment, and it's been interesting.  On the whole, we like turkeys - they're not as flighty as chickens.  More placid, yet more curious.  They like to check things out, though they don't seem to come to any conclusions.
So, the other day, I was on morning chores.  Now evening chores can be done in a relaxed manner, since there are no time constraints.  For this reason, disaster rarely strikes for evening chores.
Mornings, however, are another story.  Since we have to get to work in a timely fashion, we tend to be in a bit more of a hurry, even when we've allowed an extra margin of time in case of delays.  (We have a theory that morning chores take 20 minutes if everything goes smoothly.  However, this is just a theory, since everything has never gone smoothly...)
So, like I said, it was my morning for chores.  There had already been a few delays, and the extra time had been pretty well chewed up, when I looked toward the gate to the turkey and lorp pen and saw a turkey standing just outside the (closed) gate.
It was the hen.  I don't know how she got out.  My theory is that she'd flown up to the top of the gate and then fell off.  Not great flyers, turkeys. 
I started grumbling to myself.  "Aw, crap.  I don't have time for this.  Damn turkey.  grumble grumble" 
I approached her cautiously, trying not to spook her.  It was the first time a turkey had been out of the pen, and I had no way of knowing how she'd react.  The very last thing I wanted to be doing was racing around chasing a terrified turkey.
She continued to stand there quietly as I edged closer.  I realized I could almost hear her singing to herself:  "I'm so dumb.  Dumb-de-dumb-de-dumb."
I got closer.
 "I'm so dumb.  Dumb-de-dumb-de-dumb."
And closer.
 "I'm so dumb.  Dumb-de-dumb-de-dumb."
I finally got close enough to lay hands on her.  She still didn't move.
 "I'm so dumb.  Dumb-de-dumb-de-dumb."
I reached behind her, unlatched and opened the gate, then, with both hands gently turned her around.  She obliged by alternately lifting each foot as I spun her, rocking in time to her song.
 "I'm so dumb.  Dumb-de-dumb-de-dumb."
I gave her a little push, and she walked back into the pen, still singing.  "I'm so dumb.  Dumb-de-dumb-de-dumb."

Turkeys.  Raising them again next year?  Oh, yeah.

As if we didn't have enough to do...

Our chicks and baby turkeys arrived yesterday.  What were we thinking...

 We've got 50 Cornish-X, though 20 of them will be going right away to someone else.  The black ones are Black Australorps that I ordered at the last minute.  (Madman had sent me down to the feedstore with our turkey order.  I was unsupervised.  Black Australorp chicks were on their order list and were the same price as Rhode Island Reds.  I couldn't help it.  I'd wanted Australorps since the first picture I saw of them, and there they were, right on the order form.  How many times do you get a chance to impulse buy chickens...)
Madman picked up the chicks when they came in, and brought them home.  "You're going to love your Australorps," he told me.  "They look like little penguins."

 And we got half a dozen turkey poults.  We've never grown turkeys before, so this should be an interesting experiment.  The three in the foreground are turkeys - they look like chicks with lumps on their heads.

I told Madman I wanted to take a black marker out to the chick's coop and draw little bow-ties on the Australorps.  "Wouldn't that be cute?"  I asked.  He just laughed and shook his head.  And went to hide the markers.