Lesson Learned

We moved our meat birds out to the chicken tractor the other day because they were getting too big for the brooder. We were a little timid about the cold nights, but said if got too cold at night we'd either put them back in the brooder or hang the heat lamp inside the tractor.

Yesterday was very windy but warm. We new there was a chance of rain, but didn't bother to check how cold it would get. I guess we were lulled into a false sense of security. Last night it stormed pretty good and the wind blew like crazy.

I went out this morning to a very chilly wind. I dreaded the worst and went to check on the meat birds. Sure enough, eight had died of exposure during the night. I was hopeful they had all been able to huddle together for warmth behind the plywood wind break a put up, but these were laying out away from it. I'm guessing the combination of being wet and the near freezing wind chill was just too much for them.

So, rather than sulk about only having 13 meat birds left, let's review what I've learned from this:

- If we're going to get meat birds this time of year I need to be a diligent weather checker
- Maybe we should wait until the last average frost to get meat birds. They can't stay in the brooder more than three weeks, and the weather extremes might be too much.
- If it's going to get below 40 degrees at night (or any time), we need to hang the heat lamp out there, at a minimum.

Oh well. Lesson learned.

21 Days and Counting

DW got all the eggs she needed yesterday so we fired up the incubator and set 17 eggs. We noticed that with the eggs in there, the incubator dips in temperature faster and takes longer to recover than it did when it was empty. We changed the light bulb from 25 to 40 watt so the temp would normalize more quickly. So far the temperature has been, on average, less than we would like, but within an acceptable range. At the very least it might take a day or more for them to hatch. The big thing to watch out for is letting the temp get too high and stay there. Anything over 102 degrees for more than a few minutes would probably kill the embryos. All we can do is wait and see.



We also lost one of our meat chicks to illness (I think) last night. We're down to 22 meat chicks and one (unidentified) rare chick. The meat chicks are starting to soil their brooder pretty quickly, so they'll probably be moved to the chicken tractor fairly soon. They're still very lively and healthy. We'll have to wait and see, but last batch seemed much more lazy and apathetic. That could have something to do with the heat.

Next month is turkey and pig month. The feed store gets their turkeys in March or April, so we plan to pick up three. That way if we lose one we'll still have one for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I'll also be calling the pig man in a few weeks. He sells show pigs year round and should have a few piglets that he's willing to sell as feeders (i.e. - not show quality). I built a new pig feeder that is cemented into the ground and has a lid they can open. We will also be setting up an automatic waterer. Both of these things will make feeding them everyday much faster and cleaner. We used to have to search the entire pen for the food pan, the entire time getting slimed by a very muddy and hungry pig. If it works, we should very rarely have to set foot inside the pen.

Homemade Egg Incubator

DW has been itching to hatch some new chicks from our flock, but none of our hens have gone broody long enough to hatch any. We decided to try and make a homemade incubator out of an old styrofoam cooler we have laying around. It has no lid and a big chunk taken out of one side, but we figured we'd give it a shot. We can always get a new cooler cheap if we need to. After reviewing some websites on homemade incuabators, this is what I came up with. (99% of this is taken from other people, so don't be impressed with my ingenuity)

I cut some hardware cloth and shaped it to create a raised floor to put the eggs on. A pan of water is put underneath it to maintain proper humidity.

Next I wired a lamp socket to a thermostat and mounted them to the side of the cooler. The thermostat will cycle the light on and off, keeping it as close to 99.5 degrees F as possible.

Next, I wired a small fan for a computer CPU to a transformer and mounted it. The fan circulates the air throughout the incubator for more even heating. This turns the incubator into a "forced air" type instead of a "still air" type. Forced air incubators have better hatch rates.

Lastly I added a digital thermometer and bag of water. The digital thermometer is a cheap one from Walmart that measures inside and outside temperature and humidity. The probe for the outside temp will be placed in between the folded over water bag. The temperature of the water bag best simulates the temperature inside of the eggs, which is the one we care about the most.

Since we don't have a top for this cooler, I cut a top from plywood. I also cut a small viewing window and covered that with plexiglass.

I have no idea if this will work, but it's worth a try. We tested it and found the setting that holds the water bag within one degree of 99.5 degrees. The thermostat cycles on and off just like it should. When we have enough we'll add eggs and wait 21 days. We tested its capacity and it will hold 17-18 eggs.

I'll post again when we've set our eggs.

Homestead Nerds

I was talking to DW the other day, and realized what nerds we are, homesteading nerds to be exact. We get so excited about things other people would laugh at. It mostly has to do with self-sufficiency. We got so excited when our cow freshened because we didn't have to go to the store for milk or butter anymore, and we (I mean she) could start making cheese again. Then, DW got that cute little excited look in her eye and tone in her voice because she had just discovered another self-sufficiency item we could add to our list. She made ranch dressing! She had tried another recipe earlier this year, but was unsatisfied because she still had to use store bought ranch mix.

Well, through the power of the internet, she found out how to make her own ranch mix. As a double bonus, she also discovered how to make her own mayonnaise, which the ranch dressing recipe calls for. It was excellent. I asked her to add a little more homemade ranch mix to it to make it "ranchier", and that was even better. She was so happy. So now we will have homemade mayo and ranch dressing in our home.

She talked about it on her blog earlier, but she also made her own ketchup. We had TONS of tomatos left over that we had picked before our first freeze. They were turning red quick and would soon go bad if she didn't do something with them. It was a day-long project, but when she was done she had turned 10 pounds of tomatos into 3 quarts of ketchup. It tastes great! The kids rejected it because it tasted different than store bought, but after a while of having nothing else, they'll get used to it.

We're such nerds.

You may ask how she has time for all of this while homeschooling and taking care of 4 little kids. Well, she doesn't. A lot of projects she would love to tackle or finish get postponed. It's a little easier because with all littles, homeschooling doesn't take up a whole lot of time right now. As the kids get bigger there will be more homeschooling to do, but also more hands to help with our homestead projects. It all balances out, sort of.

Lazy Days of Winter

Well, the winter days of not having (relatively) much to do around the homestead are coming to an end. After five weeks of being gone on temporary assignment for the Air Force, I came back to the first inklings of spring. No, it wasn't a change in the weather although it has been unusually warm this week. It was the early work that is light, but nevertheless, a harbinger of spring.

I spent all day Tuesday tilling the garden beds with our "new to us" tiller. I paid for that the next morning with very sore forearms and back. DW planted the first of our plants. I don't know everything that went into the ground but it included strawberries, blackberries, and peas. She has also started a myriad of seedlings indoors.

We also received our shipment of 25 meat chickens (Jumbo Cornish X Rocks, to be specific), plus one rare chick we haven't identified yet. We set them up in the brooder in my shop. This time we ordered from Murray McMurray Hatchery because we lost almost 25% of our last batch to leg problems. I can already tell these are much more lively than the chicks we got from the other unnamed hatchery. I think Murray McMurray is popular because they just have better breeding stock.

I was also excited to take home my first chicken plucker, the "Fabio 2000". (No, Sean didn't paint that. That's my artistic ability in a nutshell) It was built by my father-in-law, and named after our head rooster Fabio. Apparently he developed quite a bad reputation with my father-in-law while I was gone by attacking him at every opportunity. I'm the only person around here he doesn't attack. My FIL returned to his shop with new fevor after that weekend, and finished the chicken plucker. He has expressed a desire to be there to watch it strip the feathers off that devil bird. It looks funny, but should work. It's got a motor that turns the PVC cap, and the rubber fingers strip the feathers right off a scalded chicken.

I'm also slowly working on a tub-style chicken plucker that you just dump the birds in and it plucks up to four chickens in 15 seconds! That beats the 45 minutes per bird it takes me to hand pluck. It will also make plucking turkeys much easier.

Grizzly Man

I watched a very interesting documentary last night on a man named Timothy Treadwell, who was a grizzly bear enthusiast, and lived among them every summer for 13 years in Katmai National Park, Alaska. The documentary addressed the controversy surrounding this man's activities and his death at the hands of the bears he loved in 2003.

Treadwell was an athiestic, self-proclaimed "eco-warrior" whose mission was, in his mind, to protect the grizzlies in Katmai from poachers. He was about as "crazy environmentalist" as they get and practically loathed human civilization for threatening the grizzly's existence. His approach to studying the bears was the most controversial part of his story. Treadwell literally lived right next to the bears and considered them his friends. He would swim with them, play with their cubs, and get amazingly close to the adults, sometimes even touching them.

Watching footage from his extensive video recordings, it became very clear to me that the connection Treadwell perceived between himself and the bears was complete fantasy. He loved these bears with a passion, giving them all names, and their lack of aggression towards him was perceived to be friendship and acceptance. He went so far as to take on mannerisms of bears and expressed many times to wanting to be a bear and live among them. He did inject some reality into his fantasy. He was very aware how dangerous these grizzly bears were, and knew there was a chance one could turn on him one day. Despite this danger, he refused to carry bear mace or put up electric fences around his camp, which the Park Service suggested for his protection. He tried to be careful around them, but his fascination caused him to get much to comfortable with them.

The remains of him and his girlfriend were found by the bush plane pilot hired to pick him up in the fall of 2003. They were clearly attacked and eaten by bears, and not much was left to recover. The reason I found this story so interesting is because this seems to be a recurring theme throughout history. Man thinks he can tame or befriend wild animals, and eventually is killed by the animals he loved. What Treadwell perceived as friendship was nothing more than bored indifference on the part of the bears. He was not considered a threat, and was literally ignored by them. Only their curiosity would cause them to investigate him at times. His death occured because of natural bear tendencies. The year he and his girlfriend were killed, he stayed later in the season than he normally did. When the salmon were plentiful, the bears had plenty of food and had no reason to take notice of him. But late in the season, when the salmon are scarce and bears are trying to store fat before winter hibernation, he suddenly changed into a potential food source to them. I think these "save the world" liberal environmentalists sometimes live in a fantasy world where nature loves them because they are the heroes of the environment. The stark reality is that these animals are wild, and have two driving forces that never change: their need for survival and the urge to procreate. Beyond this, emotional attachment is an illusion.

Many environmentalists respect Native Americans because they lived "in harmony" with nature, but an Native American interviewed in the documentary said it best. He said there has always been an unspoken boundary between bears and humans. It's a level of respect. The indians leave the bears alone, and vis-a-versa. To cross that boundary into their world is disrespectful and foolish. The numbers tell it all. Treadwell and his girlfriend were the first humans to be killed by a bear in Katmai National Park. He didn't respect the bears enough to leave them alone and he died because of it.

Cow Happenings

Lately a few things have been happening with the cows that bears mentioning, and since this is a homestead blog, here goes!

DW came up with a great idea to feed our cows. We bought 5 big round bales and have been hauling in arm fulls of hay from the overhang connected to our barn, into the barn and dumping it in the hay feeder. This has caused more than a little to be wasted as it falls to the ground while we're walking, not to mention our clothes get covered in hay. The whole point of feeding the cows this way was to keep them from wasting the hay, so that problem wasn't solved. I thought about buying a round bale feeder (at least $100), but I'd have to find a way to haul the round bales into their pen so they can eat it. Then DW had a "apostrophe" (you have to have seen the movie Hook to understand). The pasture fence borders one end of the overhang where we store our hay. Why not replace the fence in that section with an old gate we have laying in the junk pile, cut holes in it for them to stick their heads through, and let them just eat right off of the round bales? Ingenius! Not only is the hay protected from the rain, but it doesn't require us to move the bales to the pen. When they finish a bale we just slide a new one in place, like a coke machine.

Secondly, we tried drawing blood on Chloe again to send in for a preg test. We must have stuck that poor cow 10 times and couldn't get enough to send in. We'll try again this weekend and if it doesn't work, I'll have to have the vet palpate her.

Thirdly, Pumpkin and I seem to be doing this weird dance every morning now. For some reason, about halfway through milking, she gets it in her head that she doesn't want to be in the stanchion any more. She starts trying to pull her head out and poops, pees and dances all over the place. I don't get it. She has plenty of grain left, and it's not like I'm taking forever. I just have to stand back and let her calm down. The rest of the milking consists of me trying to milk the rest of the way and stopping to let her dance some more. So far she has not kicked, which I'm extermely thankful for. She has stepped in the bucket once, but that wasn't her fault. I don't know what gets into her, but it makes milking twice as long as it has to be. The other thing I can't figure out is why she doesn't do it with Regina. Not even once. Go figure. From experience I know it could be much worse, which helps me keep perspective. Oh well. I'll just smile each morning now as I know I'm going out to the barn to dance with my cow.