Last one gone

Well, whatever it was came back and sort of got the other one.  We came home from work yesterday and the other chicken was outside the pen, but the door was closed.  I found a small hole which might be where the critter made it’s way into the coop, or ours got out. 

Normally the chickens move around when I come to them.  They are rather hard to catch.  This one just stood there and let me pick it up and look it over.  It was pretty banged up.  I won’t describe it.  But it wasn’t dead.  I had to put it out of it’s misery though.

Strange feelings of guilt about the life of a chicken that died because of my lack of observation of this hole.

RIP little chicken

I went out to the coop yesterday to take care of the chickens and one of them was dead.  I can’t really figure out how it died.  It does look like trauma of some sort.  There are feathers all over the place and the carcass was pretty mangled.  But, I can’t find a hole anywhere in the fencing or a hole that something dug under the fencing.  The carcass wasn’t eaten either, it was just kind of chewed up.  It’s possible that the other chicken killed it, but it doesn’t have that appearance, although I have no experience with dead chickens.

It’s kind of a strange feeling.  I’m a lot sadder about this dead chicken than I expected to be.  I’m not really sure why.  I guess because in some way it seems like a failure on my part by not taking care of them somehow.  This really throws up the question of what to do with the other chicken.  I’ve read that you shouldn’t have just one of them, but I don’t really want to give it away.  I guess I’ll have to make plans to pick up a couple more this next spring.

Wish I knew which chicken it was.  Either Poke or Brownie.  Gotta tell the boys sometime still.  I have a feeling they will be upset.

New Pants

I picked up some new pants yesterday.  My pants have gotten so loose they hang on me really badly, and sometimes just plain fall down.

I was almost able to get into a 38, which is two pant sizes less than than the ones I was wearing at the time.  Rachael thinks the 40 waist pants I got may be too big as they loosen up so I may go back and look at the 38s again.

Pretty exciting for me as I haven’t been under a 40 for a long time.  If I remember correctly, that would be a drop so far this year from a 44 to a 38.

Things I’ve learned in the garden this summer

I need to plant a lot more sunflowers.  They grow great, need little care and make a ridiculous amount of seeds to feed to the chickens.  Simply break down the stalk, chop off the head and throw it in a bin to be shaken to release all the seeds.  By using plants that grow shorter I could plant a lot more in the plots.  Definitely do this next year.

Oats fall into this too.  They grow well and make a great addition to the chicken coop.  I threw the whole stalk in there with the oats still on them and the chickens had a grand time figuring out how to eat the oats off the stalks.

Peanuts are too much work.  You can get most of the nuts when you pull up the plant but you still have to dig them and it’s really not worth it.  But, if you wanted to grow some feed for pigs I think they would be great.  The pigs could eat the tops and then root out the nuts and the high fat content would be good for them.

It is possible to plant too many green beans.  For me, bush beans work better than pole beans.

Don’t waste space on tomatillos.  They produce heavily and grow well, but we aren’t into them that much.

 I didn’t miss tomatoes this year.  It was a bad year anyway, but all the time I saved not slaving over the plants and canning them was better spent other ways.  I’m going to just plant a few next year too so that I can use all that space and time on other things.

Don’t be afraid to pull up some squash plants.  You don’t need as many as will sprout.

Sweet potatoes yield very well.  Plant more plants in the future.  4 gallons from 2 plants is a good deal, especially when this year was cool even so I would expect they under-yielded compared to a normal summer.  They were almost no maintenance even, I just kept them halfway weeded and then dug them up.

Plant peppers earlier in the spring so they will be bigger when they get outside.  They are heavily loaded down now but don’t have time to get ripe before the frost.  (I don’t like green peppers)