(Prepare for a Ramble)
Some firsts today at Pure Water Hollow: a pullet laid her first egg, our pigs ate out of the children's hands for the first time, and the first snowflakes of the year floated leisurely to the ground!
I had written about my concern when our chickens stopped laying eggs all of a sudden in September. In August, our 9 layers had given us 100 eggs, but then there were 21 consecutive days with no eggs in September! Finally, during the last week of September, one hen decided to lay an egg every other day into the first week of October. We got 7 eggs during the 12-day period and I was feeling like eggs were going to start coming around again. But then we had another 15 days in a row with no eggs again, until today.
We got an unusually small egg today, which means one of the pullets have started laying! In addition to our 9 mature layers we also have 11 pullets that were hatched March/April, which makes them 6 to 7 months old now. They have grown to be as big as the hens and it is exciting to think that they will all begin laying soon! I don't think they will start peak production until the days start to get longer again, in January. Every egg we get now is a blessing, especially after being with no eggs for so long! We've been thinking about getting some store bought eggs, but haven't caved in yet.
We also have 3 other pullets that hatched in July and are only 3 months old. I wouldn't expect them to start laying for quite some time still. So the 9 hens plus 14 pullets, plus Dommer makes 24 chickens in the main flock, which get closed up in the coop every night. I am still keeping 2 Dominique looking cockerels that are 6 or 7 months old because they are looking like such fine roosters. They are just about as big as Dommer now. We've read that if you have more than 15 hens you should keep more than one rooster with them, so we are waiting to see which one will work best with Dommer in the main flock. Maybe all three of them will get along together?
On the pig front, the children are continuing their goal to tame them and to help them feel comfortable with us. Sally ate some corn out of Matthew's hands this morning. When I brought the pig chow home after work today, they really went for it. Both Nellie and Sally ate out of Erica's and Christina's hands for about a half hour! Simon was climbing around the barn and Matthew was digging postholes with me for the coming pig lot we want to give them. On Mondays and Wednesdays I can't get home until 5:00, which is almost dark these days, so there is not much time to do anything out side. (It will really be bad next week when the clocks are moved back an hour. I won't have any daylight at all when I get home! On the good side, I will have some daylight to feed the chickens by before I leave for work.)
While I'm doing some updates let me tell about our disappointment with our chestnuts. We found some websites selling fresh chestnuts for $20-$25 per 5 pounds. I figure that we have about 5 pounds in each gallon size bag and we filled 11 bags full! That would be over 50 pounds, which means around $200 in chestnuts!!!! That cannot be right, can it? It doesn't really matter, though, because we still do not know the best way to use them, and no one is offering to buy them from us. We wanted to make chestnut flour but we read that they needed to be dried first. We have tried drying about 15 pounds worth by spreading them out flat on some old screens rigged in the rafters of our small metal out building. This is a warm area, and dry, so we thought that maybe they would be safe. We let them dry there for two weeks and checked on them this weekend. They seem to be ruined with those little white grub worm type things that we would run into other years, when we did not refrigerate them! So how in the world can we get them dried for flour making without the worms getting them? Does anyone know where these worms come from and how they can be prevented? We still have the equivalent of 7 bags in the refrigerator that I suppose are ok? (How can you really know for sure?) I guess if we can't figure out any thing else to do with them, perhaps the pigs would like $200 worth of chestnuts?
One final note: This is the earliest we have had snow flurries here, on October 23rd, since 1995. (There was some snow on October 21st that year. We remember because my brother-in-law, Gary, got married that day in WV. It snowed there and we heard that it was the same here.) We have had mild, almost non-winters for so many years now that I wonder if folks will know what to do if we get hit with a bad one? We had some huge snowfalls in the mid 90s here, but the children were too young to enjoy them.
Erica was the only child we had when we saw 24 inches of snow dumped on us on March 13th, 1993. She was just one year and four months old! Matthew had also been born when we had the 15-inch snowstorm on January 17th, 1994, but he wasn't even walking yet. That January our water pipes were frozen for 3 weeks straight and the river nearly froze over when we saw our thermometer reading at 26 degrees below zero! It was our first winter in this old house here at Pure Water Hollow. The house had no heat because the fireplace was not safe and we had put in some very inadequate baseboard heaters that kept the house at around 50 degrees while costing hundreds of dollars in electricity! The windows were hand blown glass and let air in when the wind blew. All this with a 4 month old baby boy and a 2-year-old little girl! They were too young to enjoy the 15 inches of snow but at least they survived!
Personally, I enjoy winter more than most people do, so I wouldn't mind having a bit more winter than we have had. On the other hand, I am not set up well enough yet to keep chickens and pigs alive for long, if we have many 26 below zero days!
I thought this was going to be a very brief, update of some things I hadn't written about lately, but as I look back at it, it has turned into another lengthy post! This one does not have much literary merit and reads more like a ramble, I am afraid. I suppose that's what a blog is for, sometimes.
1 comment
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Renee on October 24, 2006 at 3:34 pm
Hello! I can't wait for the snow too! We got flurry's on Sunday. I found a web-site I thought you might like to look at they have chickens too. homesteadblogger.com/surplusfamily/ It looked like you all had a little incommon.
Blessings to all of you,
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