Last Respects

This past week we say goodbye to three of our flock: Stumpy, Ping and a no-name Welsummer.  We lost them all to a Red Tail Hawk who was starving in the cold weather.  We know because the hawk was waiting for it's breakfast to come out of the coop the next morning.  It was sad, but we are thankful we only lost chickens.  We have lost two in the past to a raccoon, one to a mystery predator who found our lost chicken before we did and now this.  

Stumpy led a much fuller life than most Frizzle chickens get to lead.  Here's most of her story from a previous post.  She had quite a few fans on FaceBook and made such a miraculous comeback from losing all her feathers (see above lower picture).  Here's her first appearance on this blog and this is her last.  

Interestingly, when we first got the two white crested Polish chickens, we named them Mutsu and Ping.  I just liked the names.  Later in the year when apples were in season, I remembered that Mutsu was an apple, and the very kind we chose this past year to make sauce actually.  When Marcella moved in with us, she heard the names of our chickens and though Mutsu had already passed away (she wandered off never to return again), we still had Ping.  She said, "Ping mean "apple" in Chinese."  So, we inadvertently named both Polish chickens after apples!!!  They all love to eat apple scraps when we make sauce too.  

Here's a baby picture of Mutsu and Ping

We have loved having our chickens roam the yard and have plans to get some turkeys this year and a few more chicks in order to bring up our numbers again.  We started with 11, then got Stumpy from our friends, and now we're down to 6: four Ameraucana and two Welsummers.  One Welsummer seems to have camouflaged itself to look like an Ameraucana and it looks like we have five Ameraucanas and one Welsummer.  It's a mystery that baffles us.  We only bought four Ameraucanas, so there can't be five.  So weird. Above is the last picture taken of the ladies all together when there was still nine just a few weeks ago. 

We've had an eventful year already with a trip to Tennessee to visit my grandparents there.  I have so many pictures to share with you all!  Hopefully in the coming week I'll be caught up on laundry and housekeeping stuff and can get those up.  Happy New Year, may the Lord keep you from predators swooping down from the sky to take you out!    

The Tale of a Chicken

We've told you before about our foster chicken, Stumpy.  When she came to us she was missing all the feathers on her sides and bottom from her pen mates pecking her nearly to death.

Turns out hybrid chickens tend who lose feathers tend to molt all their feathers before growing any back.  She is now nearly featherless.  She looks like a broiler chicken running around in our back yard.  We've been concerned about the cold weather coming and how she'd manage.

So we bought her a coat.  It's really for a tiny dog, but looked like it would work. 

 It fits her, but she trips over it when she tries to walk. I know, we already have naked dogs, who wear coats, now a chicken, yadda yadda yadda.  She could freeze to death!  For the record she's much more pleasant to hold when wearing her sweater, it's a bummer it won't work out for her.  We're hoping she learns to stay in the coop for the winter, she is so cold already that she stopped laying eggs.  She's an older bantam and has laid eggs since we got her.  The good news is, two of our Ameraucanas started laying finally!  Wing-Wing, Z's favorite, was the first to start laying.  Chickens are usually about 5 months old when they start laying eggs, these two were two weeks shy of becoming 5 months old.  We don't expect to get many eggs over Winter, but lots come Spring.  

The fun part is that the new eggs are GREEN!  

  I'm sorry if all of this is WAY too much chicken information.  We just had to share!  We do love our chickens.  If you happen to see Ben in person, be sure to ask him what a chicken sneeze sounds like, he does a great impression!!!

 Stumpy keeping an eye on things.

A really long post that gets more exciting as it goes!

The bountiful harvest from our community garden. Notice I don't show you a picture of all the weeds in the garden. That's symbolic for something worth mentioning. Below I will share with you much of the bountiful harvest God's given us in our lives. Please don't assume that our lives are perfect or that we are because we share our happy news with you. We'll share the yuck too, but only in metered doses due to the public nature of this medium. We are sinners, who somebody had to die for and we are completely undeserving of all the good that we share. Come, rejoice with us!!

Good ole' Gwennie and Wing-Wing (above)

Meet "Stumpy" our foster chicken. We took her in after her pen mates were pecking her to death (literally) a good month ago. This is the first time she's been able to have her picture taken, she was in too bad of shape for public viewing. The picture definitely shows her better side. Her back end is still naked as a jay bird. Her name was "Frizz" as she's a Frizzle breed, but she had a Biblical name change after her wing feathers were completely pecked off, now all you see are little stumps like you dip in sauce on Wing Night. She's the smallest of the chickens because she's a bantam but she is the oldest and subsequently our only "layer" right now. We get one small egg a day from old Stumpy. She's feisty, runs with a giant waddle that makes me laugh out loud and lays her eggs in the corner of the coop where she makes her nest since she can't fly up to the laying boxes.

We had a rough week this week with the chickens and lost our Mutsu (above left). We actually lost two chickens this week, but after a brown tailed hawk swooped down to attack, the remaining 8 chickens ran into the corn field behind us to hide and came back with one of the missing chickens (a no name Welsummer) and so we have nine. We had some hope that Mutsu might also make a miraculous return, but our hope is dwindling as each day passes. Her Polish buddy, Ping, misses her very much, but is beginning to move on with her life. Glad I took these pictures the day before she went missing!

Remember in a previous chicken post, that beautiful chick who, I said, should be named because she's so beautiful, but we hadn't thought of anything? Well, we thought of a name! Meet "Mrs. Crooked Toes"! Yes, she's married. It's arranged anyways, Mr. Rooster will be joining the flock shortly (each hen has chosen to keep her own last name for the sake of individuality in their polygamist family- I checked and this is kosher for chickens). I'm praying we don't lose anymore chickens, we've gone from 11 of our own to 8, plus Stumpy makes nine now.

The above are the last of the pictures taken with my camera. Ben took it apart to fix the smoking problem it had and we agreed it wasn't worth trying to put back together. Thankfully, my mom gave me her old camera a while back and if I can find the charger for it's battery I'll be in business again. I kinda need to find it before I get another order for virtual tours. I did three last week. I don't think taking panoramic shots with my cell phone would be a good idea.

I have a confession. I've been holding out on you all. Big time. My laundry life has been so exciting that I'm not even sure why you've ever read this blog before now. I've decided to come out of the closet, the time has come. Hold on to your britches! I have been making my own laundry detergent since January of this year. I liked it so much I found a recipe for fabric softener too. Then I started making shampoo for Ben. He loves it. I haven't told you all because I didn't want it to be a passing phase I was going through, like, "Guess what I'm doing everybody!" but then stop doing it, y'know? So, now that I've been doing it for seven months, I can officially share with the world what I'm doing. I also bought a drying rack from Amish country last Fall and hung our laundry to dry in front of the wood stove all winter long. Spring came and I took a break from hang drying, but was reinspired when Ben's sister, Debbi, moved in with us for the Summer. She hand washed all her clothes when she moved in as she spent her Spring semester in Uganda. She now lets us throw her clothes in the wash with ours, but she still bathes out of a bucket like she did there.

Anyways, the move to make my own laundry detergent came when our friend, Matt Sebree, sent me this recipe:

Homemade Laundry Detergent

Yields 10 gallons. (cost approx. $5-$8 dollars a batch)

Ingredients:

4 cups of hot tap water

1 bar of Burt's Bee's body soap or any other natural soap you feel safe using

1 cup of Arm & Hammer Super washing Soda (not baking soda and not the A & H laundry detergent)

1/2 cup of Borax

Equipment needed:

Cheese grater

5 gallon bucket with lid (an ale pale with a spigot works great)

Tall stirring spoon

Smaller containers for dispensing

Directions:

1. Grate bar of soap into sauce pan with hot tap water and still continually over medium heat until dissolved

2. Fill 5 gallon bucket half full with hot tap water.

3. Add melted soap, washing soda, and borax.

4. Stir well until dissolved and fill bucket to the 5 gallon mark with more hot tap water.

5. Stir, cover, and allow to sit overnight.

6. Optional: add an essential oils such as lavender, rosemary or tea tree oil (good anti-bacterial oil)

This 5 gallons of liquid is your concentrate, to use:

1. Stir well

2. Mix it 50/50 with water in an old laundry detergent bottle for easy dispensing.

3. Use 1/2 cup with regular washing machines or 1/4 cup in HE machines.

This batch will yield 10 gallons of chemical free and safe laundry detergent.

Can be used as a pre-treatment

For an inexpensive alternative to fabric softener, add 1 cup of vinegar to the rinse cycle (will not leave smell and increase the absorbency of your towels)

One batch lasted our family of four (and random guests who stay for weeks/months at a time) six months. So, I just made my second batch of it. It makes a ton!!! Note: Use hot/warm water to dilute at the end, as it ends up super lumpy otherwise. I have tried two different laundry softener recipes and much much much prefer this one to the recipes that have one to one ratio of baking soda and vinegar as the baking soda ends up all over the laundry room. I used this website to pick out a good shampoo recipe. I make the Step 2: Stimulate recipe for Ben and am still searching for the perfect recipe for me. Next on my "make it myself" agenda is HAIR GEL! I found this recipe and am excited to try it!

Finally, I saved the best for last! On August 19th, our family will welcome a 24 year old girl from Jakarta, Indonesia who will live with us for one year! She is sort of a missionary to America. She comes to us via the IVEP program (International Volunteer Exchange Program) and is sponsored by two churches. One of the churches has a coffee shop as a ministry and she'll be working there twenty hours a week and the other church is ours, where she'll be doing random miscellaneous jobs for twenty hours a week. We are excited to meet her, get to know her personality and culture. Maybe we'll even learn how to make some Indonesian food! We are busy preparing her room and reorganizing the house for her arrival. We look forward to meeting you, Marcella!

**UPDATE**

Good news! I found the charger, it was labeled "CAMERA" Thanks for the clue, Dad! Thanks for the hand-me-down, Mom!!

A moment of silence, please.

RIP

Nutmeg 4/25/10-5/29/10

We were enjoying a lovely dinner out with the family on Saturday night at Der Dutchman. I thought, "We should really get back to the chicks to lock them up for the night..." Ben told me later that he thought the same thing. As we drove home at 9pm we watched the sun set. The dogs were barking wildly in the house when I came in and I let them out, as Ben and Z were slowly making their way from the car to the coop to put the chicks away for the night. The dogs tore up the hill straight to the coop, barking wildly. Z came down to tell me that a chickie was dead. I gave him a hug and was thankful it wasn't more as our friends with the incubator lost all of their chickens just a week ago. Z cried and cried after we put him to bed that night. Ben and I had heavy hearts too. The next morning after I watered the garden, I went to see which one it was, and I only counted nine chicks. We had eleven.

We think a raccoon got into the coop. Mean old coon just killed 'em and didn't even eat them. Thankfully our naked dogs ran up and scared him away before he got more of our birds. Also, we're thankful it was likely two roosters (sorry Nutmeg!). You only need one rooster and we were thinking we had 2-3. Now time will tell if we have any. Currently, none are apparent roosters.

Thankfully, we still have:

Gwen (who, like her mother, is not very photogenic)

Mutsu and Ping (the fiesty duo)

and Z's special Wing-Wing who is adventurous and sweet,

along with five other no-namers, that used to be six (may he or she also rest in peace). These pictures were taken last Monday when we put them outside for the first time. They absolutely loved it. It was like watching prisoners set free. They would jump and run and play. They love their new coop that Ben built with a ramp to take them into the yard. The fence is only for honest chickens, Ben likes to say, because it doesn't keep them in as much as tell them where their boundaries are. He's been training them to come to him when he calls. We're pretty sure they think he's their mommy. Silly birds! I'm the mommy!

We had a lovely weekend with family. How special to have my grandparents from TN here, aunt and uncle from NJ, cousins from PA, NJ and MD, as well as my parents from Germany. Such a good time we had, I hope to share pictures soon. Happy Memorial Day!

Meet the crew

Gwen (My Favorite)

Center we have Nutmeg (who we think is a rooster because he struts and is getting a comb already), with Mutsu and Ping to his left and right respectively. Far left are no-name chicks.

This is Wing-Wing, named and loved by Z

This one has no name, but should because she's beautiful!

Note the difference in orange legs vs. gray legs. Ameraucanas have the gray, Welsummer have bright orange and the Polish mop tops are somewhere in the middle.

Five more chicks

Out of a dozen eggs, five hatched and time will tell how many are roosters. The five Welsummers are brown with stripes and look very similar to two of our Ameraucanas, who, we are told can take on the look of any breed. The Welsummers have orange feet which help us identify them, the Ameraucanas have grayish feet and puffy cheeks. The new babies have integrated nicely with the six we got yesterday, it helps they all hatched on Sunday and are the same size.

Here they are all sleeping.

A Polish chick taking a drink

Welcome little chicks, we are so excited to have you in our basement. Z can't wait until tomorrow when you turn three days old and he's allowed to hold you for the first time. Next week we'll invite little friends to come and visit you. What a great experience this is for all of us.

Six have arrived!

Wow...what a day this has been. It has certainly been eventful. Later in the week I'll share about our morning, but for now I'm just sharing about our afternoon. As of now, one third of the Welsummers have hatched from the incubator at our friend's house. So we'll see how many we end up with tomorrow when we go to pick them up.

Today we drove to Polk, Ohio which is literally in the middle of nowhere. We dropped off the kids at Ben's grandma's house first so they could play with their cousins. Then we stopped for some food for lunch. We don't often eat out and it was a treat to be near a Popeye's, which is one of the few American restaurants we had access to when I lived in England. So for memory's sake, I had myself some Popeye's Chicken and finished up the last of it as we pulled into the hatchery, which Ben and I had to laugh about. As promised all six of our little chickadees were ready for us.

The two Polish ones got their beaks pecked so much they bled at first. They must be really unpopular with their crazy tufts on top of their heads. The lady at the hatchery gave us some food and water for the chicks so they wouldn't peck each other so much. It mostly worked. I tried a little conditioning of the chicks on the drive home. Every time they pecked at each other I would tap their heads and say, "No!". It does seem to have worked. Everyone is getting along splendidly now. Granted they have mostly been sleeping since we've been home. They like their heat lamp and quickly learned where their water and food are. Z has unofficially named them all "Morty & Gordy".

Here we are showing our niece and nephew the chicks at Grandma's house.

Here they are in the temporary home until they get big enough to go outside.

More WigChicks to come tomorrow night, we'll be sure to show more pictures as they arrive. For now, enjoy the all new slide show of the last couple of weeks. Thanks for being part of our WigLives.

Coming soon to a blog near you!

One family at our church has Welsummer chickens and roosters, another family at our church has an incubator. On Easter Sunday we gave a dozen fertilized eggs from the one family to the other and 21 days later we'll see how many of those hatch. We'll also see how many are females! Too many roosters and we'll be having chicken for dinner a little sooner than later. Below is a Welsummer family, they're known for their dark brown eggs and are good for meat as well.

Because we like variety, we've scheduled to pick up a few interesting breeds at a hatchery the day after the first set hatch. We ordered four female Ameraucanas who are known for their "Easter" eggs.

We also ordered two White Crested Black Polish Standard females, just for fun.

Follow the countdown in the sidebar with us! We've got a lot of work to do before they get here.