Visit to Ginger and King

Last January we gave away 2 of our young roosters which we raised from eggs to a friend who was starting his own flock. 

They were named Ginger and Muffin Jr.

 

This past week we went back to visit our boys!

They are both doing great.  The new owner changed Muffin Jr's name to King (I don't blame him!)

Ginger and King free-range with their hens during the day and are locked up in their coop at night.  They are both still very friendly roosters.

From left, King, Randy and Ginger

It's nice to know that the children of our flock are happy and doing well. 

Ginger is still a goofy rooster.  He loves to be held, and we trained him to eat bugs off the walls.  Maryland is in the midst of a stinkbug plague.  Last autumn there were thousands of stinkbugs all over the outside walls of the chicken coop building.  Randy would hold Ginger up to the wall and Ginger would look for the bugs and peck them off the wall and eat them.  Whenever we held Ginger his head would be all turned sideways looking around for a wall which had bugs on it.  He's still the same.  But, in addition to being a silly rooster, he's a strong leader and a good protector of his flock.  He is the lead rooster and King is #2 in their rooster pecking order.

King and Ginger and the flock

 

Jerry vs. Deer

I love my barn cat Jerry. 

He lived here before we moved here.  He let us move into the house, but he still owns the property.  He lets us use the property when he's not around.

He will not let us pet him, he keeps his distance from us.  He does allow us to feed him, though. 

He's not stupid!

Jerry eating canned food last night

Shadow kitty used to live outside with Jerry.  Jerry thought she was annoying.  She wanted to rub against him and be loved by him all the time.  She is the friendliest, most-cat-loving cat that ever was born.  She loves all cats, even when she was feral and hated humans.  She's slowly getting used to humans now.  Jerry had more important things to do than hang with Shadow, like hunt.  Shadow always gave away her hunting position when he talked her into hunting with him.  And then, after a long unbearably cold winter, Shadow moved into the humans' house and left Jerry.  She took up with that other cat who lived inside named Jack.  Jerry was ok with Shadow moving inside.  Now there was more time for hunting and prowling by himself, and doing other boy-cat things. 

Jerry has no plans on ever moving inside, although he's invited in all the time.  

Funny thing, Shadow has no plans on ever going back outside, although it was offered to her. 

Funny how everyone's different.   

Jerry had many choices.  He ate most of them 

Usually once a day Jerry comes to the back door for his food.  He gets dry food and canned food and warm milk on cold winter days.  He's the most spoiled feral cat I know.  When we're not home Jerry sits on a chair on the back porch and waits for his food to arrive.  He has gotten used to the guineas, he didn't like them when they first invaded his space.  Now he ignores them and eventually they get bored with him and leave.  They don't even squawk at him anymore.

What's that out in the gate?

Recently, after eating Jerry goes out and sits in the back yard in the gate entry to the back yard.  We assume there's a mouse or something that he's hunting out there.  He always waits till he eats, then sits out there until it gets dark.  He often lays down while he patiently hunts for hours.  That critter better watch out. 

Jerry is on duty!

Jerry, guardcat, protector of farm

Friday night Jerry was doing his hunting duty in the gate when I noticed a deer was in the backyard.  It wanted to walk through the gate and go into the woods, but Jerry was sitting there and wouldn't move.  The deer walked up near Jerry, then it finally noticed him.  It jumped straight up in the air, threw it's white tail straight up, and bounced all over the back yard.  After stomping his feet several times, the deer started walking back towards Jerry.  I held my breath!  Jerry stood his ground in the gateway.  The deer was not going to pass.  The deer got about 10 feet from Jerry, then gave in and bounced away back into the backyard.  Jerry won the deer fight.  The deer waited a distance away until Jerry left for the night, then he was allowed to leave.

 

Jerry 1, Deer 0

Today we saw a woodchuck for the first time this year!  He was in the backyard.  Goodmorning, Chucky!  We have lots of Chucky's.  Jerry loves playing with the woodchucks, at least he did the past couple years.  He hunts them for hours and tackles them.  They absolutely ignore him.  Even when he tackles them.  Hopefully Jerry will stop playing with the deer and will start playing with the Chucky's now that they have woken up from their hibernation this year.  They are more his size.  

Happy Sunday! 

   

Farm Fresh Eggs

Our chickens provide us with about a dozen fresh eggs a day.  Even now, in the wintertime!  I love eggs, and I love those chickens!  The chickens run around outside in the cold during the day, and we keep heatlamps in the coop so they can go inside and get warm if they wish.  It seems the five white chickens often can be found inside warming themselves.  They don't seem as tolerant to the cold as the darker-colored birds.  This just an observation of mine.  I assume it's because of the types of chickens they are.  We also keep a light on in the coop during the day, as it can get dark in there because it's not an open air coop.  The light and the heatlamps encourage egg production.

This day was a 10-egg-day.  Not a good egg day! 12 or 13 eggs is a good egg-day!

The two new birds, Luna and Virginia, have integrated into the flock and have started laying eggs in the nest boxes already.  They started laying right away, on the first evening we had them, one of them laid an egg.  They are both Americauna chickens and lay light greenish/blueish eggs.  And their eggs are large!  Many of our other chickens are bantams, so they lay small or medium sized eggs.  Our older chickens, who are older than a year, mostly lay medium and large eggs, and the pullets still lay small eggs and once in a while medium eggs.  As the pullets get older and more mature their eggs will probably be medium/large, too.

This week we got our first dozen eggs that we could label as LARGE.  Most of our cartons are labeled SMALL or MEDIUM.  I was so excited to have a large!  I had to save eggs from two days to have enough eggs to make a large.  But two-day-old eggs are not bad!  I imagine the eggs that other people buy in the store can be several weeks or even months old sometimes!  I have not bought eggs in several years, but I love to look at the eggs in the store.  They are so HUGE and white, it's amazing.  And the brown ones are so dark brown.  Other people in the store must think I'm strange when I stare at the store eggs and make comments about how funny they look!  Most of my chickens' eggs are light brown.

Just in case you don't know, in the US, the sizes of eggs are defined by the weight of a dozen eggs. They are not defined by the size of individual eggs.  Here's a quick chart I got from
http://www.sizes.com/food/chicken_eggs.htm

Size and Weight of a dozen eggs

Jumbo 30 ounces

Extra Large 27 ounces

Large 24 ounces

Medium 21 ounces

Small 18 ounces

Peewee 15 ounces



Light brown and green eggs - LARGE dozen

Now, I'm going to go have some eggs for breakfast!

Happy Saturday!

Chicken News

I love my chickens!

We got 2 new additions last week.  They are named Virginia and Luna.  They have been totally integrated into the flock already.  They have found their place in the pecking order. 

So, this blog post is dedicated to my chickens, new and old, pullets and cockerels, hens and roosters!

Cinnamon

Danni

Luna

Virginia has a lonnnng neck!

Front - Freckles, Back - Zoner, mother and daughter

Luna on left, Virginia on right

Poor Lucy is still bald and wearing her chicken apron

Chloe



Luna



Left to right - Raspberry, Zoner, Freckles

Betty

Muffin, our lead rooster

Chloe on my knee

Leggy

Have a good night, my chickens!

RIP Brownie

Last August we gave away one of our roosters, Brownie, to some neighbors.  We had too many roosters.  We raised Brownie from a tiny chick.  Brownie was a great protector and always was very attentive to the hens in our flock. He liked to serenade them - sing little humble songs to a single hen when she was sitting out in the pen. He always was very gentle with the hens, but a brave a fearless rooster when he needed to be. He was the #2 rooster in our flock - second in the rooster pecking order. He was promoted to be the lead rooster for their flock.

 

It is with a sad heart that I tell you that Brownie lost his life last week.  He was defending his hen Shirley from a wild animal that dug enter the fence into his pen and entered their coop at nighttime.

 

Brownie died so that Shirley could live.

Shirley was the only chicken of theirs that survived the attack. They lost all their other hens.

Brownie was a good rooster, saving Shirley like he did, fighting till the bitter end.

Brownie at his new home with Shirley back in Aug 2010

Since then they fixed and reinforced their chicken pen.  We just have too many wild animals living in this neck of the woods.

And so last Friday Randy assisted our friends to get some new chickens.

And maybe we got some new feathered friends here at Razzberry Corner... Just maybe...

Stay tuned!

One Less Guinea

Ahh, remember these happy days?

Last summer we got some day-old Guinea keets and gave them to a broody hen Bella.

Proud mama hen Bella with her new Guinea keet babies.  Bella thought they were her chicks

Bella looks out for her keets.  Leggy thought he was the Daddy ~ he was watching out for the keets, too



Keets integrated into the flock - they were so small!

Guinea in the pine tree



It is with a heavy heart today that I say we lost a Guinea this week. 

We had 8 light Guineas and 2 darker ones.  Now only 7 light colored Guineas and the 2 darker ones are left.  Every morning the Guineas start out in their huge pine tree overlooking the chicken coop.  They sleep in the tree, at daybreak they fly down and eat the Guinea food we provide for them beside the chicken coop.  In the wintertime we have been feeding them, as there's no grass or grain or bugs for them to find.  After eating, they wander about the property, and in the late afternoon they return home to the feeding area beside the coop again.  At dusk they all fly into their pine tree to sleep.



Yum!  There's some cracked corn in the bowl this morning!



This week one didn't come home.  Everyone else acted like nothing happened.

We have no idea what happened to the missing Guinea.  We searched and searched all around for feathers, for an injured Guinea, for a broody Guinea, for any sign of what happened.  Nothing.  Previously we tried to let our chickens free-range over the property, but they were picked off by foxes.  Where the fox grabbed a chicken and carried it away there was always a massive amount of feathers left behind.  And a feather trail into the woods.  But we found no Guinea feathers at all this time.

Guineas digging holes and taking dirt baths under the bushes

 Maybe a Great Horned Owl took it away??  We have seen Great Horned Owls hunting our fields and we often hear their calls.  I'd think a Barred Owl would be too small to carry away an entire Guinea.  We have Barred Owls close, too, we can hear their wonderful hoots.

But you know, back when Boy Guinea was young, he disappeared for 3 months in the deep of winter, and then reappeared one happy day.  He watched the chickens and Guineas from afar for about a week, and then he couldn't take it anymore and he joined back up with the flock again and quickly became the Guinea leader.  I mean, he had experience, he had traveled the world and come back home.  All the other Guineas thought he was awesome, he had such stories about his travels.  They worshipped him and made him the flock leader.  And he still is the leader.  We never knew what happened to Boy Guinea during that time, we thought he was dead.

Boy Guinea

We've noticed recently that what we assume are young male Guineas, the light colored ones, don't really appreciate Boy Guinea as much as the female Guineas do.  The females stay right beside Boy Guinea.  Some light-colored Guineas, we assume at least one is a male, often separate into another group.  Maybe they want to be the leader of their own Guinea flock, they are tired of following Boy Guinea? 

Maybe this missing Guinea is going away to do his sabbatical, maybe he's a male and that's what male Guineas do???

Maybe he'll return back in summer like nothing strange happened? 

Take a Walk with Me ~ Early Feb 2011

I always love to take pictures after a snow.  Everything is fresh and bright. 

Yeah, it's cold, but I've come to understand that it's going to be cold here in MD, so I mind's well embrace it and make the most of it.  I'd prefer it to be warm every day of the year, but, alas, I don't live in the south.  And even down south they have been cold this year.

What's up with this weather???

Here are some pictures I took around the property in early February, 2011. This was right after a light snow. The first picture below shows our old tobacco barn. 

Here in MD, for almost 400 years, wood-frame tobacco barns sat along the rolling fields.  Tobacco used to be a mainstay crop of Maryland's agriculture since the 17th century, and every farm had a tobacco barn.  The tobacco barns had to be big enough to hang the tobacco, which was essential to the process of air-curing tobacco.  Now historic tobacco barns are being lost at an alarming rate as the region's agricultural land is consumed by the spread of the D.C. metropolitan area. Also, Maryland's 2001 "tobacco buy-out" state policy, which encouraged farmers to stop cultivating tobacco, unintentionally made the barns unused. Scores of tobacco barns now have no productive purpose and are deteriorating.  In 2004, southern Maryland tobacco barns were placed on the National Historic Trust's list of 11 most endangered historical sites.

Our tobacco barn had already collapsed before we bought the property. You can see it through the trees in the below picture.  It seems a fox uses the barn now.  We often find carcasses of small dead animals underneath the fallen roof of the old barn.

The trees here grow like weeds.  Especially the sweet gum trees.  I like to have some rolling fields (with no trees), but it's almost impossible to keep down the trees.  Most of our 250 acres is wooded, but there used to be a few fields along our entry road without trees.  But now the trees are taking over those fields, too.  The wind must blow the tree seeds into the fields, and the young trees grow up fast and very close together.  We've been here 2 years and all the little trees in the right side of the above picture have grown since then!  There is a natural spring at the left side of that field, and the water flows down into the woods on the left into a little brook which joins a stream on the property.  I guess the trees have a good water supply.

The below picture shows more trees along the right side of the field pictured above.  We've found quite a few deer antlers along that treeline.  We planted corn and pumpkins in the field last summer, but the summer drought killed most of it before it grew very big.

The below picture shows Randy's firewood area.  He's constantly cutting, chopping and splitting wood for firewood.  We use it in our woodstove and he sells quite a bit of firewood, too.  He's been burning wood scraps (bark, limbs, old bad logs, etc) in a barrel in the firewood area which not only gets rid of the waste products, but creates some warmth while he works.  You can see the smoke from the barrel in the picture.

The below picture shows one of the front fields.  It, too, has been taken over by small trees.

Thanks for taking this short talk with me.  I hope it was interesting! 

We'll have to do this again when the weather is nicer and we can take a longer walk! 

My Sister's Visit

Back in January, my sister, Barb, and her family visited Razzberry Corner!

And I clearly wasn't thinking straight ~ I didn't take any pictures while they were here!

Luckily Barb took pictures, which I borrowed from her blog, Barb's This and That.

Normally I am the one taking pictures, hence, there are NO pictures of me in my blog.

Alas, Barb broke my no picture streak and posted a picture of me and my boy Leggy. 
I remember how very cold it was on that January day. 
If you look closely, you can see his spur on his left leg.  He's got some SERIOUS spurs. 




Leggy and Lynn

 

 While they were here Barb collected eggs and visited all the chickens.  Here are some of the chickens roosting and preparing to go to sleep.



Top row, left to right ~ Muffin's tail, Freckles, Zoner, Raspberry Leggy, Meg, Lilly, Blackie, Charlotte
Bottom row ~ Chloe, Bella, Cinnamon, Jade, Ethel

 Down by our well there's this huge old tree ~ to me it looks bigger in person than it does in the below photo.  I love it because it must be so very old.  If only trees could talk, I'd know all about the history of this property.  The tree makes me think of the Ents, the talking trees in The Lord of the Rings and The War of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien.  I've named this tree Treebeard, after one of the Ents.

Here's Barb and her son JJ in front of the tree.



Barb, JJ, and Treebeard

This was a root from the tree that ran across the ground.  It had a little hollowed-out-spot that a small animal could have used as a home.

Treebeard's root

Here's a picture of a Guinea ~ I think it's a female.  I'm still trying to figure out the gender of the guineas.



Lone guinea



And finally, here's a picture Barb took of my old home.  It's a work-in-progress.  The renovation progress never moves as fast as I wish it would, but that's life! 

Thanks for visiting!

Another Little Deer

Another little deer has been coming up to our back door.  After every hunting season, it seems there is a motherless baby deer left behind.  Often the fawns are born late in the season, and are still very small come February.

This little guy has been hanging out in our back yard right outside our back door.  If we go out back he runs away, but seems to return to the area soon.

This morning at sunrise he was out there, but now at 10:30 AM he is off hiding somewhere.

Last year's Little Deer joined a herd of does and other young fawns.  I'm sure this little guy will join up with some others soon, too. 

I feel like the surrogate mom for lost deer children.  Wish they were more friendly!  I'm heading out back to put out some cut up apple pieces for him.

She lays both green and brown eggs!

I know all you experienced chicken people will think I'm crazy with this blog post.

But I know what I saw!

I wouldn't believe it unless I saw it myself.

Previously, my pullet, Jade, laid light green eggs.

Jade

Jade's green egg

I watched Jade lay a light green egg with my own eyes in January.

She's been laying green eggs since she started laying, which was about the beginning of the year.  She's still a pullet, and doesn't give us eggs every day.  And there are a few other pullets in the flock who are laying green eggs, too. 

But I KNOW I saw Jade lay a light green egg.

And then early this morning, I watched Jade lay an egg.  In an empty nest box.  I watched it come from her rear and thump on the floor of the nestbox.   

As soon as it was laid, when Jade was still standing tall in the nestbox (they stand up when they lay), I grabbed the still-wet egg.

And to my amazement it was light brown!

I didn't think it was possible for both green and brown eggs to come from the same hen!

It's just amazing to me! 

Jade was hatched from a light brown egg, if that makes any difference.

Lucy and Ethel chat about the egg mystery

Danni, with her broken toe, isn't impressed about green eggs

Left to right: Betty, Leggy, Raspberry, Chloe's tail

Such drama in the coop these days!