Summers Past...

I love summer...especially the planting. Every year I plant a garden of vegetables and herbs and around our pond and yard we have loads of flowers and shrubs. I couldnt wait to get started and since we are still having the occasional cold night I decided to start some seeds. See the larger plants below? Those are moon flowers. They only bloom at night and the smell is outta this world!

This is a moon flower plant in all its glory!

Here are some of my favorite photos of summers past.....

Hitchin a ride!

How dogs cool off in the dog days of summer :)

Oh yeah..we have berries too!

I bought this cute rooster wind chime to celebrate the arrival of Spring 2011!

And today I planted 3 lavender plants by the pond....Im officially ready for summer now!

10 different herb seeds started....

Double Yolkers

I got rained out remodeling a kids wooden playhouse into a new chicken summer home :) Thought it would be a good time for a blog entry!



I posted earlier about the possibility of one of the incubating eggs being a "double-yolker"...I candled it today and indeed it is. In nature these eggs never make it. The bottom twin will drown in fluids or be smooshed while the top twin sometimes hatches successfully. Want to watch an assisted hatch of twins?



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1ZeEY-kt7A

A most EGG-CITING adventure!

Time for the count-down! In 21 days (April 9th) we should have some hatching eggs, if all goes well. I marked an "x" on one side and an "o" on the other side of each egg because I will be turning the eggs several times a day. See those 2 tiny white eggs at the very top? These are my experimental eggs. Word on the street is, some folks have had success incubating recently refrigerated eggs. I was really hoping Goldie, my tiny pet bantam would lay an egg to add to the other 29 but the last eggs she layed was several days ago. I decided to grab 2 of those and add to mix. It will be a MIRACLE if one of those 2 hatch since I didnt even bother to let it come to room temperature before adding it to the incubator. Also, theres a rather large egg that might be a double-yolker. If the chicks make it to hatching there has only been one case that I know of where both chicks survived and that was with an assisted hatch. This could really be interesting. Im confident in my ability to do an assisted hatch but its nerve wracking just the same :O Having raised parrots and incubating their eggs I did several assisted hatches but never for twins!

So heres the run-down....in 7-10 days I will candle the eggs and see which ones are fertile and developing. On day 18 the incubator will go into "lockdown" which just means I will not open it for any reason. Humidity during hatching is very important. Chicks should hatch anytime between days 19 and 25.

So while there wont be a whole heck of a lot to see or report on the next week or so I will post other happenings from the farm :)

The temp you see is NOT the normal temp the incubator will stay at. Its low because I just added all the eggs. It will slowly creep back up to a steady 99.5-100 and humidity around 40-45%.

Spring Chickens!

Spring has sprung! This year Im off on a new adventure. Last spring I ordered baby chicks from Cackle hatchery and thus began my chicken addiction :) They were the cutest little fuzzy butts and now they are providing my family and others with delicious farm fresh eggs. I've grown fond of the "girls" and so I've decided to add more ladies to the flock but this time Im incubating eggs from my lovely ladies and cutting out the middle man. BTW we do have roosters too...3 are in with the 20+ girls and there are 2 Rhode Island Red hens and 4 roos that are free range. They run amuck and generally stick close to the coop and chicken pen. This is what happens when you end up with more roos than you need but dont have the heart to make soup out of them!

I set up the incubator tonight and will give it a couple days for the temperature to stabilize....

In the meantime I'm picking out select eggs from the daily egg-gather to incubate. So far I've got these 10....Im really hoping my tiny little bantam hen, Goldie, will lay one of her teeny eggs so I can incubate it :) Maybe tomorrow.