“Last one’s a rotten egg!” December 20, 2010

Another chicken metaphor comes to life. Or not, as the case may be.

After waiting another 4 days for the rest of the eggs to hatch, wondering when to call it quits, nature let us know today. We had an exploder. STINKY! The mother hen had pushed the empty, stinky shell out of the nest and into the yard, but the nest was soiled, the straw by the nest was soiled, and the whole broody house just stank.

So I decided that was that – no more waiting. Our one hatchling out of ten was pitiful, but at least we had that one! It’s name is ‘Crackle’. (We had been hoping for a Snap and a Pop as well, but alas – not this time.)  I gathered up the remaining 8 eggs, much to the dismay of the mother hens. (Cockey was busy protecting Crackle at the back, with much fan fare, and Lockey was all confused) I tried to feel movement in each of the eggs – nope. I held them up to the light in our darkened bedroom – no signs of movement, just stinky smells from the eggs that had been with the exploder.

So Nigel dug a hole out back, and I was to put the eggs in. Just to make absolutely sure I wasn’t burying a live one, I cracked each and every one into the hole. All I got was a mass of stinky yellow stuff. I quickly covered them up with the dirt again, and ran out of there to wash my hands. (And breathe deeply again)

I went back and changed all the straw from both nests, and made the call to move Lockey back with the other layers. She was being terribly awful to Crackle, trying to peck it while it was out with its mother – she got a beak full of feathers by the time I got to her, so I couldn’t risk allowing her (understandable) jealousy to play out.

It was off to the chook house with her, but not before clipping her wings (to keep her in there, and not flying back to the broody house) and also giving her  a good foot soak in oil. We seem to have picked up the awful “scaley leg mite” and I’ve been treating the others, but couldn’t treat the mothers, since any oil on the eggs might have suffocated the developing chicks. (Eggs are porous, and the developing chick has a vascular system right next to the shell to ‘breathe’ with). So her feet have got quite bad, but hopefully they’ll come right with a few more oil soakings. (an organic method I’ve read about, hopefully as effective as the harsh chemicals.)

So now it’s just Cockey and Crackle in the broody house. Cockey has now taken to leading Crackle around to dig & peck, which is very sweet. All the time, she’s making this noise, to catch Crackle’s attention to things. Indeed, she’s following her instincts, and is being very ‘clucky’. Another chicken metaphor brought to life.

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First chick is here! December 18, 2010

Yesterday morning, before work, Nigel and I had a quick look – nope, no chicks yet. Both mums got up to have a little feed/drink/dust bath, and then we shut the cage again.

When I came home from work (4pm-ish) I had another look… and… WAHOO! A tiny little face peered out from underneeth Cockey’s tail feathers in the nest. The chick was still all wet – clearly freshly hatched. It looked yellow-ish, which surprised me, and I wondered if it was from recently ingesting the yolk. (I read on the internet that they absorb it through their navel just before hatching – could that be true?!?!?).

This morning, we had another look, and little chicky was now sitting next to mum, all dry and fluffy, and bright yellow! Wow, like flourescent! Where does the yellow come from? If it was a baby of the shavers, it should be orange! And the dad was black & white!

It’s 5pm, and I’ve been looking on and off all day into the little broody pen, and haven’t seen any more chicks yet. The more I read on the ‘net tells me all the reasons why some eggs might not hatch. We have 10 eggs in there. I think at least one was actually not fertilised. The only thing I know for sure is that we can’t count our chicks before they hatch! Maybe this little one will be our only one?

I’ll try to get a photo soon – our only camera is my old cell phone, and I haven’t yet set up the downloading on the new computer, so you’ll  have to wait…

In the mean time, here’s a cute little vid on what’s going on under Cockey & Lockey’s feathers right now…

Enjoying the pool December 12, 2010

Since even before Labour weekend (end of October, for those outside NZ!) We’ve been enjoying the pool. In October the water was chilly. In November it was brisk, and in December it has registered simply ‘cool’. But definitely swimmable. For about the last month, the girls have been in swimming almost every day. You’d think the fun would wear off, but no – and it never ceases to amaze me how the kids can entertain themselves with water.

The adults in the family have been less keen, but we’ve probably been in once a week. It’s lovely and refreshing, and yes, you do get used to it. The best times, in my opinion, are early mornings or late evenings. When the air is cool. I find the transition to the water less of a shock, and can stay in longer. And there’s something quite atmospheric about watching the sun go down late in the evening from in the water.

The older girls have become quite confident and able with their swimming, which is awesome. Zoe, our bold, ‘need a challenge’ girl, has started jumping in from all different angles, in all different poses, and loves showing off (“I believe I can fly!…”). Emily has just about perfected her free-style breathing, and enjoys doing a couple of laps at a time.

Tessa has gained a lot of confidence, but still needs flotation devices. She’s just about got the hang of ‘streamlining’ in her swimming lessons (hands straight forward, face in the water, feet kicking and propelling forward) but she hasn’t yet shown us this in our own pool. She’s very good with a board, though, and often kicks her way right to the deep end and back, with the big boogie board as her ‘boat’. When her big sisters are playing in the deep end, she’s often there with them, hanging on to the edge, sometimes working her way all around the perimeter and back again.

Maintenance has been ongoing. A regular set of chores. I’m sure it would be best to test the pool & clean/adjust every other day or something like that, but we have so far tended to do big clean ups just before we have visitors or such like. But we have noticed that the time frame for the pool to get ‘out of synch’ is getting shorter. As the weather gets even warmer, I think we will need to move to more frequent management. Actually, we’d love to move over to a salt-water system, which can self-regulate the chlorine levels in the pool, and needs far less manual work. But alas – it’s just another item on our “Lotto List”. A silly list, really, since we never buy Lotto tickets. But you know – until the budget allows the big outlay for changing the pumping system, we’ll just keep going with what we’ve got.

And we really do appreciate what we’ve got.

People have started asking whether we’re taking a summer holiday this year. We have traditionally spent a lot of time away during the break. But this year, apart from spending a bit of time with both sides of the family, we’re staying put. Why would we need to go anywhere else, when we have this summer treasure right in our backyard?! And if we feel like a bit of a change of scene, we can always walk 100m to the end of the road and swim at our wee beach. Paradise. At home.

Come hang out at our place, if you’re around!

Chicken coop. December 11, 2010

Our ‘situation’ forced us to move ahead with plans for our new & improved chicken coop. We wanted to separate off the mums and babies, and keep the layers in the back run (didn’t want to get any eggs confused!). But during the first few days, when all eggs were destined for incubating, we put them all together in the broody pen, and we took the opportunity to renovate the back coop! It used to be an old tin garden shed, on a concrete pad (council regulations). A roost was a round branch balancing on a couple of old bunk bed ladders. The chicken entry was a square cut out of the back of the shed, and the human entry was the shed door, which, more often than not, would get caught on the straw/mulch stuff all over the ground in front, and frequently not shut properly. And being at ground level, on a sight downhill, in winter, the shed would often get quite muddy.

First, we sorted out our broody pen. We decided to use the old brick dog house (so cute!), which used to house bits of wood, drying for the fire. We moved all the wood to one of the pool houses, which will be a permanent, dry wood storage area. Then, we got a whole lot of chicken wire and simply staked out a couple feet of grass around the house. I trimmed the branches & trees around the area, to allow a bit more sunshine, filled the inside of the house with straw, a couple of nests (shallow cardboard boxes) and a little roost, and we were done.  We moved the broody hens (and all the others initially), and then we all got busy out back.

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Within a remarkably quick timeframe (5 days?) we had ourselves a brand-new, purpose-built, recycled material chicken coop out back! It’s a raised coop, sitting a couple feet above the concrete pad. The roof is from the old tin shed, the floor is a wall from the old shed, making ‘sweeping out’ very simple. There are 3 openings: a hinged side opening, for sweeping out, a small front door for collecting eggs, and a wee chicken hole, atop a ramp. There is ventilation at the top, and sheltered space on the concrete below, to keep their water and food free of debris. The whole contraption is attached to 4 half-rounds (which came from the pile of half-rounds, which used to be the pool fencing), concreted in the ground. All the wood and paint (just undercoat at the moment) was leftover from various projects. The laying box is an old planter box that we had built & painted when we were at our old house. (who needs planter boxes with this much land?!) and the roost is the same old branch, but now attached to some cross-bars of wood, and secured to the coop. It’s so cute, and our 4 non-broody chickens have now been moved in, and are doing all the right things.

So far the only design fault is that the ramp seems to make a lovely ‘launching pad’ from which the chickens can fly over the rose bush and out into the lawn! I don’t mind too much, especially as we are ‘prepared’ for free ranging hens – all the gardens are fenced off – but we may need to enforce some wing-clipping if we need to keep them in.

The weather has been spectacular these last few weeks, so we are as yet unaware of any problems in weather-proofness of the coop. The front has a large eave over the opening, but the sides may allow some rain in, depending on the direction of the wind. So we wait and see, and Nigel is thinking of some back up plans, if it looks like a problem.

Otherwise, we have four happy hens, with heaps of ground space to use, and a designer tree-hut-like coop! The plan is to move the new chicks in with the flock out back once they are big enough to stick up for themselves (about 6-8 weeks, according to the internet). But in the meantime, let the mums have some peace and quiet (and extra chicken-wire-security!) to raise the babies separately.

ROOSTER!

One day a couple weeks ago, completely out of the blue, a rooster showed up on our front lawn. I did a double-take – no, that wasn’t one of our hens, but whose was he? My first reaction was to chase the fella away – who knows what he might like to do with our ‘girls’! He ran back up our driveway, and I didn’t think much more of it. Later that night, our neighbour phoned: “Are you missing a chicken? There’s one in our backyard!” Well, after clarifying that it was not ours, but a stray rooster, Nigel and I went up to help them chase the creature. Much running around and side-clutching laughter ensued, and finally we managed to corner the guy in their kids’ play hut, and throw a towel (complete with newborn baby hood in the corner!) onto Mr. Cock A. Doodle. (Nigel’s name for him) Gotcha. But now what?

 

Well, in the intervening hours between the first sighting, and the capture, I had decided I wouldn’t mind if he ‘hung out’ a bit around our place. Nigel was skeptical, but let me have my way, so we carried him down to our place, and even opened the pen to let him into the chicken run! (No, I will NOT do this to the stray teenage boys that might make similar appearances in about 10 years’ time!!!)

 

Well, Mr. Doodle didn’t like being put in the pen at night, and he flew straight out again, and up into a hedge on the driveway, where he seemed to decide to stay for the night. We just left the pen door open (we’ve been mostly free-ranging the chickens around the property anyway) and went to bed.

 

At approximately 5:00 am the next morning, we knew: Yes, Mr. Doodle was still here. And his call was so loud and distinct, that another of my wonderings was answered – no, he had never been here before. We definitely would have noticed THAT! He ‘hung around’ all that day, and the next day, too. Only this next day, he woke us at 4:20 am. This was getting a little tiring. Now we knew why roosters are actually banned from urban areas, unless you have the express permission from your neighbours.

 

And that we did not have.

 

And the neighbours appeared.

 

“Excuse me, is that your rooster?” No, we were pleased to announce, and did they know where he might have come from? All the people we talked to had no idea where he was from, and they joined in the chase. Because Mr. Doodle had decided that he was ‘done’ with our girls, and had started wandering the neighbourhood, and announcing his presence wherever he went.

 

Four long days, we could hear his call from various angles around the streets, and everyone had sort of joined in the attempt at… “project disappear”. (Some liked the idea of “project Christmas Dinner”). Eventually, he did come back to our place (too much of a good thing going on!), and when we realized that he was here, we decided to get him. We managed to corner him in a shed, and this time, a beach towel was the chosen ‘throw’, and then we had him. We decided to take the more humane approach to the project, and we followed some leads that some had suggested. In a park about 2km away, apparently several wild hens and roosters lived. So we drove Mr. Doodle, sitting on my lap wrapped in a towel (was that legal?) to the park, and let him loose. He ran into the bushes, and has not been seen since, much to the relief of the whole neighbourhood.

 

MEANWHILE, my internet searching told me that his original ’48 hours at the Smith Patch’ (it could be a movie title) was enough to fertilise all our chickens’ eggs for the next 5 days! Yes, they keep his ‘deposit’ in a special sack, and let it go little by little for up to a week! And yes, all 6 hens would have been ‘done’, as cockerels can ‘service’ around 20 chickens per day!

 

We now had a “situaton”!

 

Three of our hens happened to be broody at the time (it’s seasonal), but the other three were laying. So for about 4 days, we collected all the eggs that were laid, and put them under the broody hens. Eleven! One hen decided she couldn’t be bothered with the broody business, so we were down to two hens, and then one egg got pushed out of the nest (it happens, apparently) and so now we’re down to two hens sitting on 10 eggs. And they are doing brilliantly!

 

We are now ‘expecting’ in about a week!

(photos coming shortly)

Back online!

Yes, it’s been AGES since I last blogged.

But I’ve got my blogging fingers back, with the wonderful new asset from work: a new MacBookPro! No, technology has not much to do with our “Smith Patch”, but it certainly makes the blogging a bit more fun! So I shall attempt to report a few of the interesting things that have happened in the last few months…

Domesticity August 30, 2010

I’m just shining up my domestic halo at the moment, and felt a blog coming on. (it’s well over due..)

Today, after an afternoon working from home (huge pile of marking….), when the clock strikes ‘5’, the working day is done, and I switch gears to ‘home goddess’. I prepare the roast, with the help of one of my children, then, when the others come home with a new netball, I watch them all play ball on the driveway from my kitchen window, while preparing a slice for baking, and enjoying the roast fumes. Just before dinner is ready, I steal 10 mins of time to play ‘piggie in the middle’ with the older two girls. I then come in, shape my pre-prepared dough into the hamburger buns for tomorrow night, and the ‘subway rolls’ for the girls’ lunches. While we eat our juicy chicken roast, (and no, it isn’t one of ours!) the bread rolls bake in the oven. The slice cools down enough for dessert, then, with the bread rolls cooling, I do the dishes, and get the next bread loaf into the machine for tomorrow morning’s breakfast. Put on the dishwasher, wipe down the table, and then I’m ready for the hair-drying ceremony. Nigel has just finished the bath routine with the girls, and has handed them over to me. He puts the washing in the machine and times it to finish in the morning, while I dry off the girls’ hair and kiss goodnight. In to bed they go, the jug gets turned on for a cuppa, and the day is done. Well, domesticity is done. My huge pile of marking is only half-done, so I need to ‘switch gears’ again, and I have at least another hour or so to do before I’m really done.

Life is very busy. And I don’t finish every day with my halo in-tact. (But I wouldn’t blog about that, would I?) Half the time I feel like I just drag myself to bed. But still, life is good. I’m so grateful for this property, where I can watch the girls as I cook, and where they are completely safe to play outside. And for my job, which is flexible enough that I can do a lot from home. And for our chickens, who provide much-needed concentration breaks from work. What hilarious creatures they are. I love having them wander around when I’m home. Who needs TV when you can look out the window at chickens?

Today, I also looked out the window at our pool with longing. The weather is nearly warm enough. After all the constant chemical tests and adjustments, I’m so ready to actually enjoy the pool. I was seriously tempted this afternoon.

Spring is just about here, and I’m pretty sure we won’t wait for summer. Watch this space.

New rhythm July 30, 2010

Well, we are now two weeks into the school term, and our new life rhythm has started to settle down. I’m working full time this semester (first time in 8 years!) and that’s taken quite a bit to adjust to. I am fortunate enough to have a day free of teaching per week, when I can focus on my research, and I can do that from home. This week, Nigel was also home studying that day, so we enjoyed a lunch date out together. I’ve started biking to work once a week, which is fabulous. (Although I didn’t say that the first time I did it – my legs got the fright of their life when they had to do the return trip home, and it had also started pouring with rain that afternoon.)

Emily and Zoe have started a new primary school, and Tessa has started at a new preschool, which all require adjustments, too. It’s great that we can walk to both places. (Although Tessa usually gets a pedal-ride on a bike between school and kindy.) We’ve also started straight in with extra-curricular activities: swimming lessons for all (essential now that we have a pool!) and ballet lessons for the older two.

The ballet addition to the family has been one of the bigger changes: Emily is over the moon to finally be having ‘proper’ ballet lessons, Zoe wonders when the class will get more active, Nigel is trying to get his head around the world of ballet costumes and strict hair-do requirements, Tessa is upset that she doesn’t have dancing lessons, and I watch it all from a distance, since I have a late class that day, but yearn to be there to help!

Nigel has now fully settled in to his new office. The walls got painted (Thanks, Derek & Shirley) and the carpet got laid (thanks, Pops) and finally the boxes which were in the carport got unpacked into the shelves. Nigel loves his little ‘house’. It warms up quickly with a small blower heater, and he has a lovely outlook from his desk.

He sees the native Pukeko come visit our gardens, and he watches wax-eyes and fantails flutter around the trees.

 

We get quite a bit of birdlife here – we’ve had herons on our pool fence, and high up in the neighbour’s palm tree. (Didn’t recognize them at the time, but I think they were white-faced heron).

On my writing day, when I looked up from my computer, I saw some Tui just 2m out the window flirting with the flowers in the camellia tree.

 

So yes, we’ve been pretty busy getting used to our new rhythm, but we all still feel incredibly lucky to have this fantastic property. I’m now starting to understand the lady that I read about in a recent edition of ‘the New Zealand Gardener’. She said “I once took a holiday, about 35 years ago, and I couldn’t wait to get home”.

PS –  Until we get some shots of our own, here is a little slideshow of internet shots of these birds. They’re so beautiful. 

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Frostbite

We had frost on our property a couple weeks ago. Every morning for about a week, I had to de-ice my car before going to work. Not a completely new experience for me – I have lived through a couple of European winters – but certainly rare here in Auckland. I was surprised that even here – only 50m from the sea itself, we had ice. It was the first time I have experienced frost damage on plants. Yes, I’m a newbie gardener, my thumb only appreciating the colour green after living for two years in the concrete jungle of Manila. So my previous knowledge of frost damage was only from books, and at first I didn’t recognise it.

I started wondering if something had gone wrong when those hardy cherry tomato plants (the ones which surprised us when we first moved in, and which kept growing, and which I was going to pull out, lest they take over the whole area north of the pool) started turning brown. Then, I noticed a couple other plants around the swimming pool starting to yellow, and I wondered whether maybe we had been too careless with netting out the leaves from the swimming pool, and perhaps the chlorine splashes from dumping the leaves in the garden was killing the plants. Even in front of the house, some fairly exotic-looking plant was losing all its leaves. Had I neglected to give it some sort of extra-special attention? My gardening feel-good-ometer was rapidly going down until I spotted the banana trees out by the chickens. Yes, they, too, were looking pretty sad, but I thought – well, I’m sure banana plants just don’t like the cold – it has been very cold – and then the penny dropped. Frost damage!

So the next fine weekend day (last Saturday) I decided to tidy up the poor, frost-bitten garden. I put my gumboots & garden gloves on, and got out the secateurs. I thought I’d just spend half an hour trimming some dead bits off plants.

Well that half an hour turned into about 4 hours. I started with the dead leaves, then I saw some roses. Hmmm – at the garden centre I saw a diagram about how to trim rose plants – now was the time. So I trimmed those, and felt very domesticated indeed. (I even remembered to cut diagonally!) Then I saw some creeping vines that were threatening to take over the whole swimming pool area come spring time if I didn’t act soon. And on and on it went. I made my way around the whole garden, leaving a trail of sticks, vines, branches & leaves on the lawn in my wake. Who would have thought you could cut so much material out of a garden, and still have so much there.

Thankfully for me, Nigel had decided he’d give the lawn a go that day, so in the late afternoon, he mowed over my trail of cuttings. There were 5 catcher-loads full of grass and clippings. (Think how many there will be in summer time!) The hens appreciated some in their yard, the back garden got some, and the compost got a lovely lot mixed in.

The next morning I woke up with a stiff right hand and a blister on my thumb. And that was enough to send my garden-feel-good-ometer right back up to full!

“Going on an egg hunt…”

The girls sang this the other morning before school, as we trapsed around our property looking for eggs. It felt like Easter morning, only instead of brightly wrapped chocolate, we were looking for real eggs!

(I know the origins of Easter eggs lay in this very deed – the early church having decided to celebrate the resurrection of Christ at the same time as the changing of seasons to spring in the northern hemisphere. And with the early spring, many birds would have started laying again, after a dormant winter. But, hunting for real eggs is totally new to our modern urban family, and, however bizarre, chocolate is for us antipodeans more closely aligned with Easter than the seasonal ‘spring’ back to life…)

Back to the point – our chickens have become star layers. We are now getting 5 eggs per day! (When we first moved in, it was either 3 or 4 each day). So we must be doing something right. One thing we have changed is that we decided to fence off the veggie garden, and allow the chickens out regularly. With a birthday voucher for the garden centre (thanks, Shirley!), I bought 8 m of chicken wire, and some bamboo poles with which to loosely enclose the veggie patch. Although the chooks could probably fly over it, (or knock it down!) they seem to recognize it’s not worth their while, when they have so much more land to explore. (And the other bonus is that the cats no longer treat my veggie patch as their litter box!)

So the chickens regularly wander around the property, exploring, dust-bathing, and scratching for worms. It’s a fun sight, seeing a hen discover a big, fat juicy worm. And I don’t mind that the gardens look a bit messy, with bark mulch strewn about a foot out of each garden bed – they are doing a good job of keeping the shallow weeds down, and fertilizing as they go. (It’s only my wee veggie seedlings that need protection, and the poor silverbeet plants, which still look like sticks…)

The chooks have even become quite adventurous! Last Wednesday, not only had all of them decided they could go right ‘round the house, but when it came time to gather them in again, they were no where to be seen! We found them out by the mangroves, outside our fence at the waters’ edge. It didn’t take long for them to follow us back inside the gate, and ‘home’ to their coop – the rattle of a cup of Peck-N-Lay is like the pied-piper’s call. That night, however, there were no eggs to collect! At first I thought that their star 5-egg performance the previous two days had worn them out, but since then, they have regularly left a clutch of 5 to be collected each night. They don’t seem to need a ‘day off’ at all. So I now realize that somewhere around our property, there must be 5 eggs a-hiding!

They could be anywhere, really – they were out so long that day, that I don’t know how far down the mangroves they explored. We’ve had a few searches around our own gardens, with no luck so far. Ah well – I’m sure nature has had to deal with this problem before. We may never find them, but some creature, somewhere might have enjoyed an extra special treat!