Chicks!

It is about noon. We are anxiously awaiting a call from Farm-n- Fleet telling us our baby chicks are ready.  Hopefully I will be able to be here when they come, but I’ll have to leave to go work in the city by 2:00.  Once we bring them home, we have to dip their little baby beaks in a nutritional gel, their first meal since the yolk sac.  Then we place them in their brooder box where the temperature is monitored to remain at 85 – 95 degrees.  We will have 5 buff orpingtons, 5 barred rock, 5 rhode island reds and 5 polish hens.  The polish chickens are not necessarily good layers, but they make up for it by having a funny-looking mohawk hairdo.  For the first couple of weeks they will be yellow puffballs with big feet.  Then, the ugly duckling phase. Then, after 5 months, they are laying eggs.  Photos will follow shortly!

Seed Potatoes

Well, the soybeans are out of the ground.  Merle and I took a walk around the bare ground (trespassing, yes) and found our way behind a small plot of corn.  The soybean field makes an L, with the short end between corn and sunflowers.  Sunflowers!  What an eery thing to stumble upon:  a ten-acre army of sunflowers, heads down, drying.  I wonder what will happen to them…
Our own ground is a confusing mix of dried up fox millet (awaiting the flame weeder), still-green pasture, frostburnt vegetation, and stubborn lettuce seedlings.  Garlic went in yesterday.  Too wet to do anything else.
Went to a workshop on Food Safety and Defense last week to learn how to arm against fecal matter and disgruntled employees, not necessarily mutually exclusive.  Learned, again, how to wash hands properly: 20 seconds and don’t forget between the index finger and thumb.  Lock your empty barns so that a crystal meth lab doesn’t inadvertently sprout up in the night.
Todd and I are both missing the markets and the smiling faces of all our sharecroppers.  
Thanks to all,
Julia