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Today, for the first time, we have three blue eggs.  This confirms what I had suspected – our three Ameraucanas have been taking turns laying.

We’d been getting two blue eggs a day most days, but the color wasn’t always 100% consistent, and just recently a couple of the eggs were bloody outside (typical of a hen just beginning to lay)… but now, we’re sure that all three are laying.

The tomatoes are doing well; they’re almost ready to be potted on.  It’s fifty degrees outside, so they get to go out for a sun-bath.

When you touch them, they smell like tomato plants.  For me, that’s one of those wonderful summer smells; it’s very happy-making to have the smell of tomato plants in February.

Did you know chickens beg?  Chickens beg a LOT.  I’ve deliberately trained them to come when called, and we’ve accidentally trained them to come when the garage-door opener makes its noise.  They flap and squawk across the yard, and then they stand at the fence cawing and walking back and forth.  You can see there’s still some snow; it’s all gone from the streets and mostly from the yards, but it hangs on in shady places, like our back yard and driveway.

In order to try and beat the heat, my Dad always starts his tomatoes really early.  Last year was the first time he started tomatoes from seed, and it inspired Chris and me to start some of our own.

Chris got a little plant-starting greenhouse with a heating mat, and a Jump Start plant light, this past winter.  He set up the peat pods and I planted the seeds this past Sunday… we had about 30% germination by Wednesday. Three days.  Half the time tomatoes are supposed to take.  We’re at about 80% germination now, on Friday.  I am now a Heat Mat Believer!

Last year we raised a mix of different types of cherry tomatoes, and we didn’t keep track of which was where.  This year, I divided into 12 plants of each of 6 types – two different sources of Grape (Botanical Interests and Johnny’s Selected Seeds), Celebrity, Arkansas Traveler, Sweet 100, and Green Zebra.  If they grow like the ones last year did, we’ll have 72 tomato plants – last time around, we brought them to work with little “free to good home” signs.

This time, we’ve got more gardening friends, and I think they’ll all find homes.  I’m hoping to take them to the Rainbow Garden Club meeting in April… I want to be That Queen with a huge flat of organically-raised tomato plants to share.  I’ve already bought the little plantable pots and cute wooden markers.

When I had a beekeeping friend inspect my hive early this summer, she said that the hive was way too small and not building up properly, and was likely not going to make it through the winter.  I requeened in September, and I fed and hoped.  The hive dwindled down in numbers, but I didn’t realize they had gotten so low on stores, until they started dying off.  Within a couple of days, the hive failed and the bees were almost all dead, of starvation and cold.

Some of the bees were head-down in empty cells.

These look like they’re going about their bee business… but they froze in place.

This is all the bees that were left in the hive.  There was a pile scattered on the ground in front of the hive as well.

In the interest of finding at least some silver lining, this means that the hive can be used again; there wasn’t any sign of disease or poison.  It doesn’t help much on making me feel like less of a bad person, though.  I do want to try again in the spring.

The fertile Marans eggs arrived in  the mail today!

They were all well-packaged, and all six of them arrived whole and uncracked.

They’re not quite as large as Ginger’s freakishly Jumbo eggs, but their color is excellent.

I set up a broody box for Sue in the upstairs bathroom, where we raised the Ameracuana chicks this spring.  The other hens were sitting on top of her to lay eggs in the favorite nest!

This looks like two roosters getting in a fight… but I swear the big black one with the tall comb (Jeanette) has given us an egg every day for the past two months. I love how she spits out a mouth full of feathers at about 0:36.  Sorry about the blurry focus!

Finally, the little banty rooster pushes the right “submit” button, and Jeanette bows down. He is suddenly puzzled… like the amorous Dachsund who finds that the neighbor’s Great Dane is willing, but doesn’t know how to go about it. He tries to mount her from a couple of different angles, then gives up.

I finally got a good shot of Little Bit.  She is about the size of a pigeon.

Sue has decided to go broody.  She was setting eggs when we got her from Bageniece Farms.  Most of the hens we have are from breeds that don’t tend to go broody, and I’m hopeful that she’ll turn out to be a good momma hen.  Of course, without a rooster, she’s not sitting on eggs that will hatch – so I ordered some fertile eggs through Ebay.

I love the way she fluffs up her ruff.  What you can’t see, is that she’s pecking my hand!  She hasn’t hurt me at all, but she’s made it clear that failure to obey the warning peck will result in a more aggressive one.

Looking at pictures and reading, I think Sue may be (at least partly) a breed called Golden Phoenix.  She has the right shape and coloring, they’re a breed that tends toward broodiness, and they tend to roost high up.  The first couple of weeks, we kept having to fetch her out of the honeysuckle on the fence and tuck her into the hen house!