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.
00MichaelMichael2010-12-29 18:59:242010-12-29 18:59:24Sue’s New Eggs, Hen Pecking
So far, at least, it’s really low-volume; I hope we don’t end up with a full-on rooster crow, because they’re not allowed in the City of Dallas. If “she” turns out to be a “he,” we may have to get rid of her.
00MichaelMichael2010-12-24 08:19:012010-12-24 08:19:01Our Little Bantam… hen?
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!
00MichaelMichael2010-12-19 17:14:132010-12-19 17:14:13One Banty Hen, One Broody Hen
A friend of mine is working on writing a description of a textile, and is having trouble describing the hem. I’ve seen similar turned-scallop technique in San-Blas applique, but I don’t know if there’s an English term that describes this.
This is showing the back. You can see where the brighter printed color from the front is turned over and hand-stitched down in a little reverse scallop.
Here’s a close-up. The textile comes from Rajasthan, in India. I did find this post, which shows pictures that look like they have a similar edge.
00MichaelMichael2010-12-14 10:14:472010-12-14 10:14:47Anybody recognize this hem?
Today was the holiday party for the Rainbow Garden Club – Dallas’s gay gardening group. I had to take something fabulous for the potluck.
I started with a pound of deli ham, a pack of sliced Swiss cheese, a pack with capicola, calabrese, and peppered salami, two bricks of cream cheese, some cherry tomatoes, and some jarred roasted red pepper. From the garden, I added two varieties of purple mustard (both rolled up with the meats, and as garnishes on the plate), green onion, and bright-colored chard leaves to give it a pretty base. The crowning glory – some of Chris’s spice pickles.
We have received little jars of these from Chris’s Grandma Campbell for years, and always assumed they were made from apples – but this year, he got the recipe, and they’re made from over-ripe cucumbers. We made a huge double batch, and have enjoyed them immensely. They’re an intensive process, involving a lime bath and then six days of syrup-boiling… but definitely worth it. They were a hit at the party!
We got these chickens piece-meal, a few at a time. We’d never had them before, and started out with five Ameraucanas, tiny week-old balls of fluff… three of which turned out to be roosters. I got Jeanette off an ad in Craigslist; she was supposed to be a Maran, but isn’t. We took the three roosters back to the guy we got them from. We went and got two lovely French Marans. Then one of the Marans got eaten by a raccoon. Then we went and got three more: a Rhode Island Red, a bantam, and a funky chicken with spurs and all-black eyes. We’re at a happy number, now – seven seems about the right size for our coop and our yard, although I think it could hold as many as ten.
From left to right, they are: Sue Sylvester ( mannish, loud, and blond, of indeterminate parentage), Little Bit, a mixed-breed bantam about the size of a large pigeon, Freebird (Ameraucana), Ruby (Rhode Island Red), Weezy (Ameraucana), Jeanette (supposed to be a Maran, but isn’t), and Ginger (French Maran). This picture is significant for me, because they’re all acting like one flock – there has been a strong division between the older four and the younger three, but hopefully it’s healing. As with everything, tasty treats help lubricate the social machinery – one of the bits of advice we got from Dan at Bageniece Farms (where we got Ruby, Little Bit, and Sue) was to give them treats all together, to encourage social eating.
I think Ginger has the best expressions. She looks like she doesn’t take anybody’s crap. I think the Marans are some of the most handsome chickens.
Freebird got her name because she was thrown in as a bonus with the four chicks that we purchased to start with. I love the beards and muffs on the Ameraucanas.
They like to “bathe” in dust; it helps to cut down on parasites like lice and mites.
This fall, production tapered off as the daylight shortened. I finally figured it out and got a light on a timer set up in the coop; now, they get “sunrise” at about 3 AM so that they can have a natural dusk around 5:30. Right now, we’re getting three to four eggs per day. This is two days worth. Blue-green eggs are from the Ameraucanas (not sure which one – we’ve never had two green eggs in one day yet, so I don’t think both are laying yet), yellow-off-white is from Sue; pink-off-white is from Jeanette, and the JUMBO brown eggs are from Ginger, the French Maran.
The difference between Sue’s eggs and Jeanette’s eggs is pretty slim, but you can tell when you have one next to the other. Sue’s are a slightly golden off-white, while Jeanette’s are a pinkish off-white.
00MichaelMichael2010-11-29 16:06:102010-11-29 16:06:10Chickens and Eggs
My first thought was, “Hmm, the hyacinth bean vine has started growing onto the ailanthus bush. But something didn’t seem quite right…
And, not a great surprise in this yard… it’s a beautiful little snake.
Such a sweet little face! I think it’s a Rough Green Tree Snake, Opheodrys aestivus.
He crawled onto the fence for just a little bit, trying to escape my annoying camera; he was probably 16 to 18 inches long, and no bigger around than my little finger.
Once I backed off, though, he literally sprang back into the small tree, which was clearly where he felt more at home.
Charlotte has been missing for a couple of weeks. She was back, looking slim (having divested herself of a sac full of eggs, I assume!) and missing a leg. On top of it all, her handwriting (ass-writing?) has gone way downhill…
00MichaelMichael2010-09-22 13:47:212010-09-22 13:47:21Not a Vine at All
Today was the first day I saw any blooms on the Lady Margaret passionflower. They’re lovely!
They’re not as large as some of the varieties, but the color makes up for the size.
The different types ramble along one another… it can be difficult with some of them to tell where one vine ends and another begins. The grape purple one is Passiflora x “incense” – and that one vine that I planted this spring can have 20 flowers on a good day.
00MichaelMichael2010-09-21 20:56:002010-09-21 20:56:00Lady Margaret
I felt really bad. For the first time since the bees arrived in April, I walked toward the hive with treason in my heart. I was going to find, and kill, and replace the Queen. The decision had actually been made in June – the queen’s brood pattern was spotty, and the hive wasn’t happy with her.
Last time I opened the hive, there were scattered laying-worker eggs, no open brood, no capped brood… but I did find the queen. It seemed that the queen was experiencing a total failure. I firmed my resolve to re-queen, and ordered a queen from the folks at Bee Weaver. Laura was very helpful, and had lots of good suggestions. She recommended a push-in cage, which became a drama of its own later on.
Packages of bees arrive in a box the size of a shoe box…. queens arrive with half a dozen helpers in a big envelope. Much less threatening to the nice postman!
I had expected the new queen to be marked and clipped – but she was unmarked and entire. I just hope she’s properly mated!
Of course, once I got the hive open, there was brood EVERYWHERE. I think that the Queen had heard my plans for her demise, and was trying to rally the troops. However, there were also two new supersedure cups – the worker bees were still not happy with the queen’s performance. I took those out.
What followed, I didn’t get pictures of. I was working alone, and a lot of it was fiddly, so I couldn’t handle the camera while I was doing it. I sifted through the hive frame by frame, finally finding the dotted queen on the second pass. I removed her and placed her in a jar – just in case something went horribly wrong.
Then, I found a frame which contained some open brood, some capped brood, a few empty cells, and some honey. I brushed it clean of bees, and took it over to the garage to work away from the hive. I had the garage open, so that there was good light – but it was far enough away from thei hive that I didn’t have the attention of the guard bees. I had built the push-in cage from the window-screening that covered the package of bees when I got them this spring. I laid the frame on the trunk of my car, and figured the best location for the push-in queen cage. Now, I had to open the queen’s transfer cage, get the queen out and onto the frame, push the cage over her and down into the comb, and then put her into the hive and close up. I took my gloves and hood off, because it was delicate close work and I needed gentle fingers.
What happened instead, was that I opened the little container carefully… and all of the bees, including the queen, took off flying. See above about the un-clipped wings. After a moment of intense cussing, I calmed down and realized that there was a cloud of bees still hovering around – maybe the queen was still there? I got my little butterfly net. One after the other, I caught bees and put them in a glass jar. Finally, I caught the queen! They’re not all THAT different when they’re flying around, but you can tell once they are sitting down, how the body is longer. So I got the queen onto the frame, got the cage over her, and after much amusing catch-and-accidentally-release, I got one of her court bees in the cage with her. These bees know and follow her scent, and they’ll feed her if the other bees in the new hive don’t like her right away. I was going to try for three, but it just wasn’t going to happen. I went and reassembled the hive with the new queen in her cage, closed up, and mercifully dispatched the old queen.
After closing up, I caught a few more photos in the yard…
A really lovely lynx spider.
Gosh, she’s big.
A baby watermelon, hiding out in a tomato cage.
A tiny peek-a-boo lizard. He was on the other side of the fence, so I had to peep through leaves to see him. The camera didn’t like the focus.
Jeanette, who was advertised as a French Maran, but lays nearly white eggs.
Weezy, who is one of the two Ameraucanas from our original batch of peeps – she isn’t laying yet, but I look forward to eggs soon. They should be green or blue.
And Penny, who really IS a French Maran, has taken to crowing. It’s never a full crow, but it’s very different from her “henny” noises.
00MichaelMichael2010-09-09 18:53:492010-09-09 18:53:49The Queen is Dead. Long Live the Queen!
