Of Little Lambs and Fairy Eggs

Even though Ann and her man are still disembodied, I am done counting the sheep on Miss Rayner, thank Heaven, because those little lambs over one were rather tedious on the very tightly woven 40-count linen I am using. But I do love the way they look, don't you? Sigh. I love this sampler. I am s-l-o-w-l-y working my way through my sampler bucket list, and if this one doesn't send me to a rheumatologist for my arm/hand issues, I don't know what will.

Ann Rayner by Threads Through Time
(Mostly) NPI silk on
40-count Vintage Lakeside Linen

Now for the farm report part of this post. One recent afternoon,  I went to gather the eggs, and as they are wont to do, three of my girls had used the same nesting box. However, this time Abigail had produced a teeny tiny egg that was so sweet but certainly a fluke of nature. (This happens from time to time with the egg-laying process.) Upon researching, I learned that these little eggs are sometimes referred to as "fairy eggs." To give a some perspective, the B-52's pretty blue egg and Abby's regular egg are the size of an extra-large, I would say, so you can see just how small Abby the Chicken Fairy's egg is.  I haven't opened it yet to see what is inside, but I'm guessing it is yoke-less.

The Fairy Egg

Last week, I also gave the coop a really good cleaning. As I have such a small flock and I clean up the coop on a daily basis, every two weeks is a good schedule for this. However, I added something a little extra this time ~ Nesting Box Blend from Treats for Chickens, which contains all kinds of fragrant herbs and flowers. Not only is it aromatherapy for the hens, but it helps to ward off any bugs and parasites that can invade the coop. The girls really seemed to like it!

Nesting Box Blend

So that's the news this week from the Garden Gate, where the gardeners are strong, the hens good looking and the eggs are (mostly) above average. Happy weekend everyone!

Pssst. Abby! Does your nest smell funny?

When life gives you lemons . . .

 . . .it is a very good thing!

Lemon paradise

Honestly, I think lemons have gotten a bad rap. Replace the word lemons with liver and onions and now we're talking a bad situation. Nothing good can come of that. But lemons? I use lemons for about a thousand different things for which there is no substitute. And ingesting lemons in one form or another is not the only use for them. I just read instructions somewhere online for using lemon waste (the squeezed-out halves) and tap water for making an enzyme cleaner. Anyway, the reason I am defending lemons is that my tree is now loaded with them, and my week will be spent juicing and zesting as much as my freezer will hold.

So, February was quite the full month. The winter garden provided us with tons of good stuff, but none of it preserved. I spent quite a bit of time researching and then trying about 500 ways to use broccoli, as I do not care for it in frozen form. Also, our heirloom lettuces were a great success, and we have more than enough for us, the neighbors and the girls ~ not necessarily in that order. The last couple of weeks of the month were spent planning and then planting our spring garden and pruning our deciduous fruit trees, which are all blooming. It is glorious!

Blossoming apricot tree

But it was not all work. We took time to stop and smell the roses, too. February is the month when most of my husband's side of the family come to visit. It really is the most beautiful month in our desert, in my opinion. Having family come to visit forces us to remember to slow down and enjoy it with them.

So with everything in bloom right now, I am thinking spring cleaning and getting back to basics. I am trying to figure out where I can incorporate a clothes line into my back yard. I love clothes lines. But I don't want it to look like I just wandered down from the hills. More research needs to be done on this. This week, I am also going to make my own laundry soap, which just makes my little frugal, laundry lovin' heart go pitty pat. (The thoughts of spring cleaning were what led me to discover the lemony enzyme thing.)

Lancaster laundry day

As for stitching, I have started Ann Rayner, but I have been struggling with a nasty episode of tennis elbow, so I have been trying to not over do. Next time, I hope to have a progress photo that won't bore everyone to tears. But in keeping with my "back to basics" theme, I will instead post a little finish from last year: Carriage House Samplings' Hornbook Sampler. Basic at its very best.

Carriage House Samplings
Hornbook Sampler

I will leave you with a photo of the girls in their new playpen, which is an old wheelbarrow filled with compost. Once my arm  heals I am going to paint it a different shade of green. That is, if I can keep them out. I may have to do it under the cloak of darkness when they are all snoozy in their roost to avoid a real mess ~ or in my new parlance, one of those liver and onions moments.

And a chicken in
every wheelbarrow!

Happy week everyone!

Cleaning House

 It's been a busy January so far at The Garden Gate and the Coop de Grace, but I always enjoy the fresh start of a new year and the motivation that comes with it to organize and indulge my organizational OCD. (The rest of the year I am in recovery, as anyone who takes a really close look at my house will tell you.) And although packing away the Christmas stuff was easy this year, I am still reminded of the woeful lack of storage in this house. With my newly found love of canning, I had to do some serious reallocation of closet space this summer, but it still isn't enough. For example, I would love to have a pantry that looks like this:

Pinterest

As for other "house" cleaning, we are taking advantage of all of our winter greens to try to mitigate the excess of holiday eating. Right now the lettuces are tender and flavorful, and we have been eating a lot of salads. This year I planted some new varieties of heirloom greens, including Little Gem Romaine, Red Romaine, Buttercrunch, Tom Thumb Butterhead, Bronze Mignonette, and arugula. The cilantro I used in a citrus vinaigrette in which I also used our blood oranges. Remarkably, we are still getting grape tomatoes from one of our plants, and they are very good. The girls are also benefiting from the greens in our garden and it is fun to mix up a good salad for them, too.

Green goodness

Coop de Grace special

Stitching has been at a minimum these past two weeks, as there really has been too much to be done both indoors and out, but I shan't leave you without a house-related stitching photo.

"By wisdom a house is built,
and by understanding it is established;
 and by knowledge the rooms are filled
 with all precious and pleasant riches." ~ Proverbs 24:3,4

Have a great week, everyone!

Home, home on the (free) range

I am still having production problems with the girls. At least the girls who are not molting. This week, Abigail decided it was her turn. This time of year in the Southwest they should be back to the levels of last spring, I would think. (All of the girls have been laying for less than a year.) At that time, we had not yet enclosed a larger run and the girls were making themselves at home all over the back yard and patio.  I took a look at my current coop and run setup and realized that it is now almost completely shaded all day long. Could not enough light be the problem? My husband was skeptical, but he lacks chicken intuitiveness.

The girls and my last eggplant harvest

While getting a pedicure last week,  I happened to quiz one of the nail techs who has a huge flock in a more rural area of town. The first thing he said was, "They aren't getting enough light." Ha! So, with much protestation coming from the no-chicken-keeping-in-the-DNA crowd, I decided to let them free-range once again. Which means watching them like a chicken hawk. We have done some work on our yard since then, and keeping them out of the gardens is a challenge. One of the things we did was remove a small area of lawn (read: ugly Bermuda grass), and began working on a new garden area. As most of our yard is taken up with the cement pond, gardening space is at a premium, and grass just seemed like a tremendous waste of water and real estate. I am now working on a plan to extend the run to replace a problem area in the garden, but one with a lot of sun.

At 2 in the afternoon, not a speck of sunlight

Shaded coop and new garden area

So once again, I have patio chickens;  and on occasion when the weather is nice and I have the door open,  I have kitchen chickens, too. They come for the cat food. Fortunately, Marguerite, the cat, likes only tuna, so Chicken of the Sea is the only chicken on the menu; it is perfectly safe for the girls to eat.

In the meantime, we had a little freeze last night, and my eggplants and basil are toast. We were just about to dig them up anyway, so letting the chickens do some of the digging for us works out really well for everyone.

Making hay in the freeze-damaged eggplant

The jury is still out as far as my egg production goes, although Dolley, my only consistent layer at this point, has stepped it up. I am hoping that the B-52 and Eleanor will soon follow.

A tale of two tushies

The end(s).

It's been a quiet week at the Coop de Grace. . .

 . . .but not so quiet at The Garden Gate. Lots of hornbook frames to make for the new Plum Street Samplers Salem Hornbook (available at your local needlework shop);

Photo credit:  Plum Street Samplers

and lots of preparation for our annual golf tournament/fund raiser for Sunshine Acres Children's Home in Mesa, Arizona, a worthy cause if there ever was one;

Photo credit: Sunshine Acres Children's Home
and East Valley Charities

and trying to finish up a bathroom remodel. (NEVER again!) Photos coming soon :~)

The most excitement around the coop was the introduction of Greek yogurt into the girls' diet. It is a great source of protein, and I am still trying to get them quickly through their molts. I think it must be working, as Bea's feathers are coming in rather nicely. Compare this neck photo with the last neck photo and the difference is obvious. She looks almost normal again.

Yogurt beak Bea 

So short but sweet, that's the news from The Coop de Grace and The Garden Gate, where all the gardeners are strong, the chickens good looking and the eggs are above average. (My apologies to Garrison Kellior.)

Tossed salads & scrambled eggs

I sure don't have a clue to the meaning of the lyrics of the "Fraser" theme song, but around here it's what the girls have been getting for breakfast.

Oh my how they love their eggs! Hard boiled eggs, scrambled eggs, deviled eggs, eggs Florentine, a little egg shells all crumbled up ~ well, you get the idea. I just never feed raw eggs to my hens. There is not a raw-egg eater in the bunch, and I hope to keep it that way.

I have increased their protein intake because of this poor little girl. Yes, Beatrice is molting. Isn't she a sight? It seems like she dropped nearly all of her feathers overnight. For the first few days she was quite embarrassed. However, several days of scrambled eggs in the morning seemed to ease her emotional trauma. And mine.

When a chicken molts, they stop laying eggs. Conventional hen wisdom tells us that this is because all the nutrients needed to produce eggs are used instead to produce new feathers. A feather is 85% protein, so an increase in protein intake should help them through their molt. According to Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens ~ my Dr. Spock for my feathered babies ~ the best layers molt early and fast. Bea is a good example of that. On the other hand, the poorer layers molt early and slowly. Eleanor, my Barred Rock, slowly molted in late summer and she still has not resumed laying. I am hoping that the increased protein helps. Pretty as she is, I don't need another non-producing diva.

I think Beatrice is grateful for the new item on the breakfast menu, as she posed for this portrait. How can I not love a face like that?

The Coop de Grace

So what is with that corny play on words, anyway? It is a tribute to this woman, my grandmother, Grace Whittenburg Shaw (shown holding my sweet dad as a baby). A  farmer's wife, she is the first person I remember who kept chickens, except hers were not pets. Ahem. I'm not sure what she would have thought about my ga-ga-ness over my girls, but I think she might be pleased that I have a little flock of my own. When I was little, my folks used to call me "Little Grace," as they thought I resembled her. As I have grown older, I realize that we have more in common than I ever could have imagined as a child. Sometimes I wish I could have known my grandmothers at the age I am now. Thankfully, much of them remain in my parents, my aunts and uncles and in some of the treasures they have left behind.

Now that you have the back story, I think it is time to introduce you to my little flock. They all have their own personalities, which was just one of the lovely surprises of having my own backyard chickens. Honestly, I don't think I will every look at a fryer in the grocery store in quite the same way again. Speaking of which, I get a lot of questions about whether or not I will eat my chickens when they have outlived their egg production years. Are they serious? I have named these birds and I kiss their heads (oh yes I do). I look them in the eye every single day and have been known to sing "You Are My Sunshine" to the Buff Orpingtons. I have their retirement coop already planned. Enough said.

Still with me? Here we go.

First, allow me to introduce you to the Buff Orpingtons, Abigail (right) and Dolley (left). They are my reliable layers. They are always the last to go into the coop at night. Abigail is the escape artist of the flock and my husband refers to her as his "white whale." He swears up and down that Dolley stands sentinel while Abigail digs out a tunnel under the fencing around the run. The garden with all of its tender shoots is their goal.  I would not have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. But they are good girls. For the most part.

Dolley & Abigail scouting escape routes.

Next is my beautiful Plymouth Barred Rock, Eleanor. She is the Queen of the Coop, first in the pecking order. She definitely has the queen attitude. Her little toadie is Frances, a Sliver Laced Wyandotte. Frances is the most beautiful of all the hens, I think. However, she is barren. She has never produced an egg. So I am happy to keep her as my coop ornament. She can be kind of aloof, which I attribute to her "I am the prettiest of all" status.

Eleanor ~ It's good to be Queen.

Frances, famous turkey impersonator.

And lastly we have Beatrice, or the B-52, as she is sometimes called. Bea is an Ameracauna, and she lays beautiful blue eggs. She is another good layer. Bea is just a good old girl, friend to all. She recently pulled a fast one on me, a story which I will tell soon. I learned a lesson from her, but not before giving the Tempe police department a good laugh.

Beatrice, the B-52, waiting
for tea and crumpets.
Star of the Tempe PD.

So there you have the girls of The Coop de Grace. They are a lovely little flock. They have taught me a lot in the past year. And I love them with all my heart.

Under my own vine & fig

A couple of years ago I decided to take a little break from blogging to devote more of my attention to family matters. In fact, I drastically cut back on all social media. I needed a breather. I did not intend to be gone so long, but I needed to reconnect with my inner introvert. However, while I was doing that, something else happened: I became an urban farmer.

It all began quite innocently enough. For awhile my husband and I had been trying to eat locally and seasonally, which led us to gardening in our back yard. We built beds and planted our first small crops. We went on garden tours and talked with a lot of experienced folks. Soon, our conversations were filled with words like “sustainability,” “permaculture,” and could talk compost with the best of them. Our garden grew. We planted more fruit trees. I learned to can, and I didn't blow a hole in the ceiling.

It didn't take long for us to realize that many of the master gardeners in our area also kept a flock of chickens. Curious (and with my husband ecstatic over with the thought of chicken manure for the compost bin), we went on our first Tour de Coops in the Phoenix area. We knew that very day that this was something we wanted to do. And so the adventure began.

For the next year we designed the back yard to accommodate a chicken coop, looked at coop plans online, talked with chicken people (including some of my family members) and read, read, read. I subscribed to Backyard Poultry magazine. Soon it was time to bring home our little flock, five beautiful pullets. The Coop de Grace was born, and I have not been the same since.

The urban farm community, both local and online, has been so giving and willing to share what they have learned along the way, that I in turn want to do the same for others who may be fledgling gardeners and coop keepers like us.  A couple of decades ago, someone who helped me immensely in my life's journey told me that his personal philosophy was that he was “just a beggar showing other beggars where to find food.” While he meant this in a spiritual sense, I think this also applies to just about any area of human endeavor. At The Garden Gate it is gardening and keeping chickens, cooking simply, living simply, re-purposing whenever possible, pursuing creative outlets, and sharing our bounty with family and friends.

So while I haven't given up the things that made up the former Garden Gate, I hope I have certainly “re-purposed” it into something of a richer brew. Thanks for stopping by! Don't be a stranger ~ the garden gate is open.