Black Rifle Barter

This week we brought back the barter system in a small way. Back in the day, when people said they were "going to town to do some trading" it meant they would take something they had, and trade it for something that they needed. Cash money played a very small roll in day to day life. We always say were are "going to town to do some trading" but it's mostly cash for goods. Leave it to our pal "Rhulenbarb" to offer up a true barter this week.
We had a bountiful week in blue eggs, and with the recent heavy snow and mud show, egg sales dropped off quite a bit. Our eggs began to pile up, so we asked Dave if he could help us out. He agreed, in exchange for a bag of "Black Rifle" coffee. Apparently Dave put some thought in to a future exchange, and we were thrilled to be a part of it.

We had one extraordinary day on the egg front this week. We gathered forty eggs in one day. That means every girl took a turn in the box. Usually they are every other day layers, but we guess since it's a leap year, they synced up for a blowout day.

While we were visiting with Rhulenbarb, we ran across the retired high chief of police from CPD, Gary Brumfield. He stopped and chatted a bit, we discussed all things retired police talk about, we talked about "The Outlaw", we all laughed. Good times.

Last week we promised a plant update surprise. We started a "grow" operation in the basement this year. We picked up a couple of LED grow lights that don't use quite as much juice as the old bulb type, and they certainly do not get as hot. We bought a couple of adjustable ropes to hang the lights from, and used existing holes in the ceiling to hang them from.

Prior to doing this, we used the sliding glass doors in the living room as our source of sunlight. It works really well for starting plants, but once they sprout and we transplant them into cups, we have fifty or so cups of dirt in the floor. That means Fraidy Mutt needs to get all up in their business, and knocks about half of them over. Water leaks out. We don't know why we never thought of this before. So to celebrate our new found operation, we replanted another 36 marigold plants, and another 36 ground cherry seeds. The first round of ground cherries didn't do so well, we only had about six sprout, so we try, try again. The marigolds did very well, we are excited for them because the birds leave them alone, and they repel pests and deer as well.

Some of you may remember Cupcake and her seed fetish from last fall? It's paying off big time now. We even started putting a handful in the chicken feeder, so the girls can get to spreading around some flowers in their day to day. We had a couple extra ropes from the grow light set up, and we used one to suspend the chicken feeder in the hen house.

We had the feeder on the ground, but the girls would always find a way to knock it over. So we put a large plastic trash can lid in the hen house, and put the feed directly in that, but the girls felt the need to scratch sawdust and straw into the lid, and we would lose more feed than the girls ate. NOW they can't kick anything in to it, and they can't knock it over. We rock.

And speaking of all things chicken, we started our breeding plan this weekend. We moved six of our brown egg layers into "Arkham" along with one of our blue roosters. Our plan is to hatch these eggs to produce olive colored eggers. We're sure we will mention the progress, we have three weeks until the Farmer's Almanac says it's the time to incubate eggs.

We had a vacancy in "Arkham" this week, because Penguin woke up dead one morning. We guess he was too far gone when we identified the problem? But it lead to a funny story.
Big Man came in the house and reported Penguin's passing, and Cupcake asked "was there anything wrong with him?""You mean other than he was dead?" "Yes"  "Nope, dead was pretty much the only issue today"  We would soooo make a better reality show than anything the Kartrashians are putting out to the sheeple, but our regular readers are the only ones who will ever know.
The remaining five guinea birds are still on patrol, and all seem healthy and happy.

Moving on to the food portion of our week, we used some of the smoked turkey from last week to make a batch of turkey salad. We enjoyed that for lunch most of last week. We had plenty of home made pickles to go in it.

We had Cupcake's new favorite meal, paprika chicken on Monday night.

Home made pizza on Tuesday

And we thawed out one of the three black heart cherry pies we made last year and froze. It was a little taste of spring. It won't be long until we're picking this years batch of fresh cherries, and we are counting down the days until we can.

We ended the week with wings.
K&K