This week we had births and deaths in the farm game. We had two more guinea birds hatch, thanks to Boomer, and we had a racoon kill about half of our new birds. Boomer has been on the nest for over a month now and has managed to hatch three guinea eggs. We had a guinea bird on the nest and she managed to hatch three eggs, but as soon as the eggs hatched she kicked the keets out of the nest. Big Man found two dead, and found one newly hatched keet that had just been kicked out of the nest. He got it to the heat lamp in time and appears to be doing fine. Our lead off picture this week is Boomers last hatch. Big Man stopped in the coop deville mid day and found one of the last of Boomers eggs cracked. BM carried it to the heat lamp cage and ran to grab the camera, but by the time he got back to the cage the keet had already broke free.
We also have been hand feeding the keets sugar water, they came up with a case of pasty butt, and this helps keep things moving in the right direction.
We put the new arrival birds into the starter coop this week. We've been using it for almost four years now and never had a problem with woodland creatures interfering with the birds. That streak ended Thursday. A racoon dug under a plywood cover between the two coops and killed about half of our young chicks. We figured it would come back Friday night for the second half so we scrambled for a solution. Our usual go to response would have been foot traps to catch the critter, but Jake had not brought the traps back to the house yet, so we rigged up a deterrent instead. We screwed in plastic insulators and ran a hot wire around the base of the two coops. We placed a cinder block in front of the hole so the racoon would have to get on top of the wire to re dig the hole, then we ran a line from the electric fence to the hot wire. We've had no more digging under the coop, so we're chalking this up as a win.
We got the two hog wire pieces up for the cucumbers to run up.
And we have a before and after picture of the sucker tomatoes that we pulled off and replanted. We are very pleased with this technique.
Cupcake got to use her new lawn mower this week when she helped BM mow the lawn. We didn't get a picture of it because Cupcake is the usual photog. Just visualize her mowing here.....
One food related updates, we start off with last week's wings. Just as we got the wings fried up the power went out. We didn't let that slow us down any, we lit the oil lamps and chowed down.
Cupcake wanted a soon to be world famous buttermilk pie this week, so BM whipped one up. This week instead of using the rolling pin to roll out the crust, BM used just his fingers to spread the crust until it got to the right size to fill the pie plate.
We raided pop's garden one night and made a huge batch of scalded lettuce for Thor's night of red meat offerings.
We got one last picking of cherries, this time from the tree in the back yard. We made another batch of jelly.
And we made another batch of laundry detergent.
We end the weeks update with a hijacked picture from The Dutchess. A picture of the happy couple
We ended the week with wings.
K&K
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