It also comes with some knives and accessories, so it seems like a pretty good deal. We've never used a lathe, and have no knowledge or experience whatsoever, but this seems like a pretty good starting point. We've called the guy, and have plans to pick it up tonight. We're pretty excited to be learning something new!
What color do you think we should paint the coop?
They love the freedom, and Nina's turned it into a game, giving herself a point for each chicken she rounds up back into the coop. It's pretty cool to see our ladies running around and stretching their legs, and it makes me lust over the flock of free-rangers we hope to have one day.
Should we get new rabbits? We spent around $500 on the cage, rabbits, and food, without anything gained except a lesson. To build another cage that would be dog-proof, we'd need a better fence, new rabbits, and some electric fencing to deter any dogs, raccoons, or other animals. This will easily cost a few hundred more dollars, and many more months of waiting for kits, plus hours hunting for the right rabbits, the cost of purchasing them, and a bunch of feed. We're also not going to live here permanently, so we'd have to do it all again in a few years anyways. We're weighing the pros and cons, and hopefully we'll come up with a decision soon.
We picked up a few partridge silkie chicks that are cute enough to die for. I love the little peep peep peeps coming from our bathroom. The little chicken power naps are amazing. They'll peep and hop around for a few minutes, and then pass out like they have narcolepsy. After ten seconds of power napping with their heads down, they're back to pecking at the bedding and cheeping.
The larger chick is a few weeks old. The chicks aren't sexed, but she suspected this one was female, which is why we grabbed her.
All of the males will be going back to Glenna's farm, and we'll hold on to the hens.
With too many eggs for our household to eat, we've developed a wonderful system to get rid of the excess. For $4 a dozen, New College Students can get fresh eggs delivered to their on-campus mail box. A few times a week, I hop on the bus with a couple cartons of blue and brown eggs.
I stick the eggs in the appropriate mailbox, and a few hours later, the eggs have been replaced with some cold hard cash. Students say they love love love the eggs, and I keep getting requests from more and more people.
One thing we haven't done super well is keep track of how much our gardening hobby is costing us. We're finally starting to make a profit selling our eggs for $4/dozen at New College. It's pretty much paying for our feed at this point, but not much else. We've had a few offers for our extra produce, but so far we don't have enough, let alone extras.
We tossed in some bacon, tomatoes, home-raised eggs, and soy sauce.
In the end, it looked like regular stir fry, until we found a cricket peering out from under the noodles on the end of our fork.
We ate every darn one of them. They really didn't taste bad, but there was such a mental hurdle when it came to eating a bowl of cricket noodles (one of us may have even gagged once or twice). It was an interesting experience, but probably not something we'll try again--- at least not as stir fry. I still want to try chocolate covered crickets.
We've hunted on Craigslist, but no real luck. Plenty of people have roosters, but nobody really has chicks or hens. We've found one lady in Tampa who gets shipments in occasionally, but we have yet to hear back from her. I promised Taylor some for his birthday, which was a few months ago, so we better find some soon!
Our egg production is just about in full swing. After months of no eggs, then a few months of nothing but blue eggs, we're now getting eggs from (we assume) all of our chickens. One day we actually got eight eggs, which was amazing! Taylor is still charting our egg production, and the past few days, we've gotten a big spike. It seems like all of our hens started laying at once.
The colors come out very unpredictably. This set was coated with a honey-colored glaze, but instead came out with red, green, and blue shades.
It's hard to get the fires as hot as we need, since there's not a lot of good wood to burn. Some of the pieces have the characteristic shine from melted silica in the glaze, but most of it is just matte.
It should be perfect for our sugar-snap peas to climb up on. Up to now, we've been using bamboo with yarn tied to it to give the peas something to grab on to. This should work rather well for this climbing variety.
We're pretty happy with it. You can definitely see the difference between the un-composted beds and the ones with a happy dose of humus. We'll have to see how it works out this growing season.
Now we've got some pretty big piles of palmettos laying around. They're great for fires, and even burn well when completely wet and green. It's been a lot of work (Taylor goes out almost every day after work), but without letting things take their natural course (wildfires caused by lightning), it's actually better for the ecosystem to clear it out every once in a while.
