The girls taking a break from the rain in style in their sun/shade/rain shelter.

At 8 weeks old, the new chicks are almost as big as their momma!

By April I am usually too impatient to wait any longer for night temperatures to warm up to 50 degrees, so I usually just go ahead and plant the garden on the first warm sunny weekend in mid-April. This year it seemed like we had a colder than usual stretch of below 40 degree nights, but by last weekend it appeared to be over so I decided it was finally time to plant the warm season vegetables. I started most of my veggies from seed this year, and transferred them to the greenhouse about a month ago. Last weekend I planted tomatoes, eggplant, anaheim chilies, red and orange bell peppers, cucumbers, and squash. I’m growing 8 varieties of tomatoes this year – a couple of early varieties (Manitoba and Moskvich), a large Brandywine-like heirloom from our neighbor Clancy, a variety called Longkeeper that is supposed to store for up to 3 months(!), Black Plum, Taxi, Orange Blossom, and Tigerlike. I haven’t grown eggplant in quite a few years, and the last time I grew it I don’t think I ended up with a single eggplant to harvest. This year I am growing an extra early variety called Millionaire, and I am hoping for better luck than I’ve had in the past. I also have not had much luck with bell peppers, so those are being grown in the greenhouse, and since it easily gets up to 90 degrees inside I am feeling confident that I’ll have success  growing bell peppers this year. I’m growing three varieties of cucumber – my favorite lemon cucumber, and also a green bush variety and a miniature white skinned variety. The squash were planted in the new planting bed near the greenhouse. The varieties I planted include yellow crookneck, zucchini, acorn, butternut, delicata, hubbard (green, baby blue, and Anna Swartz – an excellent storage variety), spaghetti, gourds, and pumpkins.

The cool season veggies including spinach, lettuce, broccoli, kale, onions, and potatoes were planted a few weeks ago. I was a little slow to get the seeds started for the swiss chard and the bok choy, but those should be ready to plant out in a couple of weeks. This year I am growing the potatoes in boxes – well actually stackable wood frames that you fill with straw or mulch as the potato plants grow and add additional frames and layers of straw as the potatoes grow higher and higher. The strawberries, blueberries and raspberries all have tons of flower blossoms, and now that we have hung a bird scare out of repurposed CDs we should get a bumper berry crop this year. Last year the birds ate 99% of our blueberries and raspberries, and I am not exaggerating! The other garden chore I’ve been hard at work at for the last couple of months is hauling wood shavings up to the garden and spreading them on the paths between all the beds. I have to say the garden is really looking great this year!

It’s been three weeks since we installed the bees in their hive, and they are doing great!

That’s where my little Sweet Pea is now. She left us this evening after a few weeks of us trying our best to nurse her back to health. I first took our poor little Sweet Pea to the vet two and a half weeks ago, and at that time the vet prescribed 5 days of antibiotics. I took her back to the vet a week ago after she finished the course of antibiotics and wasn’t showing any sign of improvement. This time the vet took a blood sample which revealed she was severely anemic, which explains her very pale pink comb. The vet said that a normal red blood cell count for a bird is 40 and perhaps down to 30. The lowest she had ever seen was 10, and Sweet Pea’s was only 8. The vet said she was surprised that Sweet Pea was even alive. After running a few more tests with her bloodwork, the vet came back into the exam room and said that Sweet Pea had her stumped. Sweet Pea’s symptoms suggested a possible kidney disorder, and the condition of her red blood cells suggested some other possible disorders, but she was uncertain about the diagnosis because the other tests she ran were inconclusive. Further complicating the diagnosis was the fact that there is not all that much information to assist in diagnosing symptoms in live chickens. In the commercial poultry industry when a chicken falls ill it is quickly dispatched of, and apparently there is a lot of literature about post-mortem diagnosis of chicken diseases, but that’s not all that helpful when trying to diagnose illness in a living chicken.

The vet gave Sweet Pea a shot of cortisone which she said would give her a boost for 4 to 5 days and perhaps help her recover a bit from whatever the cause of her anemia was. We noticed an improvement in Sweet Pea’s appetite and energy level for the next 5 days. Every morning I would prepare various tasty treats for Sweet Pea and feed them to her while sitting on the kitchen floor with her and drinking my morning coffee. She ate lots of live meal worms during this time, and I kept hoping to see an improvement in the color of her comb but it remained an unhealthy pale pink. We took her to the farm last weekend, and she seemed to do okay being back with the flock and even pecked about and ate some grass. On Sunday we decided to take her back with us to Portland since that was day 5 after her cortisone shot, and I was worried that the boost in energy and appetite she was enjoying wouldn’t last too much longer.

Sure enough, Monday morning there was a noticeable decrease in her appetite and energy level, and she began breathing heavily. We still sat together in the mornings, me on the kitchen floor and she in my lap while I drank my coffee, although she no longer ate anything except for a few pecks at cucumber slices. When I got home from work tonight we spent a little time sitting on the back deck in the sun which she seemed to enjoy. Then she got up from  my lap,  and it soon became obvious the end was near. We went inside and I held her again in my lap. She began having more trouble breathing and convulsed several times, and I wished that I’d had her euthanized rather than see her suffer. It was a more traumatic end than I would have wished for my little Sweet Pea, but I know it was a better end for her with us in the kitchen than she would have had being pestered by a bunch of hens and roosters at the farm during her last moments. Sweet Pea is the third chicken we’ve lost in the last year, but I think she was the hardest since I had an extra special place in my heart for her and I was with her during her last breath. I sure hope this is the last of the chickens we lose for a while. I may regret saying this, but I’m looking forward to our girls growing old and and having to set up a retirement coop for the old biddies. Right now it seems that would be much better than losing any more of our ladies too early.

I had thought about calling this post “Crazy Chicken Lady” because I’m about to divulge the lengths I will go to for one of my favorite hens, little Sweet Pea. This is the same Sweet Pea that I wrote about back in September 2012 after she suffered from a reproductive disorder (prolapsed vent). Sweet Pea recovered from that condition, and she’s been living happily at the farm until last week when we brought her back to the chicken infirmary in our kitchen in Portland. One of the indicators of a chicken’s health is the condition of their comb and wattles. When the comb and wattles are full and bright red it indicates a healthy, laying chicken. When they are a pale bubble gum pink, it indicates either a sick chicken or that the chicken is undergoing a normal annual molt during during which they do not lay eggs. Sweet Pea’s comb turned a very pale pink a few weeks ago, which was a noticeable difference from the rest of the flock, most of whom have full bright red combs and have started laying eggs again after their winter break. I tried not too worry too much at first, and I hoped that it was just a sign that perhaps she was about to molt. After a couple weeks of her not looking well, isolating herself from the flock, sleeping a lot, and not eating much, I decided to take her to the vet. There are a few vets who see chickens in the Portland and St. Helens area; however, I have not been too impressed with their knowledge of chickens when I have visited them in the past. I decided to take Sweet Pea to the avian vet in Lake Oswego who is well-respected in the Portland chicken community and who is herself a chicken owner of over 15 years.

Here’s where the crazy chicken lady part of the story comes in. The vet suspected Sweet Pea had injured her liver, possibly by bumping or flying into something, and that she may have an infection, so she prescribed antibiotics. Okay, fine I thought, I have administered various treatments to the chickens before but they’ve always been in liquid form and easily added to their drinking water. This prescription, however, was for pills! For a chicken! Not to worry the vet said, I’ll show you how it’s done, as she opened Sweet Pea’s beak with one hand and slid the pill down her throat with the other hand in about 2 seconds. The prescription was one tablet twice a day for five days. The first couple of days went fine, in part due to the fact that I recently discovered Sweet Pea’s fondness for grapes, and I was able to stick half a pill in half a grape and get her to swallow it down after a few tries. Then about halfway through the treatment she caught on to the grape trick and wasn’t having any more of that. So the search began for other foods I could camouflage her pills in. I tried blueberries, scrambled eggs, and cooked squash with little luck. She loves cheddar cheese, so I tried wrapping grated cheese around the pills, to no avail. All that was left to do was to try it the way the vet showed me. Sean held Sweet Pea, and by some miracle and with minimal struggle, victory was mine! I actually managed to stick a pill down her throat. It’s a good thing too because we’re going to have to do it a couple more times to get her through her prescription. I wish I could say that the antibiotics appeared to be helping her, but she doesn’t seem to be improving.

We will bring her back to the farm this weekend and see if being reunited with the flock perks her up a bit. I fear the worst, however, and in the back of my mind I can’t help but think that her past prolapse is an indication that she may suffer from additional reproductive issues. Her pale comb and lack of appetite are a reminder of our poor Ruby that we lost last year to a reproductive disorder. I sure hope that’s not what’s going on with Sweet Pea. If she’s not looking better over the weekend, I have another appointment at the vet scheduled for early next week. Only a fellow chicken lover could understand my devotion to this chicken. What can I say other than in this increasingly bizarre and sad world we live in, my chickens bring me happiness and peace, and it’s hard to put a price on that.

Our momma hen, Millie, taking the new chicks for a walk.

This weekend was by far the most exciting weekend at the farm! On Saturday morning the bees I had ordered arrived at the bee store, and we picked them up and went right to the farm to install them into their hive. I purchased the bees in what they call a bee package, which is a small wood and mesh box that contains 3 lbs or approximately 10,000 bees. I preparation for the big event, I took a beekeeping class a couple of months ago from the store where I purchased the bees. The process of transferring the bees into the hive sounded easy enough in the class (there was only one slide in the Powerpoint presentation after all!), but there are lots of steps in the process and all the while you can’t help but think about all that could go wrong with 10,000 angry bees on the loose! Actually it went pretty well, although if I install another hive in the future I will definitely do a few things differently.

First off, I put on the protective bee gear, which worked great except for the slight decrease in finger dexterity due to the gloves (more on that later). While the bees are being transported from where they are bred to the bee store, they feed on a simple syrup mixture in a tin can that hangs in the middle of the wooden box. The first step in transferring the bees is to pry the tin can loose and quickly lift it out of the box, stick your hand in the box, and remove the tiny cage the queen bee is contained in that hangs from the top of the box. Then you have to quickly put the tin can back in the box to keep the bees from escaping. Since the queen bee meets her colony for the first time when they are packaged for shipment, the queen is confined in a very small cage, about the size of a lipstick tube, to allow her colony to be exposed to her pheromones and come to identify her as their queen before they actually interact with her because there is a possibility that they may kill her if they don’t recognize her as their queen. Before hanging the queen cage in the beehive, you remove a cork at the bottom of her cage and replace it with a marshmallow, then affix the queen cage with a thumbtack to the inside of the hive (did I mention you’re wearing gloves during all of this?!) Over the course of a couple of days, the queen and the other bees eat the marshmallow and she is released from her cage to join her colony. Doesn’t that just sound like a romantic fairytale of true love!

Okay, that first part was a bit nerve-wracking, but the next step was much more so. Working quickly, you bang the box containing the bees on the ground to knock the bees onto the bottom of the cage, then remove the can and pour the bees through the relatively small hole in the cage into the hive. It sounds easy, but let me tell you, as soon as I whacked the box on the ground and I heard the buzz of 10,000 bees I got a little freaked out! I was able to get the majority of the bees into the hive after several whacks and repeated pouring and shaking of bees into the hive. You don’t have to get every last bee into the hive, just most of them, and then you leave the cage propped in front of the hive entrance and they are supposed to find their way into the hive.  I didn’t really find the bees to be all that interested in leaving their cage and going into the hive, so I came back a couple more times during the afternoon to whack and shake them into the hive and I’d say eventually all but probably 100 of them went into the hive.

So after all of the excitement of transferring the bees into the hive, I was more than a little ready to close the hive up and be done with it. I installed their pollen patty and placed an inverted jar of simple syrup in the top of the hive. These are both needed to feed the colony until more plants come into bloom later in the spring for them to feed on. I did forget to do one thing which I’m hoping doesn’t cause too much of a problem. What I forgot to do is to slide the frames where the bees make their comb closely up against the queen cage so she is surrounded on both sides by a frame. I went back to the hive today to check on their food supply of simple syrup and I thought maybe I would slide those frames together. This time I had my smoker with me to drive the bees deeper into the hive, but even with the smoker there was a little more bee activity than I was ready for, so I just left the frames as they were. I suppose it will take some time working with the bees and refining my technique before I feel more confident managing the bees and the hive. Next weekend I will have to muster up my courage and get all of the frames in their proper place. For now, I am going to celebrate the homecoming of the new members of 5R Farm.

The new chicks, Daisy and Daphne.

It was great to finally have good weather last weekend so that we could make progress on a couple of outdoor projects. Actually, most of our projects at the farm are outdoors so the recent rainy weather has been slowing us down quite a bit. The greenhouse has been in progress for the last couple of months, and now that the weather is warming up and the veggie seedlings are getting tall, we are anxious to get the greenhouse finished. This weekend Sean finished the roof and installed the skylights, so I’ll be able to move plants in next weekend. They’ll stay in the greenhouse for a couple of weeks to harden them off before planting in the garden once the danger of frost has passed. The other project that definitely needed to get finished this weekend was getting the beehive set up so that it’s ready to transfer the bees into when they arrive next Saturday. I picked a nice sunny southeasterly facing slope near the greenhouse to install the beehive. I removed sod, put down landscape fabric, hauled and compacted gravel, and made a level platform for the beehive. I also set up a concrete planter next to the beehive that will provide a nearby water source for the bees. All in all it was a productive weekend at the farm. Stay tuned for next week’s post – I’ll let you know how it goes when I move the bees, all 10,000 of them, into their hive. It’s sure to be an exciting day!

Lil’ Red Rooster looking handsome in his frizzle feather finery!

I have exciting news to report – our very own Millie hatched out some baby chicks! You may recall I had written about Millie wanting to be a momma for quite some time in a previous post, Momma Wanna-be. Well, after she started camping out in the nest box for extended periods this spring, we decided to grant her wish of motherhood. Millie has never met a rooster in her life, but her breed is well known for making excellent mothers so we put three fertile eggs from the farm under her a few weeks ago. It takes chicken eggs 21 days to hatch. We were away for most of the day on day 20, and wouldn’t you know that had to be the day that one chick hatched a day early. We don’t know what happened, but unfortunately the first chick to hatch didn’t make it and I found it dead on the floor of the run. We are speculating that it may have followed the other adult chicken, Coco Puff, down the ladder that leads from the coop to the run and then the chick didn’t know how to get back to the coop and the warmth of it’s momma and so it may have died from exposure. I was horrified to find that first dead chick, but I was soon relieved when I opened the coop door and found Millie sitting in the nest box with a live chick under her and one more egg left to hatch. The following morning she had two adorable peeping chicks.

Coco Puff has been sleeping in the nest box with Millie the entire time she was broody and then during the whole time she was incubating eggs, and now that the chicks have hatched we decided to give Millie some alone time with her new chicks. We installed a screen inside the coop to make separate quarters for Millie and the chicks and to also prevent the chicks from leaving the safety of the coop and their momma. Millie appears to have spent the entire first two days after the chicks hatched in the nest box with the chicks. Then on day 3 she moved the family from the nest box to the food and water station we set up for the chicks and began giving them lessons in eating and drinking. To teach the chicks where the food is and what it looks like she makes a series of quick clucking sounds while picking up pieces of food, dropping the food in front of the chicks, and then pecking at it. The chicks seem to have figured it out and have been pecking hungrily at the food I sprinkle on the threshold of the nest box to lure them out from under Millie. Millie is doing a great job as a momma, and we are going to let her raise the chicks in the coop rather than raising them in the kitchen as we  have done when we bought chicks from the store. We will need to be attentive to socializing the chicks to people, as chickens that are hen-raised are known to not be as friendly toward humans as chicks that are regularly handled while they are growing up. Today was the first day of socialization, and it did not exactly go smoothly. I was able to slide my open hand under a chick and pick it up without much objection by the chick, but when I lifted the chick up off the coop floor, Millie flew at me in full attack mode. Luckily when a two pound fluffy bantam chicken goes into attack mode it’s really more cute than it is intimidating! I can tell that Millie is going to make a great mother hen, and I’m already looking forward to having her hatch out more eggs. Now let’s just hope we are lucky enough to have at least one of the baby chicks grow up to be a hen and that we don’t find ourselves with two more roosters on our hands. Besides, I’ve already picked out their names – Daisy and Daphne – which are not very well suited to roosters!

We have a Northern flicker pair nesting by the house – I love it when the male drums on the wood stove chimney!

It looks like I’ll be shoveling the 27 yards of wood shavings I just got delivered for quite some time!

I’ve learned a lot about rooster love in the last year, a bit too much perhaps, and one thing I can say is that love hurts! We currently have 3 roosters living with our flock of 25 hens, which is at the high end of the recommended rooster to hen ratio. Now that spring is here the boys are getting increasingly amorous with the ladies, and several of the ladies are looking a bit tattered in the feather department.  The black australorps are among the boys’ favorites, followed by the easter eggers and the speckled sussex, all of which are showing telltale signs of overmating including bare spots on their backs and bald spots on their heads from where the roosters grab onto the hens with their claws and beaks during mating. To be fair, there are times when a lady hen appears to be seeking some male companionship, but most of the time the roosters’ affections do not appear to be reciprocated by the hens. Another thing I’ve learned is that roosters can be quite sneaky when looking for love. Often times the roosters will call the hens over for something tasty to eat they’ve discovered in the pasture only to try to get a little something in return. Many times I’ve seen an unsuspecting hen pecking in the dirt with her fluffy bottom raised high in the air (apparently too much for a rooster to resist) get snuck up on from behind by a frisky rooster.

There is one measure I’ve read about which is supposed to protect hens from overmating and that is to put what is called a chicken saddle on them – which is not exactly what it sounds like. It’s a piece of cloth that covers a hen’s back where she is experiencing feather loss and which allows her feathers to grow back while being protected from further damage by the rooster. My sewing skills are rather limited, but for the sake of one of my favorite hens, Squeaky, I decided to undertake one of my first sewing projects in many years and make her a chicken saddle. The chicken saddle is secured to the chicken by elastic bands with snaps at the end which wrap around their wings at what equates to their shoulder and then snaps in place under their armpit. Luckily Squeaky is one of my friendliest hens, and she often runs over to me for some petting when I enter the chicken pasture so I figured she’d be a good candidate for the chicken saddle experiment. She let me put the saddle on her with minimal objection, but then proceeded to run around the pasture in large circles as if trying to run away from the saddle. It was quite comical, but I immediately realized that that was about as far as this experiment was going to go. I called her name, and to my surprise she came right over to me despite the fact that I was the one who had so recently subjected her to this uncomfortable garment. She let me pick her up and sat patiently on my lap while I removed the saddle. For now, the ladies will have to put up with a bit too much affection from the boys, and I may end up having to rehome another rooster to allow the ladies to return to their beautiful fully feathered selves.

The star of this year’s garden is of course the new greenhouse. The framing is nearly complete so let’s hope the weather cooperates enough to start hanging windows this weekend. Even without the greenhouse finished, there is still plenty for me to do to get the garden started. I’ll be planting my warm season vegetable seeds indoors in a sunny southern window. By the time the seedlings are ready to transplant into larger pots, the greenhouse should be ready (or close enough) to move them in.

The soil in the raised garden beds is workable so I was able to direct seed some cool season vegetables this week. I planted lettuce and spinach seeds in the cold frame and planted peas and installed trellises in another raised bed. I’m also trying something new this year – growing onions from seed. Usually I buy onion sets from the nursery, but I was on a roll with my seed saving last year so I let some onions go to seed and saved some “Candy” sweet onions. Onions need a long growing season, so I have already planted the onion seeds indoors and placed them under a grow lamp. I’m hoping this experiment goes well and allows me to grow some bigger onions than I did last year. The onions I planted from sets last year did alright, but they only grew to be small to medium sized onions by harvest time, whereas one of our neighbors a few miles down the road grew onions the size of softballs which I eyed jealously every time I drove by his garden on the way to the farm.

This summer I’ll be expanding the size of the garden by adding a squash bed in front of the house in an old flower bed. I pulled the blackberry that had invaded the bed, put down landscape fabric to smother the grass and weeds, and covered it with yard debris. In a few months, when it’s time to put out the squash seedlings it should be all ready to go. With the new squash bed, maybe this year I’ll have enough space in the garden to plant everything far enough apart so that it doesn’t grow into one tangled mass of stems and leaves that I have to tiptoe around in order to harvest vegetables…but then again, probably not. When it comes to gardening (or chickens for that matter), my philosophy is there’s always room for a few more!

The longer spring days bring good things to 5R Farm – including more eggs!

The new 5R Farm greenhouse is well underway!

We lost one of the good ones this week. Henry was the pint-sized ambassador of 5R Farm. He was one of our two banty roosters, the bachelors as they became known, who spent most of their lives living separately from the rest of the chicken flock. Henry and Lil’ Red Rooster could often be found up by the fenced pasture for the chicken flock, gazing longingly at the ladies. Any time Henry would see me come out the back door and walk onto the porch he would run over to see if there might just be some treats to be had by such a charismatic little rooster. I had a soft spot for little Henry, so the answer to this question was usually yes. Although he wouldn’t let me pick him up, he would eat out of my hand, so the treats were on his terms. In fact, most of Henry’s life was on his terms. When we first moved the bachelors into their own coop and run, I had hoped that they would stay within its confines to give them some protection from predators. It wasn’t 10 minutes before Henry escaped from his new run (read about it in the Oh Henry! post). Henry was so cute strutting along the back deck and in the flower beds that I didn’t have the heart to confine him in a fenced run, although he would probably still be with us if I had. In the mornings he would stand on the roof of his coop, crowing for all he was worth in response to the crowing of the full sized roosters. I imagined he was saying “I’m a rooster too!” with every cock-a-doodle-doo.

As time went on, Henry expanded his daily roaming grounds, and he would often bring a smile to my face when I would come across him in various locations around the farm. I knew one day he was bound to become dinner for one of many potential predators, but I always thought it would be a hawk who would get him and carry him up and away. We think it was a cat that did poor Henry in, based on recent sightings of a cat prowling the deck where Henry could often be seen making his rounds. I buried Henry in his favorite grotto underneath the weeping cherry tree. He brought a lot of joy into our lives, and I’m pretty sure he enjoyed his life at 5R Farm too. In the end, I guess that’s pretty good for a pint-sized rooster.

It’s been a long time coming, but I finally decided to rehome one of our roosters – Ringo, our silver gray dorking. Now that the roosters are eleven months old they’re all grown up, and although they’ve been raised as brothers since they were little chicks and have gotten along well until now, there’s been an increase in rooster showdowns lately that has me more than a bit concerned. Our alpha rooster, Reuben, is getting challenged by all the other roosters. Reuben is definitely a lover, not a fighter, and he’s been running away with his tail between his legs at the first sign of a challenge. Ramon and Ringo have been doing more than chasing however, and I’ve seen some fairly serious looking sparring between the two of them. It starts with a face off and flaring of the hackle feathers around the neck and lately it’s frequently followed by the roosters jumping in the air with talons outstretched toward each other. Although there have not been any serious injuries, Ringo has suffered a few minor injuries. A few weeks ago I noticed his comb and wattles were a bit bloody and his formerly pristine white hackle feathers were stained brown with dried blood. Ringo treats the ladies well, and is one of the more gentlemanly roosters in our flock, so I was sad to see him at the losing end of a fight. With spring and peak mating season right around the corner, I think it’s likely the sparring will increase so I decided last week the time had come to reduce the number of roosters in our flock.

Deciding which rooster to rehome was a tough decision. I’d like to raise our own chicks one day, and of the breeds we have now I’d like to breed the easter egger first, and likely also the black australorp. That means that Ringo is the one to go. I posted a notice on the chicken group I belong to (PDXBackyardChix) that I was looking for a new home for Ringo, and I found someone willing to take him. It sounds like a great new home for him where he would be the only rooster with a flock of seven ladies of his own. Then in one of life’s little ironies, two days before Ringo was to be picked up by his new owner, I was horrified to see that Ringo was bleeding from the tip of his broken beak! I have no idea what happened, and I can only guess that he was either injured in a fight with one of the other roosters or flew into something and broke his beak. Chickens do break off the tip of their beaks on occassion, and they do grow back, the concern is whether the break is far enough back that it affects their ability to eat. Unfortunately Ringo was having trouble eating his usual feed so I fed him soft food for a couple days, and he seems to be eating fairly well after a couple days of healing. His new owner said that she would still take him, and she came today to pick him up. I’m hoping that he will have a speedy recovery at his new home where there are no other roosters to compete with. Although I’ll be sad to see him go, I hope he’ll be happy at his new home with his very own group of ladies. I will certainly miss him as he is a handsome boy indeed, and he was very striking looking in the farmyard with his black and white feathers and very large red comb and wattles. As much as I enjoy having Ringo in our flock, I’d feel awful if he were to be injured more seriously while living with us, so I know it’s the right decision to say goodbye to Ringo.

I finally got a good picture of the deer that’s been visiting us lately.

We’ve had several weeks of freezing temperatures in the mornings at 5R Farm this winter. When I look out the window in the morning and see a frost covered landscape I think of two things – most importantly, I need to heat up the tea kettle and get out there and defrost the outdoor chicken waterers. (There is a heated waterer inside their coop which never freezes, but since they don’t spend much time in the coop during the day, they also have outdoor waterers.) Secondly, I grab my camera and take some pictures of the beautiful winter wonderland right outside the door! When it’s especially chilly out, I’ll make the girls a treat of warm oatmeal for breakfast. Not that they really need it – their feathers are essentially like a down coat and they are perfectly content in below freezing temperatures – but I figure everyone likes a warm breakfast on a cold winter morning so why not spoil the girls a bit. On the days that I don’t get to be at the farm, thankfully we have our friend and caretaker, Chip, to make sure the ladies are well attended to.

There have also been a few snowy days this winter, although it has been nowhere near as much snow as we got last year. When it does snow, the chickens have several places they can get out of the weather including their covered run as well as the shade shelter we built them last summer, which as it turns out also provides a nice respite from the snow. Some of the chickens (in particular the English breeds like the speckled sussex) don’t seem to mind the snow at all and they are out and about even when the flakes are falling, getting their feathers as wet as can be. Not to worry however, because the chicken coop is dry and draft-free and after they spend the night all snuggled up together on the roost they come out the next morning dry and ready for another day of winter. All in all, life is good for a chicken at 5R Farm.

It doesn’t get much cuter than my sweet peas!

The frosty mornings have been quite beautiful the last few days.

Lil’ Red Rooster and Henry in our New Year’s Eve snow.

The winter garden is still producing some beautiful swiss chard.

Happy holidays from the ladies of 5R Farm.

We had a very successful veggie gardening season in 2012, but there’s always room for improvement so I am making plans for a bigger and better garden in 2013. Winter is the perfect time to start planning for the upcoming gardening season, and the to do list is well underway. The project I’m most excited about is building a greenhouse. We have been collecting materials for about a year to repurpose into a greenhouse, and we’ve got quite a stockpile of old house windows, a set of french doors, corrugated plastic for roofing or walls, old cedar decking, and the parts from an old disassembled greenhouse. I’m currently sketching out the dimensions of the greenhouse and the floor plan to accommodate everything I think I’ll want to have room for in the greenhouse, although never having had a greenhouse before makes it a bit hard to know for certain what I’ll need. Right now I’m leaning toward a 10 x 14 foot greenhouse with planting beds and shelves along the south and east sides, a sink and potting bench on the west side, french doors on the north side, and a potting bench island in the middle. Now that I’ll have more space for seed starting, I am planning to do a better job of starting seeds next spring and I’m also planning to do more succession planting of salad greens, spinach, bok choy and kale. I also want to experiment with growing a few tomatoes in the greenhouse and see how late into the fall they will continue to ripen.

There’s an old garden bed in front of the house and below the driveway, close to where the greenhouse will go that looks like it used to be a nice little flower garden until it got invaded by blackberry after a few years of neglect. It gets full sun and would be the perfect spot for growing sprawling plants like squash and cucumbers. I’ve read that squash are fairly deer resistant since deer don’t like to eat their fuzzy leaves, so there’s no sense in growing those plants in our vegetable garden that is protected by the electric deer fence – I may as well save that garden space for growing plants that need to be protected from deer. I spent a bit of time last year pulling blackberry and planting a few flowering shrubs around the perimeter of the old garden bed, so this spring I will finish weeding it and try growing my squash there and maybe even a few pumpkins and gourds while I’m at it.

There are a few other items on the garden to do list, including putting up a bird scare to keep the birds from eating all the raspberries and blueberries like they did last year and building a wooden potato box to keep the soil mounded up around the potato plants. With 2013 right around the corner, I can already tell it’s going to be a busy year in the garden!

Homemade suet treat, it’s nothing but the best for our ladies!

I introduced you to Rooster Cogburn (aka Reuben) and Ramon, the two highest ranking roosters in our flock, in the previous Boys of 5R Farm post. Now it’s time for you to meet our other four roosters. The position for omega rooster (the lowest rooster in the flock) appears to be undergoing a transition period. For a few months it was Grayson, who is the youngest of the roosters and was slow to mature. I initially thought he was a hen, and when we moved the chicks out to the farm I kept him in our backyard in Portland where he was living happily as Grace. Then one day I noticed he was developing some very rooster-like bright orange feathers, something a proper hen would never do! So Grace was renamed Grayson, and he rejoined his flock mates at the farm after living apart from them for about a month and a half.

At the time Grayson moved to the farm, Ringo, our silver gray dorking rooster, was third in line for the throne. Ringo is a bit shy and tends to stay out of the way of the other roosters. He is generally more of a gentleman than Reuben and Ramon, and Ringo can often be heard calling the girls over when he finds something good to eat by making a rapid series of short little clucks. He has been slow to establish his own group of favorite ladies, but he appears to have taken a liking to the white Delaware hens that we call the Jumpy girls, and I think he will soon have his own little harem.

For the last month Grayson has been challenging the other roosters and chasing Ringo around quite a bit. Thankfully there has not been any bloodshed, and I’m sure they will sort it out amongst themselves soon. Grayson may move up a rung or two on the ladder, but if he gets too cocky I’m sure Reuben will put him in his place.

Our last two roosters are Henry and Lil’ Red Rooster, our red cochin frizzle banty roosters. Several months ago when they started acting amorous toward the ladies and making a general nuisance of themselves, I separated them from the rest of the flock (you can read about it in an earlier post, Oh Henry!). They currently have their own bachelor quarters, complete with their own mini-coop, although they prefer to spend most of their time free-ranging. They often wander up to visit the rest of the chickens and gaze longingly through the chicken wire at the hens on the other side of the fence. They have been wandering farther and farther from the chicken coop and are gradually making their way down the driveway. One of our neighbors has four free range hens that we occasionally see on our shared private road, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Henry and Lil’ Red eventually make their acquaintance. Who knows, next spring we may be seeing a few new chicks on the block with a resemblance to Henry or Lil’ Red!

It’s molting season, and poor Rosie mourns the loss of all but one of her tail feathers!

After the flurry of vegetable and fruit harvesting, canning, and fall garden clean-up, it’s been nice to slow down and just enjoy the farm these last few weeks. I’ve finally managed to find the time to sit and read or just gaze out the window at the beautiful surroundings while enjoying a roaring fire in the woodstove. After finishing up the morning chores of cleaning the chicken coop and replenishing the feeders and waterers and getting in some snuggle time with the Sweet Peas and Squeaky, these rainy fall days are also good for reflecting on all we’ve accomplished over the past year. We started work on the vegetable garden back in January with chainsawin’ and stumpgrindin’, followed by berry planting, building raised beds, and cool season vegetable planting. Mid-march was a highpoint of the year with the arrival of the 25 chicks for the farm. You can see the varieties of chickens we got for the farm in the chick order is in. From March to April, chicken coop building was the big priority. The veggie garden was fully planted by May, and the slug wars began in June, followed by the deer ravaging the strawberry patch in July, so it was time to put the electric fence around the garden into action. In July, our two overly frisky banty roosters, Henry and Lil’ Red Rooster were moved to their separate bachelor quarters. Sadly, we lost one chicken this year, one of the 5R Farm namesakes, Ruby, but we were fortunate in being able to successfully nurse one of my favorite new girls, Sweet Pea, back to health from a potentially fatal condition. By September we had a very full hen house with all 25 hens laying eggs. Not long after that the summer vegetables were going gangbusters, and I began putting food by in every spare moment. As you can see we accomplished a lot in 2012, and the to do list has gotten quite short. Luckily, there will be lots of rainy days for me to daydream and plan for what’s to come in 2013.

I had to give up my first rooster two and a half years ago when our backyard chicken Ramona turned into Ramon, and ever since then I looked forward to the day that I could have roosters in the flock. As the saying goes – be careful what you wish for! We ended up with 6 roosters at 5R Farm, which is several more than we need, but they are such handsome fellows that I can’t bare to get rid of (let alone eat) any of them. It’s been fun to watch the roosters grow up and see how they interact with each other and the ladies, and I have become attached to each and every one of them.

Our alpha rooster and leader of the flock is Rooster Cogburn, also known as Reuben. He is a black australorp and is the largest of our roosters. He has a striking appearance with his full suit of dark black feathers, large black eyes, and large red comb and wattles. Despite his bold appearance, he is a well-behaved rooster and assumed his position as alpha male without so much as a scuffle with the other roosters. Perhaps it’s because when we brought the chicks home, the australorps were a few weeks older than the other chicks – as chicks we called the australorps the dinosaurs because they towered over their flock mates. Reuben was also quite adventurous as a youth, and he was the first to figure out how to escape from the chicken brooder and soon began wandering the kitchen floor begging for treats. Whatever the reason he ended up as the alpha rooster, I’m very glad to have him as the main protector of the flock. He is always on the lookout for predators and gives frequent alarm calls, which are low growls, whenever anything from a mourning dove to an airplane flies overhead. I know that should the time come when a predator infiltrates the chicken yard, Reuben will be right there on the front lines, as a good rooster should be, ready to do battle and defend his ladies to the death.

Next in the rooster hierarchy is Ramon. He is an easter egger rooster and is quite beautiful with his black body and contrasting mix of white, gold, orange, and red accent feathers and beetle-green tail feathers. Although there’s been an occasional quick face-off between Reuben and Ramon, I think Ramon realized early on that Reuben was boss. Ramon is a couple pounds lighter than Reuben, and Ramon has never made a serious challenge to Reuben’s authority. After realizing his place in the pecking order, Ramon quickly attached himself to the first girls of 5R Farm – Rhoda, Raquel, Rosie, Ruby, and Ramona – the big girls that moved to the farm after being city chickens for two years. Ramon can usually be seen following the big girls around the pasture by day, keeping watch over them, and trying to get romantic more often than the big girls would probably like. Despite not receiving a warm welcome from the big girls, Ramon persisted, and it seems as though his advances have become less objectionable as time has gone on. In the beginning, Rosie would chase Ramon away whenever he made an advance toward her, and after she landed a few good pecks on him you should’ve seen him run from her! Ramon’s presence seems to be generally accepted by the big girls now, and at night in the coop Ramon and his small harem sleep in the opposite corner from Reuben and the other roosters.

There are still four more roosters to introduce, so I’ll tell you all about Ringo, Grayson, Henry, and Lil’ Red Rooster next time, so stay tuned!

Raquel and Rhoda – two of the 5R Farm namesakes and the bossy ladies of the flock.

I have a confession to make. I love the idea of growing squash and storing it over the winter. There are so many beautiful colors, shapes, and sizes to choose from, and the long storage life makes it the perfect crop for someone like me who is trying to be more self-sufficient. But when it comes down to preparing it, my enthusiasm dwindles, and more than one squash has turned moldy in the basement waiting for me to get inspired to cook it. Perhaps it’s the fact that the skin of winter squash is so tough that I’m afraid I’m going to cut my finger off trying to cut the darn thing in half! Or perhaps it’s that I always forget to cook the squash the day before I was planning to come home from work and whip up that delicious sounding squash recipe that takes two hours to prepare if you haven’t remembered to pre-cook the squash. Whatever the reason for my lack of follow-through, I have renewed my determination to do a better job of eating locally grown vegetables that are in season, and that means eating more squash.

This year I grew hubbard squash, butternut squash, buttercup squash, and spaghetti squash, and I also stocked up on acorn squash from the farmers market. My one tried and true squash recipe is butternut squash stuffed with sausage and apples, which is quite good, but I only feel like eating it a couple times during squash season. Over the years I’ve tried several recipes for squash gratin recipes and squash stuffed with various tasty sounding fillings, but none of them have earned repeat recipe status. In order to be successful in this undertaking, I am going to need some new squash recipes to inspire me. I’ve done some recipe research on the internet, and I have found several promising prospects:

• Creamy crock-pot pumpkin risotto
• Butternut mac ‘n cheese
• Butternut squash and leek gratin
• Roasted acorn squash with chili vinaigrette

If anyone has a favorite winter squash recipe that they would like to share, I’ve love to hear about it, so please send me a message on the contact page and let me know!

The black australorps – Squeaky 1, Squeaky 2, and Twitchy.

One thing I’ve always wanted to do, but never quite gotten around to, is put in a fall vegetable garden. The problem I’ve always run into is that the summer garden is still going gangbusters near the end of summer, and I’ve just never had any space in the garden that wasn’t already occupied at the time of year when you’re supposed to put in the fall veggies. I also have to admit that I have the tendency to want to do less work in the garden in the summer and enjoy the fruits of my labor and limit my gardening activities to harvesting tomatoes and all of the other bountiful summer crops. And after all, what’s wrong with letting the lettuce bolt into glorious three foot tall plants, even if it is taking up space that could be put to better use? Well this year I have a nice big garden and lots of raised beds, and I really had no excuse not to take advantage of finally having the extra space in the garden I needed to put in a fall garden.

A couple of months ago I started broccoli and bok choy from seed. I planted them in the garden over a month ago, and they appear to be doing well as we head into the cold weather. I also seeded several varieties of lettuce and spinach into another raised bed, and Sean built a cold frame to protect them from the dropping temperatures. The swiss chard was slow to get going this year, but it’s in full swing now, so Sean built a second cold frame for that bed. The leeks did great this year, so I mulched them really and well hopefully they can survive a couple more months in the ground. This year was the first year I grew kale, and both the chickens and I have become big fans of it, so I planted some more starts a few weeks ago.

Of course there’s also plenty of fall garden chores that need doing like pulling up the tomato and squash plants. Did I mention that I grew 14 tomato plants this year? Well let me tell you, that’s a lot of tomato plants to pull and chop up. The chore was slightly more rewarding than usual this year, since I got to put them in my shabby chic compost bins that Sean made me out of pallets where they will be mixed with the chicken coop shavings and poop and left to decompose over the winter and turn into lovely compost for next year’s garden. The weather even cooperated last weekend and the sun came out to give me a little more time to finish cleaning up the garden and get it ready for winter. Now I can do a little hibernating this fall and winter and still have garden fresh veggies. Yeah, life is pretty good here at 5R Farm.

It’s day 20 of Millie’s broody spell, so I blocked off the nest box – but as you can see, Millie is a stubborn girl!

This was my first year growing potatoes, and I’m hooked!

Well it’s official, we have our first broody hen. For those uninitiated in the ways of all things chicken, a broody hen is one that has an overwhelming motherly desire to sit on and incubate her eggs, with the obvious goal of hatching them and mothering a brood of baby chicks. Our little Millie, the partridge silky bantam, and one of our two fancy backyard chickens, has been sitting in the nest box almost continuously for the last week and a half. It all started when we went to the coast for a couple of days last week. When we returned, there were 5 eggs in the nest box that had been laid by Coco Puff and Millie, and there was Millie all fluffed up and sitting on all of them. A broody hen will sit in the nest box all day, every day, only leaving the nest for 5 or 10 minutes to eat, drink, and poop, and then go right back to the nest. When disturbed in the nest, a broody hen will make a terrible screech and puff her feathers out to make herself look big and let any intruders know they should BACK OFF!  It’s quite cute really, and I have to say that Millie is not too intimidating even when she puffs her little self up to maximum size. I have been taking her out of the nest box one or twice a day to encourage her to eat since she’s so small as it is. A broody hen can lose weight if they keep at it too long, especially if she is sitting on unfertilized eggs with no hope of hatching out any chicks! We only have one nest box in their coop, so Coco Puff will go into the nest box with Millie already in it to lay her egg. Coco Puff will leave the nest box after she’s laid her egg, and then Millie will promptly roll Coco Puff’s egg under her to set on it. Although it would be fun we’ve decided not to let Millie hatch out any chicks right now. Her breed is said to make excellent foster mothers, so we could easily slip a few fertile eggs from the farm under her to hatch. We do want to hatch out some chicks from our flock soon, but the timing is not quite right since it’s really better to hatch out chicks in the spring, not as we’re headed into colder weather. It’s good to know that we have a willing momma hen though, and we may just take her up on it the next time!

It was worth the wait for the pepper harvest!

I’ve been getting into canning more and more over the last few years, and this year we put away more food for the winter than ever before. Two of my old standbys that I’ve been making for several years are lemon cucumber garlic dill pickles and roasted tomatoes, so of course I made several batches of those. I made applesauce from the trees at the farm again this year, and since the apples are red skinned the applesauce turns out a very pretty shade of pink. I went a little overboard while shopping for tomato starts last spring, so I ended up with 14 tomato plants in the garden this year. We’ve had tons of tomatoes in all sizes and colors, and I’ve put up 18 quarts of tomato sauce. There’s lots of fruit from the farm in the freezer ready to be made into pies or tarts this winter: raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, and golden plums. Sean pitched in and did his share of canning too. He brought home about 40 pounds of tuna from a fishing trip this summer and spent a day and a half canning several dozen pints and half pints of tuna. Fresh canned tuna is so much better than canned tuna from the store, and it is excellent in salads since it’s in nice big pieces.

We’ve also got a small stockpile of potatoes, onions, and garlic in storage in the basement. This was my first year growing potatoes, and I didn’t spend much effort on them and it shows. We had a very small harvest despite what I’ve heard about 2 pounds of seed potatoes yielding 50 pounds of potatoes. Next year I am going to have Sean build me a wooden potato box to grow them in, and I’ll fill it with composted chicken manure which I’m sure will yield much better results. The onions were on the small side this year since I planted them pretty late, so I will have to get them in earlier next year. Nonetheless, we still have several dozen onions in storage, as well as a few dozen leeks which are still in the ground. The garlic patch yielded about 4 dozen cloves of garlic which is just about right. They grew very well in the repurposed hot tub herb garden, so I will plant them there again this fall.

We’re fortunate to have family and friends that also can, and they do an excellent job with jams, chutneys, and relishes so I haven’t had to learn how to make those myself yet. I would like to experiment with pickling more vegetables – beans, asparagus, peppers, and cabbage to name a few. Since we’ll be growing all of those veggies in the garden next year, learning how to pickle them is definitely on the top of the list so we can add them to the pantry next year. I did not get around to making and freezing pesto this year, and I’m regretting it already. I froze about a dozen half pints of pesto last year, and it was so nice to have it to add to meals throughout the winter. I’m not sure what I’ll use to spice things up this winter, I just may have to try my luck with pickling winter vegetables. Darn, just when I thought my to do list was getting shorter….

Getting in a little snuggle time with Sweet Pea now that she has recuperated and is back at the farm.

The chicken flock is 6 months old, and that means one thing: eggs! Most of the young ladies have started laying, and we are getting over a dozen eggs a day. This is a good thing because our oldest 4 hens (Rhoda, Raquel, Rosie, and Ramona) are slowing down in the egg laying department while they go through their annual molt, and after that they’ll likely take the winter off from laying eggs now that they are over two years old. We picked the breeds of chickens in our new flock with eggshell color in mind, and we have quite a lovely mix of eggs in our egg basket. The Australorps, Delawares, and Speckled Sussex lay brown eggs in varying shades of light to dark brown. The Welsummers lay a very dark brown, sometimes speckled egg, and the silver gray Dorkings lay white eggs. The eggs I’m most excited about are the eggs from our Easter Eggers. Two lay a lighter green egg, like Rosie, and the third lays a darker olive green egg. The fourth Easter Egger has not started laying yet, but hopefully soon we’ll have one more shade of green to add to the mix.

Our chicken coop has 6 nest boxes that can be accessed from outside the coop to collect eggs. The first coop we built did not have this design feature, and I’m really glad we decided to add it to this coop since it allows us to collect eggs without having to put on our poop-shoes and go into the chicken run and coop to collect eggs. We have 25 hens, and the suggested nest box to hen ratio is 1 nest box for every 4 hens. We have found however that inevitably more than 6 hens want to get into the nest boxes to lay their eggs at the same time. What ensues next is quite entertaining. Some of the hens will begin loudly complaining as they wait their turn for a nest box, and the more dominant hens will try to squeeze into an already occupied nest box much to the dismay of the current occupant. When the ladies start complaining, the roosters for some reason chime in and start squawking too. I’m wondering if the roosters are trying to help out, and it’s their way of saying “hey, my lady needs a nest box, you nest-hogs get outta there.” Needless to say, the mornings can get quite noisy here at the farm!

Ramona and Raquel getting in one last sunbath before the end of summer

The new girls have started laying!

We’ve got another chicken recuperating in the kitchen – this time it’s little Sweet Pea, one of my favorites of the new girls. Actually there are two hens called Sweet Pea since they are identical and both of them are very friendly and follow me around like a puppy. I quickly grew attached to these two girls, and at first I started calling them my Sweetie Pies. That led to some confusion, however, when Sean and I were in the chicken coop at the same time and he thought I was talking to him instead of the girls! So I started calling them my Sweet Peas, and that seems to have cleared up the misunderstanding. The Sweet Peas are two of the lowest girls in the pecking order, and their breed is known for being slow to mature. They are hesitant to go to the feeders when the bigger girls or the roosters are feeding, and they are pretty small for their age. Given this, I was very surprised that one of the Sweet Peas started laying eggs last week. Almost immediately she developed a prolapsed vent (the vent is where the egg comes out), and this was very likely the result of starting to lay eggs too early. Rather than go into graphic detail, I’ll just say that she needed to be isolated from the flock to keep the other girls from pecking at her backside so we brought her back to Portland to recuperate.

The treatment for this condition involves mainly keeping her in very low light and switching her to a low protein diet to prevent her from laying eggs until her body has time to heal. It’s been 5 days since she prolapsed, and her condition has improved. She’ll still need a couple more weeks to heal, and then we’ll slowly increase the amount of daylight she receives. She’s not out of the woods yet, and the real test will be when she starts laying eggs again and whether she prolapses again. I have my fingers crossed that she will recover, since I really don’t want to have to put down another chicken so soon after losing our sweet Ruby in July. Although I wish it were under better circumstances, I do enjoy having a chicken in the kitchen. She’s living in the brooder box we raised the chicks in, and we let her out for some exercise and socializing at meal times. Despite the fact that she’s recuperating she is quite spunky, and if I don’t keep an eye on her every second she’ll jump up onto the counter and try to snatch a bite of the cheddar cheese that’s usually sitting there! My little Sweet Pea is truly a girl after my own heart.

Rooster Cogburn sure is a handsome boy!

Every gardener knows the joy of harvesting the fruits of your labor, and today was a great harvest day at 5R Farm. It’s a good thing too, because the raspberries that started out so promising this spring withered mysteriously before any berries ripened, and the blueberries that were once heavily laden with fruit were picked clean by the birds. It was quite a relief that the fruit trees did well this year and were ready for harvest. There is a row of young fruit trees on the farm that was already here when we bought it. Today I picked golden plums, apples, and pears. Last year’s harvest consisted of mostly apples and a few pears, so we were pleasantly surprised this year to discover that the one tree that did not bear fruit last year had a bumper crop of golden plums. It was time to get out the handy fruit tree picker that Sean made me last year (out of an old broom handle and a two liter bottte!) and get to work. The golden plums are absolutely delicious, and I’ve already made two plum tarts this week to rave reviews. The rest of the plums have been stowed in the freezer for tart making this winter. The apple trees did well, and I’ll likely be making applesauce again this year since it turned out great last year.  The pear tree gave us 8 small pears this year which is a few more than last year. We planted a second pear tree last fall, so hopefully in a few years we will have more pears, although I have read that pear trees are notoriously slow to bear fruit so it may be a long wait. I also picked several pints of blackberries, and today was one of the only days of the year that I don’t mind having blackberries running rampant on the farm!

We’ve been working hard at the farm nearly every weekend since early spring, and this weekend it was finally time for some R&R so we took the canoe out on Scappoose Bay. We haven’t taken the canoe out in almost two years, and with the bay less than 15 minutes from the farm we were well past due  for a paddle. Scappoose Bay is the perfect place to go canoeing for many reasons – it’s an easy paddle with calm waters and no motorized boats, there are lots of forested meandering side channels and wetlands to explore, a variety of wildlife, and a beautiful view of Mt. St. Helens. On this trip we saw a half dozen osprey soaring overhead and diving for fish in the bay, great blue heron, egret, and geese, and we could hear the call of the belted kingfisher in the distance. It was such a beautiful day on the water, and it felt great to take some time off instead of working the whole weekend. I’ll have to keep that in mind now that we’ve just added a couple of dozen items to the farm to do list!

Mmm, kale treat time!

The hot tub herb garden is a success! Here’s the garlic I just harvested.

You may recall that in addition to the 25 chicks we bought for the farm, we also bought five fancy breed chickens. These fancy chickens were intended to be our new backyard flock since we decided to move our five oldest girls (Rhoda, Raquel, Rosie, Ruby, and Ramona) to the farm. Well things didn’t turn out quite as planned – which I’ve come to realize is not at all unusual when dealing with chickens. Of the five fancy chicks we bought, we ended up with only two for the backyard flock, and they are quite an odd couple indeed! The two red cochin frizzle banty chicks both turned out to be roosters, and Lil’ Red Rooster and Henry are quite happy at the farm. Sadly, little Hattie, the gold-laced polish chick died a couple days after we bought her. We had been told when we got her that she and her fellow shipmates had a rough time during shipping and that she may not survive, but it was still sad to see her go after only a couple of days. So now we are left with a mottled houdan named Coco Puff, and a partridge silkie banty named Millie (who was sold to us as a Mille Fleur D’Uccle – hence her name).

Regardless of the different outcome than we had planned, we are quite pleased with our two fancy girls. Coco Puff is quite entertaining with her huge topknot of head feathers. It pretty much blocks her entire field of vision, which has lead to us calling her our special needs chicken. It must have taken me a month to train her how to walk up the ladder into the coop at night! At treat time, she pecks around clumsily and barely manages to make contact with anything she aims at with her beak. Millie has learned to wait for Coco Puff to go into the coop first at night and to stay out of the way of Coco Puff’s rather unpredictable treat pecking, and the two of them seem to be getting along quite well. The jury is still out on whether either of them will figure out that they are supposed to go into the coop to lay their eggs in the nest box. The wooden training egg we have in the nest box is quite a bit bigger than the eggs these girls will lay, so they may have no idea that the training egg in the nest box is an indicator of where they should lay their eggs. But that’s okay, we didn’t get these girls for their egg laying abilities, we got them for backyard companions and they are quite good at that!

Ramon has taken quite a liking to the big girls. Except for Rosie, they don’t seem to mind him too much.

Today was a very sad day at 5R Farm. After a month of trying to nurse Ruby back to health, it was finally time to say goodbye and have her put down. She stopped laying eggs a few months ago and started gradually losing weight. I thought it was because she had gone broody which is common for certain breeds (of which Ruby is one). When a hen goes broody they spend a lot of time sitting on the nest trying to hatch eggs. They will sit on that nest regardless of whether you leave any eggs under them and regardless of the presence of a rooster to fertilize the eggs in the first place! Broody hens can be so committed to sitting on the nest that they barely leave the nest to eat, and they can lose a lot of weight. This is what I thought was going on with Ruby and since it’s a natural part of being a hen I just let her carry on with it.

About a month ago, I decided to take her to the vet just to be sure there was no other cause for her weight loss. The vet diagnosed her with coccidiosis, which is an intestinal parasite that is spread by wild birds and is also fairly common in chickens. The vet said to give her medicated water for 3-4 weeks and to isolate her so that she wouldn’t have to compete with the rest of the flock for food in the hopes that she would put on some weight. After 3 weeks of treatment, Ruby was not looking any better. I decided to bring her back to Portland and move her into the kitchen so that I could keep a closer eye on her and try to get her to eat more by tempting her with her favorite treats. I tried everything I could think of to get her to eat, but she would hardly eat anything. Today was the last day of the coccidiosis treatment, and I brought her into the vet for a check-up. The test for coccidiosis came back negative, but there was clearly something still wrong. The vet spoke with another avian specialist who said that in a 2-year old chicken the most likely causes of her condition were cancer, a tumor, or a reproductive disorder. Since the prognosis is not good for any of these conditions, and since I didn’t want Ruby to suffer any longer than she had already, I decided to put her down. I was not prepared to have to make this decision today, and it hit me pretty hard. I know some people may not understand how one could become attached to a chicken, but those girls really do have a way of sneaking into your heart with their cute and quirky chicken ways.

I decided to have a necropsy done so that I could learn from Ruby’s illness and apply this experience to take better care of the rest of our girls. The diagnosis was egg yolk peritonitis, which is the presence of yolk material in the abdominal cavity instead of where it is supposed to be in the reproductive system. The condition is almost always fatal, and in Ruby’s case it was so far along that there was nothing we could have done once we learned this was the problem. I’ve read about this disease, and I was certain that I would be able to identify it should it happen to one of our girls. Ruby did not have the most common symptoms which are an upright penguin-like walk and a swollen abdomen, so this was not something I expected in the least. Ruby could be quite a stubborn girl, perhaps somewhat of a chicken diva at times, and of course I let her get away with it because she was such a pretty girl. But she was a good girl too, and she was our only girl that gave us the gift of fresh eggs all through last winter. She fought the good fight, and I’m sure she hung in there a lot longer than she probably should have. I will miss my pretty princess very much, RIP Ruby.

This is Millie, one of our fancy chickens all grown up! She’s a banty partridge silkie.

Well it finally happened, the deer have discovered our vegetable garden. You can’t really blame them – the garden is looking lush and tasty and Sean did recently clear a big patch of blackberry the deer liked to munch on that was close to the garden fence. Luckily, only a single deer raided the garden. The strawberries and raspberries were the only victims, and they are already growing back replacement leaves. With all the deer we’ve seen on the property, we knew that it was fairly likely that the deer would eventually get into the vegetable garden. We had already built an electric fence around the garden, but we hadn’t turned on the electricity since we wanted to wait and see if we did in fact need to electrify the fence. Now we have our answer, and we turned on the electricity a couple of weeks ago. So far it seems to be working, and we haven’t seen any deer in the vegetable garden recently. As for the flower beds around the back deck, that’s another story. Every week the deer take a few more bites out of the flowers I’ve planted, although I don’t really mind all that much since it’s fun to see deer so close to the house. The chickens don’t much care for the deer and will announce their presence with quite a ruckus of alarm calls. It’s all quite enjoyable and one of the things I love about having a place in the country.

The girls (and boys) love Watermelon treat time!

Henny Penny, one of the cute red cochin banty chickens we intended to keep in our backyard in Portland, started crowing at 5:30 in the morning a couple of weeks ago. That can only mean one thing, so he’s been renamed Henry and moved out to the farm. About the same time, Gracie, another chicken we intended to keep in our backyard started sporting some telltale rooster feathers so he was renamed Grayson and moved to the farm along with Henry. The rooster count is now up to six, and a ratio of six roosters to 26 hens is a little too much rooster. The roosters have recently begun chasing the ladies around, grabbing a hold of whatever they can get with their beak and trying to mate, some more successfully than others. The banty roosters are not big enough to dominate the hens so when they do manage to grab a hen there is a huge commotion. The hen squawks frantically and manages to escape after a brief skirmish while the rooster is left holding a beakful of her feathers! The banty roosters are by far the worst offenders and seem obsessed with mating. Although this is the chicken way and there’s not necessarily anything wrong with it, I would prefer our ladies not be run ragged so we decided to separate the two banty roosters from the rest of the flock and move them into their very own bachelor pad.

We have a small chicken coop that we built for the original five 5R Farm ladies, Rhoda, Raquel, Rosie, Ruby and Ramona. We decided to put the small coop near the back deck and build a chicken wire enclosure for Henry and Lil’ Red Rooster so we could enjoy seeing the boys while we’re hanging out on the deck. Today was the first day in their new bachelor quarters, and Henry was already jumping up on the roof of the coop and flying over to the back deck. He proceeded to take a tour of the deck, the hot tub herb garden, and a portion of the backyard before I managed to catch him and get him back in the run. Of course he instantly jumped back up on the coop roof and tried to escape again. I’m not quite sure what to do for Plan B. We’ve talked about experimenting with having free range poultry of some sort that wouldn’t have a fenced pasture to provide protection against predators like the rest of our flock, but we were thinking more along the lines of ducks or turkeys which wouldn’t be as easy of a meal for a hawk as a 6 inch tall rooster! I’m sure the situation will resolve itself in a couple of weeks. Either Henry and Lil’ Red Rooster will figure out what’s best and will stay within the confines of the bachelor pad and the back deck or we may have two less roosters at 5R Farm!

Our alpha rooster and alpha hen, Reuben and Twitchy.

As a long-time gardener and Oregon resident, the battle to prevent slugs from devouring the garden has become an annual ritual. The first time I saw one of the enormous slugs that live at 5R Farm I knew I was in for a challenge. After spending a few rainy days working outside, I had seen how many slugs there were crawling all over the flowers, the grass, the deck, the stairs, and even on the back door. Vast hoards of enormous slugs would be on the prowl in my veggie garden, and I was going to have to take my slug control efforts to another level. I knew there was no point in trying to get rid of the slugs altogether, so I decided to focus my efforts on the veggie garden and let the slugs have the run of the remainder of the the 4.5 acres. I did some research into chemical-free methods of slug control. We all know about the tried and true beer trap, but I was looking for something that didn’t require frequent baiting and removal. A few weeks ago we implemented three slug control strategies. First, we installed copper wire around the tops of all of the raised beds. Supposedly slugs will not crawl over copper because it gives them a mild electric shock when they come in contact with it. Second, I put crushed eggshells around the veggies planted directly in the ground, and slugs are supposed to avoid crawling over the sharp edges of the shells. Lastly, I spread wood ash around some plants, which is supposed to work similarly to eggshells because slugs avoiding crossing the abrasive surface of the ash. Prior to this weekend I had noticed holes in the leaves of some of the plants in the garden, but it wasn’t too serious. Things took a turn for the worse during the rainy weekend, and the slugs were out in full force having their way with my bok choy. Much to my chagrin, I saw a slug crawling right over the copper wire, holding his body off of the wire as he went! The eggshells seem to be doing a pretty good job, although they have a tendency to move around a bit due to watering. The wood ash does not seem to be effective for very long since rain or watering causes it to mix in with the soil. Upon doing a bit of further research into the copper method, it appears we need to use a wider strip of copper for it to be truly effective. Based on the slug census this weekend it looks like we need to redouble our efforts by installing thicker copper and more eggshells. Next year, we may just have to get some of those Indian runner ducks I’ve been pining away for – in addition to being absolutely adorable they are apparently excellent at slug control!

I just love the view from our kitchen window.

It’s been five weeks since we moved the chicks out to the farm, and I’m happy to report that all is well. The girls have settled in to their new home, so last weekend we decided it was time to move our five fully grown chickens (Rhoda, Raquel, Rosie, Ruby, and Ramona), who had been living in our backyard in Portland, out to the farm. That brings our 5R flock up to 30 chickens. The big girls are thrilled to have a large pasture to roam since they devoured everything green within beaks reach in our Portland backyard quite some time ago. The big girls are less than thrilled however, with their 25 new roommates. The little girls are almost the same size as the big girls, but the big girls definitely rule the roost. Not even the roosters will approach the big girls, yet, but I’m sure that will change soon. I’m sure you’ve all heard of the pecking order. It’s quite interesting to watch the girls and boys establish their position in the flock hierarchy. Our alpha and beta hens, Raquel and Rhoda, are the top girls and everyone seems to know it. They walk calmly around the pasture, and the little girls move out of their way without so much as a glance from the big girls. It’s a different story with our omega hen, Rosie. I’ve read a lot about how to integrate chicken flocks, and one of the things I’ve read is that when introducing new chickens into an established flock, it is often the most submissive, most picked on omega hen who will do the most pecking of the new hens because it’s her chance to move up in the pecking order and she’s not gonna let that opportunity go by without a fight! That sure has been the case with our sweet little Rosie, who is not being what I’d call sweet to the younger hens. She will give chase and peck anyone who doesn’t give her a wide berth, and she even sparred with Ramon yesterday. Although that’s not really saying much because yesterday I saw Lil’ Red Rooster, who is less than half the size of Ramon, chasing Ramon around while Ramon ran away with his tail between his legs and went to hide in the coop! Overall, the integration of the big girls and the little girls has gone very well, and there has been relatively little pecking. Mostly the big girls and the little girls avoid each other, although hopefully soon they’ll be one big happy flock. It will be interesting to see what happens when the roosters mature and establish their harems and how our bossy ladies Raquel and Rhoda adjust to having roosters around. As we are fond of saying of our often cranky and loudly complaining Rhoda – I’m sure she will object strenuously!

The big girls laid 4 eggs today – a sign they have adjusted to life at 5R Farm!

There have been some tense days at 5R Farm recently as we waited to see how the nearby logging was going to affect our views of the forest behind our property. A couple of large clearcuts went in a mile down the road a few weeks ago, and then we learned that the same property owner was going to log an acre of forest behind our neighbor to the west. They would also be putting in a logging road within 10  to 20 feet of our rear property line. Needless to say, this had us a bit on edge. I spoke with the logging supervisor before the logging began, and he assured me that they would flag not only our property line, but also the limits of the road clearing area and trees to be protected during the logging. I was ready with my camera as the bulldozer started clearing the logging road (remind me to tell you the story of how I earned the nickname Ranger Stacy, or maybe it’s self explanatory by now!) The bulldozer operator stayed on his side of the property line and put in the road where they said they would, leaving a small buffer of young alder trees and other vegetation to screen our view of the road. I’m glad that I wasn’t there when they cut down the trees because I think it would have been unsettling to say the least. All in all, the impact to us is not very significant. It opens up the tree canopy behind our neighbor to the west and changes our view a bit, but we’ve still got lots of mature trees surrounding our property. The biggest effect to us is that what used to be a scenic trail starting at the back of our property and winding through the 80 plus acres of forest behind us is now a 15 foot wide logging road with deep tire ruts. I’m hoping that they reclaim the road by regrading it and throwing some native seed on it. If not, we will have one more project to add to our to do list, and by that I mean just the seeding, not the regrading!

The big chicken run is almost ready, and the girls enjoyed some fresh pasture today!

We have some pretty cute neighbors.

After a long day of yard work at 5R Farm there is nothing quite so satisfying as piling up all the blackberry brambles, branches, and whatever else I’ve been battling that day into a big ‘ol burn pile and lighting it on fire! I’ve been gardening for years, the vast majority of them in the city where by necessity I’ve spent many hours clipping yard debris into small pieces and trying to cram them all into the yard debris bin. At 5R Farm that tedious chore is a distant memory. I just drag everything to the burn pile and my work is done. (Well not really done, work is never done at the farm!) After dinner we sit around the burn pile and enjoy a roaring fire. It’s like camping but better because the fire is bigger, the neighbors are farther away, and when the fire dies down and it gets cold out I have a nice warm bed to retreat to. If it’s a clear night, the stars are bright and beautiful, and we are often serenaded by a chorus of tree frogs or the coyotes howling. It doesn’t get much better than that!

Now what could be cuter than our very own Lil’ Red Rooster?

This is Ringo, our FOURTH rooster, let’s hope he’s the last chick to turn into a rooster!

With most of the chicks now between 8 and 10 weeks old, last Saturday was the day to move them from their overcrowded kitchen brooder to 5R Farm. Unfortunately, it was going to be in the mid-80s, and chickens can easily overheat in hot weather. We tried to figure out which chickens were best suited to be packed into close quarters together for the hour long drive to their new home, and then we packed them up in our two pet carriers and a big cardboard box. Just as we were about to load them into the van and drive to the farm, we got a call from our caretaker Chip, letting us know that a logging operation down the road had knocked down a power pole and that the road to the farm was closed while the power company worked on replacing the power pole. The road closure was close enough to the farm that there is no alternate route to get there, so we debated whether to head out and hope that the road would be back open by the time we got there or whether we should unpack the girls and delay the trip until later in the day when the road was certain to be open but the weather would be hotter making the trip more difficult for the girls. We decided to head out to the farm, hoping for the best. Just as we were approaching the split in the road right before the road closure we passed two power company trucks leaving the scene, excellent, our timing was perfect!

When we got to the farm we unloaded the girls into their new coop. Chickens are not known for being the most adventurous creatures, so despite being hot and thirsty it took some coaxing and much calling “here chick, chick, chick” to lure them over to investigate the waterer and feeder. They spent their first day inside the coop so they could get used to their new home. At 10 feet by 12 feet, the coop is 6 times larger than their kitchen brooder. It was not long before they started chasing each other around, sparring, and establishing the pecking order much more enthusiastically than we had observed them do in the kitchen brooder. One of the roosters started chasing the ladies fairly aggressively as well. He’s not too good at catching them yet, but he manages to grab the big black australorps on the wing and hold on tightly while they drag him along behind them as they try to get away squawking loudly all the while.

On day two, we opened the chicken door to the outdoor ultra-secure predator proof covered run. It took lots of encouragement (lettuce and more “here, chick, chick, chick”) to get the chickens to walk down the ramp to the run, but eventually they all came outside to check things out. They spent the whole day outside in the run and appeared to love every minute of it. By late in the day it was clear that they were not going to go back into the coop on their own. I picked them each up and placed them inside the coop and put a few on the roosting bar to demonstrate where they are supposed to sleep and left them for the night. We’ll repeat this training process of putting them in the coop at night and placing them on the roosting bar for a few weeks until they figure out how to put themselves to bed. It’s best for chickens sleep in the coop on the roost because they stay warmer when the nights are cold and it will also keep them cleaner if they poop from on top of the roost bar than in a chicken pile on the floor! It was hard to leave them and come back to Portland at the end of the weekend, but I know they are in good hands while we’re away and we’ll be back to the farm in a few days to see how they’re doing.

This is Blue, one of my favorite new girls.

It’s been a long time coming, and finally the veggie garden planting is complete. It started with chainsawing and stump grinding back in January, followed by raised bed building in February, then several truckloads of composed horse manure and topsoil shoveling, berry planting in March, and several days of veggie planting beginning in April. I wrapped up the planting this weekend with tomatoes, peppers, squash, and cucumbers. It’s great to have plenty of room to experiment with new varieties of tomatoes and to plant some larger veggies that I never had room for in my garden in Portland like artichokes and rhubarb. I bought 10 varieties of tomatoes this year. Of course no garden would be complete without the tried and true Sweet Million and Sungold cherry tomatoes. The rest of the tomatoes are all heirloom varieties because I am planning to save seeds for next year. I got a nice mix of purple, orange, yellow, and striped varieties, and I also got a few determinate varieties that are supposed to be very early to mature which should be perfect for this year due to the late arrival of warm spring weather. The garden deer fence was recently completed, and I’m really pleased with how it turned out. I love the look of the round fence posts and the log arch over the entry gate. You can’t see it in the photo, but there are wires between the white fence wires, and the fence will be electrified to keep hungry deer out. We’ve worked too hard on the garden not to enjoy the fruits of our labor! I’m not too worried though because the deer seem to be much more interested in browsing on the plentiful blackberry and native shrubs on the farm than the veggie starts. If you’re a fan of before and after photos like I am, you can refer back to “the future vegetable garden” post from December 16, 2011 to remember what the garden used to look like. The stump in the lower left corner of the December photo is the stump just outside the fence at the downslope end of the finished garden.

The 5R Farm chicks are growing up fast!

With our oldest chicks for the farm about 7 weeks old, we are fairly certain that we have at least two roosters. The first to develop a noticeably larger and redder comb was a black australorp, which is great because they are very handsome roosters and also this is one of the breeds we are hoping to raise for meat birds if all goes according to plan. After considering names for a week or so, we decided upon Rooster Cogburn. I had been lobbying for Antonio or Captain Jack Sparrow, but Sean is convinced that Marshal Reuben Cogburn is a more fitting name for the head rooster of the new flock. It looks like one of our fancy red frizzles is a rooster too. If he is, then he’ll be known as ‘Lil Red Rooster, and he’ll have to come out to the farm instead of living in our backyard flock as we had initially planned. So now we’re down to three chickens for the backyard flock since one of the initial five we bought for the backyard is a rooster, and unfortunately we lost little Hattie a few days after we got her. I am really hoping we end up with three girls for the backyard flock which will hopefully be comprised of the other red frizzle Henny Penny, Coco the mottled houdan, and our favorite little bantie Millie who’s still not much bigger than a ping pong ball. We have named a few other chicks but they are pretty boring names either based on color or personality. We have ‘Lil Blackie, ‘Lil Gray, Big Blackie, Blue (which is basically gray in chicken feather color terms), Jumpy – I’m sure you can figure that one out, and Twitchy – due to a rather amusing habit of shaking her head whenever she hears my voice, hmm what is that all about?! It’s possible that we’ll end up with another rooster or two since the youngest ameraucana/easter egger chicks are only three weeks old which is too early to distinguish the boys from the girls. The plan is to move the chicks out to the farm in three weeks. We haven’t quite figured out what to transport the chicks in, but I’m sure it will be very interesting to say the least!

After several months of planning, accompanied by lots of backbreaking labor (although luckily Sean has done most of it!), today was the day to begin planting the vegetable garden. I planted the first of the cool season vegetables today – broccoli, bok choy, and swiss chard, all of which I started from seed and then hardened off for a week in a cold frame. If the good weather continues, I’ll be making weekend trips out to the farm to continue planting over the next several weeks. Next up will be lettuce, onions, and leeks. I also want to do a bed of strawberries and asparagus since I’ve read they are good companion crops, but the weather has been so rainy that we did not get the raised beds ready in time and I think it’s a bit late now. Oh well, I may still transplant the few strawberry plants that I managed to rescue from the beaks and scratching talons of the girls of 5R Farm last summer! We still need to build the deer fence, so for now we’ve got temporary deer protection measures in place consisting of chicken wire and hardware cloth. Let’s hope they do the trick for the short term, as we have been seeing deer pretty regularly the last few weeks.

The chicken coop is coming along nicely.

We’ve decided to move the big girls – Rhoda, Raquel, Rosie, Ruby, and Ramona out to the farm with the 25 farm chicks. This will be in 5 or 6 weeks when they are fully feathered and it’s warm enough for them to live outside. The big girls have gotten quite demanding (translation: noisy) in the morning when they want to be let out of their run into the backyard. Rhoda starts squawking between 7:00 and 7:30, and that’s a bit too early to be making a such a ruckus. Of course I will need some new chickens for the backyard flock, and really, what’s a few more chicks when you already have 25? This time around I am going to try not to spoil them rotten and hopefully they will be slightly better behaved (translation: less squawking, less begging for treats at the back door, and less pooping on the deck!) We bought 5 fancy breed chicks and are hoping that at least 3 turn out to be girls. Any roosters will have to move out to the farm. Here are pics of the chicks as well as photos of what they should look like when they are all grown up.

Building of the new chicken coop is underway at 5R Farm. The rainy weather has been slowing down the progress a bit, but we are on a deadline now that we have 25 chicks growing up fast in the kitchen! The coop will be 10 feet x 12 feet, which will provide spacious accommodations for 30 chickens. In addition to the 25 new chicks, we have decided to move Rhoda, Raquel, Rosie, Ruby, and Ramona out to the farm. They have completely devegetated the area of the backyard they have access to, so they’ll be much happier at the farm where there is plenty of grass and bugs for them to enjoy. In addition to the coop, we’re planning to build two secure predator-proof runs that the chickens will have free access to from the coop. They’ll also have access during the daytime to a larger fenced pasture that will be somewhat less predator proof but will still have protection from both aerial and land-based predators. It will have bird netting over the top to keep out the hawks (as well as the bald eagle who has been showing up lately!) and hot wires at the top and bottom of the chicken wire enclosure to keep out the raccoons and coyotes. By the time we’re done building the chicken compound, I would not be surprised if our girls have the best digs in all of Columbia County!

Here are three of the new chicks for 5R Farm. There’s also a video on the Photos page.

The planting continued last weekend at 5R Farm. I planted 10 raspberry canes that I dug up and potted from my garden in Portland last fall. Raspberries bear fruit on their second year canes, so we will be picking raspberries at the farm this summer. I also bought 6 blueberry plants at a nursery on the way out to the farm – an impulse purchase, but a fully justifiable one! We haven’t had enough good weather to rototill yet, so I had to go to Plan B for grass removal. I put down newspaper around the plantings and covered the newspaper with composted manure. This will smother the grass underneath over the course of the next few months and will keep the grass from competing with the plantings for water and nutrients. We put up a temporary chicken wire fence to keep the deer out, and this will be replaced with a more permanent deer fence in the next couple of months. Right now the priority is to finish building the new chicken coop, which is currently underway. The new chicks arrive on Friday so check back this weekend for photos of the new girls and boys, all 25 of them!

This weekend it was all about the wood at 5R Farm. We built cedar raised beds for the garden, planted trees, and gathered logs for firewood. The first chore on the to do list was building the raised beds for the veggie garden. We decided to build them with cedar after Sean found a good deal on rough sawn 2×10′s. The vegetable garden is really starting to take shape after a day of raised bed building and composted horse manure shoveling. There are four 4×8 foot and three 4×4 foot beds for growing the smaller veggies which will include swiss chard, bok choy, lettuce, spinach, asparagus, strawberries, onions, leeks, garlic, and basil. The larger veggies like tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and peppers will be grown in less formal raised mounds, and of course we’ll have a big patch of raspberries and a patch of blueberries.

While the boys were hard at work building and filling the raised beds, I was planting native trees and shrubs. As you may recall from a previous post, I ordered  several dozen bare root plants a few weeks ago. We picked them up on Saturday, so this was the weekend to get them in the ground. We planted 10 cedar, 5 noble fir, and almost 40 flowering shrubs. The planting took longer than I initially thought it would when I ordered them since many of the plants had surprisingly well developed root systems for $2 plants! Luckily, Sean realized that I would need some help planting all of these plants, and he didn’t even tease me about my plant purchasing frenzy. We got most of them planted this weekend, but I’ve still got a couple dozen Oregon white oak, Nootka rose, kinnikinnick, and bleeding heart to put in next weekend.

The last chore of the day was loading a dozen or so large log rounds from down the road and bringing them up to our place to be used for firewood next season. Our neighbor cut down a couple of dead trees last week and graciously offered to split the wood with us and the other two neighbors on the shared private road. We were glad to have a free source of wood since wood is our primary heat source at the farm. The other two neighbors got to the wood first, so of course the rounds they left for us were the biggest and heaviest. Sean made quick work of splitting the log rounds with a wedge and a sledgehammer and hauled them up to the woodshed to be cut another day. By this time we were ready to head back to Portland, tuck the chickens in, and get in some R&R after a hard weekend’s work!

Three  of our girls are now laying! Rhoda’s eggs range from very small yolkless eggs to jumbo size as she gets back into the swing of it!

I have been busy the last few weeks experimenting with liquid dish soap and laundry detergent recipes. Pictured here from the left are orange dish soap, lavender laundry detergent, and lavender detergent bars. I am just about to bring some samples over to my best product tester, Patricia. Thanks, in advance Patricia!

Is it treat time yet? Not that we’re spoiled or anything…

It certainly was an exciting weekend at the farm! This is the site of our future vegetable garden, and it had 5 stumps that we needed to get gone. Initially we had hoped to have our neighbor Clancy pull the stumps for us with his tractor, but it had been over a month since he offered to pull them and then disappeared on the other side of his 20 acres. Since the weather was cooperating and Sean loves any opportunity to operate power tools, he decided to rent a stump grinder and get the job done. By the time I got to the farm on Friday afternoon, Sean and Chip were already hard at work. First they chainsawed the stumps a bit lower to the ground to salvage some firewood, and then they ground the stumps down to about 8 inches below the ground surface. Sean also brought in a truckload of composted manure. We need to bring in several more loads of manure and dig out a bunch of blackberry roots, but it looks a whole lot more like a garden than it did a few days ago.

Well, okay maybe not quite, but with February right around the corner it is almost time for planting bare root trees and shrubs. What is a bare root plant you ask? Bare root plants are sold without soil around the roots and are only available during the late winter dormancy period. There are many benefits to planting bare root plants. Bare root plants establish more quickly since there is no transition from potting soil to garden soil. They are also much easier to transport and plant than container plants, and they are also much lower in cost than container plants. I’d like to put in a pitch for including native plants in your garden.  They not only provide habitat for birds and other wildlife, but if sited properly they are relatively care-free and will thrive in your garden with little maintenance once they become established.

I’ve just ordered 25 native trees and 50 native shrubs from the East Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District’s online native plant sale. We’ll be picking them up on February 18th and heading out to the farm for a weekend of planting. The plants I’ve selected tolerate full sun, and many are also drought-tolerant and will grow in poor soils, which will be great for our dry, sunny, southern exposure.

There are already lots of Douglas fir saplings on our property, but we’d like to add some diversity so I’ve ordered 25 trees, a mix of incense cedar, noble fir, western hemlock, and Oregon white oak.

I’ve also ordered the following shrubs.

Kinnikinnick – a low-growing evergreen shrub with shiny dark green leaves that forms a mat when established. Small urn-shaped pinkish-white flowers are followed by bright red berries. This will be a great groundcover for the dry slopes along the driveway.

Mockorange – a beautiful yet underused shrub that is covered in white flowers in the late spring/early summer. It was discovered by Merriweather Lewis and gets its common name from the delicious orangey scent of its flowers.

Nootka rose – one of our several species of native roses which has large, bright, orange hips and pink flowers with a sweet scent. It is a fast grower that spreads by suckers to form dense thickets, and provides shelter and nesting sites for birds. It thrives in open areas and tolerates clay. The perfect rose for the farm!

Ocean spray – a common native shrub with large clusters of white flowers drooping from the branches. It is a pioneer species which establishes in places that have been disturbed by forest fire or clear-cutting. It attracts butterflies and other beneficial insects, and provides cover for birds.

Pacific ninebark – a graceful shrub that grows in an arching thicket that provides a good source of cover and nesting sites for birds. It has clusters of small white flowers from late spring to early summer followed by pinkish-brown seed coats that remain on the plant throughout the year. It also has peeling bark for winter interest.

Red flowering currant – a drought-tolerant, elegant shrub that produces drooping clusters of light to deep pink flowers in the early spring. It’s one of the first shrubs to bloom in the Pacific Northwest, and is great for attracting hummingbirds.

Serviceberry – a large shrub growing to 15 feet tall, the serviceberry has three seasons of interest, from the bright green leaves and clusters of white flowers in spring, berries in the summer and striking autumn color.

Slideshow of our first snowstorm at 5R Farm in January 2012.

The chicks will be arriving the first week of March. I’ve ordered a total of 25 chicks, and this time when a few turn out to be roosters we can keep them! The breeds we are getting are described below.

Australorp - This breed was developed in Australia and gained notoriety when one hen in the 1920s laid a record 364 eggs in 365 days. This is a dual purpose breed that is reported to be a good bird for the table as well as a good layer of brown eggs. Described as an exceptionally beautiful bird, quite big, with black glossy feathers that have a green sheen and huge black soulful eyes.

Delaware - This breed was developed in the 1940s in Delaware. Originally bred as a broiler, it is currently recognized as a dual purpose breed that is a good table bird as well as being a good layer of very large brown eggs that also lays through winter. While once a very popular breed, the Delaware is currently a rare heritage breed listed as threatened by the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy.

Easter egger - The Easter egger is not a recognized breed, it is a hybrid that carries the blue egg gene of the Araucana breed and often lays blue or green eggs. Easter eggers usually have muffs on their face and come in many different colors. They are gentle birds that love treats and will often follow you around. This is especially true of our Rosie who tries to follow me in through the back kitchen door to get a special treat.

Speckled sussex - This dual purpose breed was developed in Sussex, England in the early 19th century. My favorite breed description is “If you are interested in combining the British poultry tradition with a brilliant all-rounder, the Sussex should be your breed of choice. Few other breeds can offer the same combination of formidable laying performance, brilliant table qualities and straightforward attractiveness.”

Welsummer - This dual purpose breed was developed in Holland and is known for its large dark brown or terra cotta colored eggs. Welsummers are probably best known for being the rooster on the Kellogg’s cereal box. Since you’ve made it almost to the end of my descriptions of our future flock, I’ll reward you with this entertaining breed description from Backyard Chickens “The colorful Welsummer has an upright stance with a strong, short beak, broad back, full breast and large full tail. It has a small single comb and medium wattles. The skin and shanks are yellow. The almond-shaped earlobes are red, and the eyes are reddish bay.” Now who could resist ordering some of this lovely sounding breed?

View from the back deck on a recent winter morning

Well you would be too if your winter coat was a bit threadbare! For those of you not familiar with the ways of all things chicken, once a year chickens molt and lose a lot of their feathers. Over the next couple of months they grow back new feathers. Molting most often occurs in the fall or winter, which seems like the worst time to do this. When chickens are molting they stop laying eggs because during this time they are using the protein that would otherwise be used for  egg production to grow new feathers. A molting chicken is a cranky chicken, and they will either avoid the other chickens as much as possible or increase their pecking of the other chickens as much as possible. Ramona is in the increased pecking category, much to the chagrin of poor Rosie the chicken on the bottom of the pecking order and receiver of the most pecks! Rhoda went through an especially scrappy looking period when she molted a couple of months ago. She lost about half of the feathers on her backside and all but one of her tail feathers, and you could see her one remaining tail feather quivering rather pathetically on those really cold mornings we had recently. Rhoda recently completed her molt and is back to laying eggs – we got a nice one on Christmas morning. Raquel finished her molt but is still not laying eggs although she is supposed to be a winter layer. I keep watching Raquel for the “rooster squat”. This is a behavior that precedes the onset of egg laying, and as the name suggests it occurs when a rooster (which in our case is either me or Sean) approaches a hen and they squat down in a submissive posture – I’m sure you can figure out the rest! I’ll try and get a photo sometime, it’s pretty funny, and in the meantime keep your fingers crossed for the rooster squat.

The paint colors have been selected and the garage/shop has been painted. Thanks, Chip!

There are two big projects on the to do list for the spring of 2012. We’ll be putting in the vegetable garden and also building a large chicken coop and run for the 25 chickens we’ll be getting for the farm. The vegetable garden will be located near the back of the house in an area that appears to have been a rhododendron garden but was overrun by blackberry when we purchased the property. The upside of our property having been logged is that we get lots of sun on our south-facing slope. The downside is that we have lots of stumps and blackberry. We hired Dan the tractor guy to clear blackberry last summer in the garden site, and he also cleared a few huge patches of blackberry in the front of the property. It sure was an exciting day when I discovered what one could accomplish with a tractor! Translation: clear more blackberry in a few hours than one could clear by hand in a whole summer. We’ll need to get some stumps pulled to make the best use of the garden site, but that will probably have to wait until the spring. Deer are regular visitors to the property so we’ll be spending the winter researching deer fence options as well as affordable building materials for the raised beds. Luckily, we have a nearby source of composted horse manure (thanks, Lee!), and we’ll be bringing in a few truckloads of manure to amend the soil. I’m already dreaming of a bountiful harvest in 2012!