Eggs (week ending 8/27): 23I'm snuffling a bit today. I'm at the peak of my allergy season - ragweed, I suspect - but thanks to a couple of great Rx's, have been largely asymtomatic. Until yesterday, when I was watching, and then helping my daughter show her goat herd during Open Class at the county fair. This wouldn't have ordinarily bothered me, but this event was held in the show ring inside of a horse barn - and I'm fiercely allergic to horses (as opposed to being only intermittently allergic to cats). So my sinuses were overwhelmed, but it's still manageable. Without the Rx's, my sinuses would have slammed shut long before the fair.
Eggs (to 8/31): 20
Eggs (month of August): 114
Eggs (year to date): 1489
By the way, with Open Class now over (and awaiting the 4-H competition), my daughter is now in a quandary. She was going to sell her two kid does, but one of them won Junior Grand Champion for Alpines and then went on to bag Junior Grand Champion for All Breeds (Junior indicates that the doe in question has not developed enough to breed, and therefore, produce milk). The same doe and her mother also took a blue ribbon in the Mother/Daughter contest. She was also told by the judge that this doe and the sister were both good looking animals. So now she has a champion to breed. But what about the almost-as-good sister?
I'm so glad that there's another chicken blogger out there now. I mentioned Amy Stewart's blog in my last post, and since then she's had a couple of great entries. The first is an amusing post that should diffuse the myth that, when you keep chickens, you get free eggs. Folks, when you keep chickens, you need more reasons than eggs. Another post references Mother Earth News in a discussion of how free range eggs are better for you than storeboughts. Glad to see it documented, but hey, I knew that already... just from looking at those lovely orange colored yolks.
(I was glad to see that Mother Earth News is keeping this story open as part of an ongoing research project. There was only one line I really disagreed with on a first quick reading of the full article: Hens housed in free-range conditions are able to consume large amounts of grass, clover, weeds and insects in addition to grain. This is because I have also seen my hens eat feathers, small toads, and small mammals (moles, voles, mice, etc.). Diverse natural diet, indeed!)
Regular visitors may have noticed that The Accidental Farmer now allows readers to leave comments. I held off on this for a long time because I didn't think the technology to keep things archived and spam-free was where it needed to be (more details on this can be read on my other web site). But now I think everything is where it should be, so I've activated them.
This prompted a couple of changes. I've added an explanation of what a chicken tractor is to the glossary page. In the process I discovered that my Farmer archives were opening up the archives from my main site, so I fixed that problem as well. While I was at it, I added the aforementioned Mother Earth News page to the list of Chicken Resources (thanks, Amy!).
And the chicken experiment continues, but went awry this week. My goal is to see if the birds will run from A to B to C, perhaps repeat it once, and then dither. A couple of days ago they went from A to C and then dithered. Yesterday they dithered coming out of the coop, some going to A, some to B, some starting for C, and some coming to me for a handout. They're either not capable of such advanced learning, or else my teaching method needs a little work. I will continue and see what happens.
