The Permanent Chicken Coop

For two years, we moved our chickens around the field in this :

There came a point last summer when we just could not make time to move the chickens anymore. Also, anywhere we moved them, no matter if it was only for a day, they pretty quickly decimated the spot; our sandy soil cannot even stand up to a chicken.

We noted that they got much calmer and easier to deal with when we were not moving them around all the time. We also found that they ranged pretty far and wide doing their chicken business. And let's face, it was much easier on us to leave them be. The eggs were easier to gather, they were more likely to be in a safe place when it came time to roost, and they still did the work we most wanted them to do- dispersing cow pats.

This past summer, we began in the same way, knowing that we wanted to have a permanent arrangement for them. I wanted whatever it would be ready by the time the meat bird chicks arrived at the beginning of July so that we did not have to brood them in the house again. We worked frantically for two weekends and we now have a fixed coop.

It is in what has been the cow shed. I would say the thirty layers look quite comfortable in it. Just to the left there is the brooding space, which was plenty big for the sixty meat birds for the first month of their very short lives.

This coop is not all I hoped for, yet it functions better than any I've had to go into so far. The fact that it is more square means the chickens and I are not chasing each other as I tend to chores in the coop. They are less stressed by our presence because they can get out of our way. They are also all laying in the nest boxes- except for one who insists on depositing her eggs on a particular bale of hay in the barn.

Come winter, they can have this whole structure to move around in, which will be nicer for them than being confined to the coop only. The past two winters, they have stayed in the very big greenhouse. I figure they can adapt to the smaller digs.

They spend the night and morning locked in the coop to maximize the chances for the eggs all being in the nest boxes. Then they range all over the property the rest of the day.

The only problem has been with fencing garden spaces. I haven't quite figured that out, so they ate all our berries this year. Maybe next year I can outsmart the chickens.

Things Used to be Tidy

So long ago, it feels like a dream, I mopped my floors almost daily, and my house seemed so easy to keep clean. I have lost this as a priority somehow.

Today, I was canning the first batch of broth and rendering fat and simultaneously helping the children with school. While I was doing the breakfast dishes to make room for my tasks, I supported Phaedra through her division work. I got the jars in hot water and read to Sylvie. Ezra slipped in and out telling me about what he was reading or trying to convince me that he needed no more practice drawing triangles. Sylvie took a break from school to help me fill jars, and then I set her up to paint something from King of Ireland's Son. More reading, more checking, more talking...

Just as I was feeling like I had things on the kitchen side of the room under control, I glanced across to see what homeschool looks like at our house. I think the word is disheveled.
And I think that's probably good enough in the midst of these four slightly canted walls.

 

No Dryer

We chose to not have a dryer when we moved in here. We had experimented with this from time to time, but this house is so tightly configured that the space that might hold a dryer was quickly occupied by other necessaries.

It's been over three year; we've made it three winters. Actually the winters are not even the most difficult season. Since we run the wood stove throughout the winter, the house is relatively dry and laundry dries pretty well. I can set a drying rack in front of the stove loaded with laundry before bed, and it's all dry in the morning.

Today's weather presents the real difficulty. It has rained pretty steadily since we've been back from Maine, and there was a lot of laundry to wash when we got home. So, with steady shuffling and a fan, I've gotten most of it washed and the last "catch up" load is hanging in the laundry room.

We talked about taking it to the laundrymat, but the dryers there smell burned. We are tired of hearing the fan running, but it seems like a pretty good compromise.

Another Good Use of Electricity

Back when we weaned Gusto, we suddenly were overwhelmed with milk. It seemed a fine time to learn to make butter. The children and I have made butter in a jar, shaking and shaking and shaking the jar until finally some globs separate. It was tedious and long, and I really do not think my children learned much from it. My friend has made butter in her daisy churn; she was unimpressed with the "convenience", but she believes it's a good alternative if she ever has to make butter without electricity. I have also made butter using a food processor, but the results were less than thrilling. Faced with all this milk, I needed to choose a method of butter making.

I did what many homesteaders do these days, at least the ones lacking knowledgeable elders, I turned to the internet. These first method I found different from those already listed was to use an upright mixer. Some of you may be wiser or more farsighted or more experienced than I am and you may already know what happened. For those of you lacking these traits that I lack, I will tell you- it was an unholy mess. There was cream on the cupboard doors and cream in the drawers and cream on the stove and cream on the floor and cream on me and really just cream everywhere. To top it off, it took FOREVER to whip into butter, maybe as long as 45 minutes. I went back to the drawing board and pondered the lovely convenience of the tidy sticks of butter one buys at the grocery store.

I decided to try the food processor again with a little phone support from a friend who makes all the butter they use. It is perhaps the very best reason for owning one of these noisy machines. After ten minutes, I had butter floating in butter milk.

I think the reason the food processor did not work when I tried it before had to do with the temperature of the cream. It was in Texas and I did have a toddler and preschooler "helping", and I am not sure the butter did not go too long or that the ten minutes it takes seemed more like 45 with two children under foot.

So, this information is already widely available on the internet, but to keep you from looking further, here's what you do. Allow the cream to separate from the milk; this only works with raw, unhomogenized  milk. If your milk has traveled much, it may not separate very well. When you can clearly see the line between the milk and the cream, skim the cream off the top of the jar (this is a bad time to have milk in a jug) and put it into another jar or straight into the food processor. The cream is much easier to skim and make into butter if it is chilled.

 Now, put the cream into the food processor with the spinning blade thing that sits in the bottom and turn it on. Sometimes the butter will make in under five minutes and sometimes it might take fifteen. The trick is to pay some attention because if it goes too long and gets too warm, you have to chill it and start again.

 The sound will change, and you might open it to see something like whipped cream. Let it keep going. You might open it again and see something like whipped butter; let it go just a little longer.

What you should see when you open it should look clearly like butter floating in milk.

So, gently pour off the milk- ideally not down the pipes as it will some day cause you untold sorrow. Run a little cold water into the food processor and pulse the butter. Drain it again. Add the cold water and pulse again. Drain.

Now is a good time for a wooden bowl. I do not work the butter much in this bowl, but I do give it a couple of turns to get a bit more of the buttermilk out of it. The butter will keep longer the more free of buttermilk it is. We freeze our butter, so this is less of an issue.

Put it into jars that do not have shoulders, seal them up (not canned), and put them into the freezer.

Eating with Gusto

Last November, Violet had a little bull calf. He was much prettier than Chappy, aka Clover, ever was. He was also less shy of people. Still, the fate of male calves in a setup like ours is pretty much the same- he was table bound.

Gusto was quite different from Chappy. He would nurse when I was milking, for example, which seemed pretty great at first. Violet would let down her milk much more vigorously than when I was just milking. Also, he wasn't taking even half the milk, so we had plenty. As he got bigger, he took more of the milk, and we did begin separating him the same way we had done Chappy. He was also harder on Violet than Chappy had been; her teats kept getting little scrapes and cuts from his nursing. Finally, we decided to wean him.

What we learned at that point is that Violet is a much easier milk cow when she does not have a nursing calf. She relaxes more, and milking is a pleasanter task. We got a surprising amount of milk once we weaned the calf and more cream. There are definite advantages to weaning a calf instead of waiting for Violet to do it.

Another thing I learned from Gusto is that banding a calf requires a little more focus on the task at hand. It seems that even though I banded him, I still had a little bull calf. This was not much of a problem until he got to be about ten months old and wanted very much for Jason to stay clear of the pasture. The braggadocio of a bull calf is comical until you remember that he outweighs you by a few hundred pounds.

That means we now have beef in the freezer and this on the stove. Because we now own a pressure canner, it makes sense to get the bones all turned into broth and out of the freezer. I'm giddy! Even my canning book calls broth a convenience food.

I'll simmer these for a couple of days, then can them in pint jars, and I'll have a beautiful ingredient for pretty much any sauce or soup.

This also all means Violet is alone again. I really want her to have another cow all the time, but at the moment, we cannot make that happen. The good news is that she did not exhibit as much stress as she did when we killed Chappy. Her next calf is due in April, and if that one is a heifer, we'll keep her to train into a milk cow.

Vacations

The world at her feet.

Jason had a booth at Common Ground, so we all trekked to Maine in two cars and spent a pretty incredible week getting to know another family, seeing the fair for the first time, and just enjoying Maine in all its late summer glory. The problem is that I am terrible about taking pictures, and I get worse when I think I ought to. Still, here are the children enjoying a beach near where we spent the vacation part of our time in Maine.

The way the beach makes us feel.

Note that only one person has shoes on.

She is very good at finding treasures.

It was a blustery day for the beach.

Motion...

Comfortable alone.

And I am back at my computer  almost a year since my last post. I have tossed this around and around in my head and my heart, and I've decided there are a few people who read this and feel connected to us, and that's important to me. Then, I regularly troll the internet when I'm having a problem that really deserves the advice of an elder that I do not seem to know. I lack the hubris to see myself as an "elder", but I can be completely frank about mistakes we have made that might help someone else.

No Calf Yet

Or what my cow likes

I have probably made it pretty clear that I am a little afraid of Violet, and it's hard to really love something you're afraid of. I think yesterday, I kind of fell in love with Violet.

(For those of you who don't like lots of hokum about communicating with animals, you might want to stop reading.)

On Sunday, I was busy burning brush close to one part of the pasture that Violet has steady access to at the moment. She spent much of her time pretty close to the fence where I was burning brush. I always chat with any animals who choose to keep me company, so I greeted her and asked her rhetorical questions and went about my business.

Then, I suddenly "knew" she wanted fresh grass. Yes, yes, she's a cow and cows eat grass and all that. Naturally, if there was grass available, a cow would want it, but this at least felt different. Maybe all that pine smoke was getting to me. Anyway, I opened a gate that let her onto another section of pasture and she left.

She was at the fence again around chore time. This was my cue to feed her apples or a pumpkin and to throw her some fresh hay. That's our routine; I did what she expected. I was still tending my fire, so I just stood and watched her while she was eating. And again, I just "knew" she wanted me to pet her, so I went into the fence and petted her. She obviously enjoyed the contact and gave me an appreciative lick, which is much different from the thorough salt-seeking lick I often get from her. After a couple of minutes, she seemed done with petting and I left to finish the other evening chores.

Yesterday, I was gathering leaves from around the edge of the pasture. Little enough light gets to those areas, that it hurts nothing for me to steal those leaves for the garden. Also, we've placed long pieces of pine along the slope of one hill. I wanted to stack leaves against these to help create a mound that will slow down the water in that part of the pasture. The plan is to put waste bedding on top of the leaves and see what happens. We hope we see a change in the grass just below these mounds.

Anyway, I had the garden cart to haul leaves to the garden, and as I pushed it through the gate, I wondered where my cow was. She poked her head out of the barn and followed me. When she saw me going through to that new patch of pasture, she picked up the pace. I think she hoped I had apples in the garden cart, but I do not like for a cow to run after me. So I stopped, held my rake up in front of me and waited to see what she was doing. She sniffed around the garden cart, and then sniffed the rake, and then began to graze about five feet away from me.

Maybe you're not at all afraid of huge animals like docile cows. If so, then you're not like me. Her grazing that close made it very difficult for me to focus on raking. Then, when I got ready to move the garden cart, she did her rodeo routine. Have you ever seen a very pregnant cow bouncing around on the tips of her hooves? It's a sight.

I stopped everything and waited for her to calm down. Then I talked softly to her as I moved the garden cart a few feet, giving her a very wide berth. And I kept raking, and she kept very close to where I raked.

It was soon obvious that my cow was just spending time with me, though not me in the specific, probably. She just liked having company in the pasture. I raked leaves for two hours and for the first 90 minutes, she stayed within ten feet of me, grazing. Then, she slowly grazed her way back to the barn. And I felt such warm affection for my cow who is so slowly teaching me what it is cows like.

Yes to petting
Yes to company
Yes to soft voices
Yes to apples, pumpkins, and hay
Yes to brushes
No to wheels
No to loud noises
No to dogs
No to sudden movements