Comings and Goings

First, let me backtrack a bit to Jeff's and my honeymoon in Charleston, SC in late May. Jeff and I had a wonderful time in Charleston during the big annual Spoleto Festival. We saw a stage play, an opera, a contemporary ballet, the symphony orchestra, and "The One Man Star Wars Trilogy". The Star Wars thing was a lot of fun, but the ballet was our favorite show. We walked around beautiful Charleston until our legs gave up, and then we utilized the bicycle cabs. We also enjoyed some fine dining, including taking a cooking class, in which I discovered a new appreciation for fried chicken and pound cake. We stayed at a very charming B&B downtown, whose owners took great care of us. We enjoyed relaxing on the porch reading on cool mornings and sipping wine during the evening social hour.





















The newest arrivals at Deerfield are two baby guineas, which are a wedding gift from friends, who are local farmers. Unfortunately, Jeff and I have a bad track record as guinea parents so far. Our first four guineas disappeared shortly after we let them out of the small chicken tractor, that we had used to help teach them where home is. The big piles of feathers that they left behind indicates that a predator probably got them. So we're trying again, but this time we're putting them in a more secure location, hopefully. However, it would help if we made the tractor a little more escape proof for sneaky little guineas. One baby vanished from the tractor within hours of being placed there. It has not been seen or heard from since. Sniff! However, the Garrys gave us one more guinea so that our remaining one wouldn't be lonely. They are currently in a rabbit cage until we fix the tractor...or something.









Keep your fingers crossed for the arrival of more baby chicks next week! Wynona has been sitting on some Welsummer eggs for almost three weeks. Hatching day should be Tuesday the 21st. Wynona started out with a dozen eggs, but early last week she kicked out of the nest one of the eggs, which we found broken open beside her. There had been a chick developing in the egg, but maybe something went wrong with it, so Wynona kicked it out, or maybe she just accidentally broke it somehow. We also put about 15 eggs in the incubator, which might hatch on the 31st. We don't really have high hopes for those eggs, though, because the thermostat on the incubator has been pretty erratic, letting the temp go up to 104 one day, which can kill the developing chicks. Our other hope for Welsummer chicks is a Silkie/Australorp hen, who finally went broody again this week. She has 6 eggs under her. We released the Welsummer cockerel and one of the girls from the "Love Shack" after we discovered that the other girl was not well one day. It appears that she has come down with that evil Marek's Disease that killed a number of our chickens over the winter, which, I suppose, doesn't bode well for the vitality her offspring. Ack! Oh, well. We shall see.

This morning we said goodbye to Lily's daughter, 3-month old Pease Blossom. Sob! She is going to a nice new home, though, where she will have another young Nubian-mix doeling as a companion. Her new owner is a newbie goatherd, like Jeff and I were just over a year ago. She's been studying up, though, and Jeff and I shared with her some useful tips, based on our own experiences as novices in the goat world.

Here are some pictures of the first chicken tractor, that Jeff and I built. It houses the Partridge Rock and New Hampshire Red youngins that arrived here back in mid-April.










The garden is growing pretty well. The corn is getting tall. We have a thick wall of cucumber vines across from the tomato beds, and lots of cool stuff has sprouted in the new bed that Jeff dug near the raised beds. We were kind of late planting some stuff (and the lack of rain didn't help), but hopefully we'll get some gourds, melons, and squash before the end of the season.









Cheers,
Annie