Rooster Pinata

Our nice rooster is still in the Recovery Room, but he's not doing very well.  I went in to give him a look-over to see how his back was (it has healed up nicely), but when I picked him up I was shocked at how light he was.

He's been eating and drinking, but now I've noticed he's got diarrhea.  And he's also limping worse than before.  His leg isn't broken so maybe it's dislocated in the hip area?  I don't understand; he was walking ok last week.   I'm going to keep him locked up and hope for the best.  I just hope that I don't make him suffer more than need be.

Other news on the rooster front here at the farm is that I think I've found a sure way to determine if a chicken is a rooster or hen.  Usually I can tell the difference around four weeks of age; they have slightly larger combs & wattles.  Then as they get older, their neck, tail and saddle feathers grow longer than the hen feathers.  They also have little bumps on their legs where their spurs will be.

But this year, I've had trouble figuring out if one of the more colorful chickens was a rooster or not.  S/he kind'a had little bumps on the legs, but the comb was short and the feathers weren't really long for a rooster.  Some of these chicks that I hatched came from a friend's farm and his chickens had rose combs and some of these chickens also had rose combs so I couldn't tell by the comb.

I was herding chickens yesterday and there was a young rooster trying to mount a young hen.  When they are this young they are very clumsy and really end up just tearing up the hen's backs and yanking head feathers in a feeble attempt to keep their balance and get the "job" done.  Needless to say, the roosters are not paying attention to anything other than their chosen hen and after watching one really work a hen over, I felt sorry for her and yanked him off.  Of course he was pretty surprised and vocal, flapping like crazy and trying to right himself up as I held him by the feet.

Yes, I'm getting to the point.
  
Obviously the chicken mounting the other chicken was a rooster.  But he wasn't the one I was questioning.  Anyways....

While I had said rooster in hand, and as he was flailing around squawking, the other roosters came running from across the yard just to attack him!  They were trying to kick and peck him even as I held him higher....they were like crazy-insane-roosters!

I launched the rooster and he scurried off, but was then able to defend himself so everyone went back to normal.  Just like that.
  
Weird.  And kind'a scary.
So I tried it again later in the day.  Yeah, yeah, call the Humane Society on me....I'm torturing poultry.  But I really wanted to see if it would happen again.  And it did.  Even with a different rooster being held upside down by it's feet.  They came from out of nowhere to attack.  But I saw what I was hoping to see; the chicken-in-question is a rooster as HE came running with the rest of the pack to get a whack in at the rooster pinata.

Do I have crazy-mean roosters?  Or do I have adolescent roosters just doing their teenage-rooster thing?

Regardless, I'm going to have to get rid of most of them.  Of the nineteen chicks that we hatched, seven of them are roosters.  And if our current Alpha rooster (well, used to be at least) doesn't survive, I'm going to have to chose one or two of them to replace him.  I want to continue hatching our own chicks, so a rooster or two is kind of a necessity.  There are twenty-five hens now so I figure two roosters is about right.

Paul has put the word out at his work and I think we have homes for at least two of them.  If the others don't find homes, they'll end up as a tasty soup.  I just have to do some rooster-watching and figure out which is the nicest of them.  Too bad we couldn't all just sit down and have a little chat and tell them if they don't treat the hens nice and if they don't respect the humans they'll end up plucked and in a pot with various root vegetables.

Coffee Filter Conumdrum

There is a drawback to stocking up on things.  Especially things that you swore you'd be using for the next thirty years, but find out that circumstances have changed and now you have:

Coffee filters everywhere!  Several years ago, we were introduced to the handy-dandiest little kitchen gadget:

Since then, we have no longer had to use a coffee pot or the coffee filters used in brewing.  So I now have a 4' stack of coffee filters sitting in the pantry.  That's what happens when your Dad has a restaurant and lets you come along to the restaurant supply store.  Now that stack is just taking up space, although a small stack may occasionally find their way into the living room for toddler entertainment.  I also use them to filter out stuff like chicken broth or a pot of tea that had a teabag tear apart while brewing.  But that's about it.  I've tried to use them for milk filters but for whatever reason they don't work as well as the "real" milk filters.

So I once again have to ask my loyal and frugal minded followers to do some brainstorming and help me think of what I can do with these things.


Toddler crafts?  New hair styling accessory?  

Saturday Oven Lovin - Or Pea Soup Facial

Winter has FINALLY come to The Ozarks.  Not that I'm partial to the wind, the freezing temperatures or having to constantly chip ice out of the water buckets, but it means that the wood stove will be cranked.

We've had some weird warm weather lately and the wood stove hasn't been chocked-full of wood yet.  It's going at night and through the morning, but during the middle of the day it becomes cool enough to touch. 

But since our daytime high temperatures were only in the low 30's mid-week I'd been keeping the stove a-blazing.  Perfect for making Pea Soup!

One of the great benefits of having a Christmas Ham.....
leftovers and bone for making Pea Soup!

8 cups water
2 cups split green peas (dry)
Ham bone (or leftover bits of ham)
Bay leaf (or two)
Onion, chopped
3 Celery stalks, chopped
2 Carrots, chopped
3 Garlic cloves, chopped
Salt & Pepper to taste
Dried hot pepper flakes (optional....not for me though)

Toss everything into a pot and simmer over medium heat until the peas get mushy & the soup looks like, well, Pea Soup.  I had my pot on top of the wood stove for six hours, lid on for the first two & then took the lid off for the remainder of the time so some of the water would evaporate & the soup would thicken a little (I like my soups more stew-like).  If you were to make your soup on top of a stove, I'm sure it wouldn't take quite as long.  I'm sure this would also work well in a crock pot.

It was very difficult to avoid passing by the pot without dipping out "just a little" soup into a cup.  And I would have just sat there with my face hovering above the pot, inhaling the heavenly aromas of pea-soup-steam had the front of my thighs not been burning from the heat coming off the stove.

Have a recipe you'd like to share with the blogosphere?  Then head over to Tiny Gardener's blog and submit yours to her "Oven Lovin" on Saturdays.

Five Weeks

Nettie is due to kid in just five weeks.  And the "little" chickens are still roosting in the kidding pen!

Well, it's my fault that they are still roosting in there as I've never trained them to go into the "Big Girl" coop yet.  We haven't had a light in the goat / chicken barn since last kidding season so the new chickens have had no incentive to move into the bigger coop.

I've been meaning to buy one of those solar panel kits from Harbor Freight, but haven't yet.  Maybe later today.  Right now, if I want light in the chicken coop / goat shed I have to run a loooooonnnng extension cord from the garage, across the driveway, through the garden, up a pole to "above-goat-chewing" height and then into the shed.  Either way, I'm going to have to get light in there for the impending kidding as well as to get the chickens out of the kidding pen so it can be used for kiddings!

Winter has finally reared it's ugly head.  Yesterday was really cold (ok, not really, really cold, but I like to complain) and windy and I was outside at least four times to skim ice off the water buckets.  This was after chipping chunks out of the buckets first thing in the morning.  The goats have free choice hay all day and get grain at night, but I also gave them alfalfa pellets mid-morning hoping it would help them keep warm.

The rooster seems to be doing a bit better.  When I was out there this morning to fill up his water dish and fed him a mash of warm milk and chicken feed, he came right up to the feed bowl and chowed down.  I haven't put a hen in with him yet, but think I will tonight if I remember to grab one when I'm closing everybody up for the night.

PS - I'm still having trouble with commenting; I can comment on your blogs, but not my own.  Anyone got a fix they'd like to share?

Rooster Recovery Room

The rooster that Harley attacked has been in the smaller kidding pen in the barn since I found him the Saturday before last.

It's nice to have an empty stall for "incidents" like these.

Not-so-Plucky Rooster

He has a pretty big patch of missing feathers & torn up skin, but no huge gashes or giant open wounds that I could see.  I guess he could have some internal wounds, but heak if I know how to diagnose that.  I've been feeding him chicken feed soaked in milk and water with electrolytes, but haven't really done anything else for him. 

He's been pretty mopey and doesn't move around much and I've just noticed that he hasn't been crowing.  And I'd even venture to say that he's depressed.  But he's eating, drinking & poop'n so I guess that's a good sign. 

Normally, I wouldn't give much thought into what to do with an injured rooster (lop his head off, pluck 'em & toss him in the stew pot), but this guy is actually a nice rooster.  Which doesn't happen around here often.

I guess I could have given him some antibiotics to ward off any infections, but honestly didn't know what kind to get, how to administer them or even how much to give.  If he doesn't perk up in the next few days, I think I may have to give him some.  Guess I'm going to have to do some online research on chicken antibiotics.  Honestly, I don't have much chicken EMT knowledge.  Most chicken deaths around here happen by predation (hawks, bobcats, coyotes....or Harley), unknown causes (I find them just keeled over in the yard) or I've occasionally had to put a .22 in their skull if they were horribly suffering from some malady.

Anybody out there in the blogosphere have any ideas as to what I can do for the poor guy? 

Besides chopping up some celery, carrots and putting him into a big pot with a bay leaf or two?

Fridge Experiments

I hate cleaning the fridge.  Not only because it takes like forever, but it reminds me how much food we waste.  The chickens, however, love fridge-cleaning day.

In order to reduce the wasted food (well, it's really not "wasted" per se as the chickens eat it), I've been more diligent in implementing "Leftover Night" for supper when there's a plethora of containers scattered in the fridge.

We had a Leftovers Dinner this weekend and while shuffling and picking containers to compile enough foodstuff for that evening I found a jar of yogurt:

It looks like yogurt, smells like yogurt, but I wasn't expecting it to.  Because this is what the lid said:

Yup.  Yogurt from July of 2010.  As in six months ago.

But the strange thing about it was that if I didn't have the little date sticker on the lid, and had I not said to myself, "Myself, I don't remember making yogurt in like, months", I would have probably eaten it.  It didn't smell sour, didn't have any funky stuff on top or anything. 

I wasn't feeling that adventurous, so I put it in the chicken scrap bucket.  And no chickens have died either.

I'm tempted to do a yogurt experiment when I'm flush with milk again.  As in make my homemade yogurt with goat milk, seal it up in a small canning jar & date it.  Then buy a single-serve container of plain yogurt at the store & keep them both in the back of the fridge for several months to see how they compare.  I'll keep you posted when / if I remember to do my experiment.

Saturday Oven Lovin!

Here's my contribution to Tiny Gardener's Saturday Oven Lovin.

It's not going to be anything specail at all.  But it's something that I think some of you may enjoy, especially if you're a French Fry Freak.

First of all, let me confess that I LOVE McDonald's french fries.  Yes, they are bad for me, full of fat and salt and all that other stuff.  It's not like I'm in the drive-through every week, awaiting my fix and swearing at the dozen plus cars in front of me (that guy still has a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker on his SUV???), but given the chance and in a moment of weakness I'll pop in and get the 99-cent bag-o-adulturated-potatoes.  So this is definitely not a "Just as Good (bad) as McDonald's" french fries, but it's good enough.....and better for ya.

First, take your potato and wash it up.  Then slice it into french-fry sized pieces.  Space the fries evenly on a baking sheet and pop into a 425 degree oven for 12 - 15 minutes, checking to see if they are cooked to your liking starting around 12 minutes.  Sprinkle salt over them and enjoy. 

Personally, I like using the red potatoes for the oven fries best, but any 'tater will do.  Even sweet potatoes!

Sweet Potato Oven Fries

Now, you could deep fry those suckers in your FryDaddy instead of baking them in the oven.  But we'll all pretend that we're going to be healthier this year and avoid those fatty foods.  Right?  Riiiiiight.