Reactions

I asked Jeff what we will do if our future kids turn out normal and cool. Without missing a beat, he responded, "Ask them what it feels like."

Now that we are "grown ups" we find people are very acceptant of our "chicken situation". We do get asked a lot how our family and friends react and they have been very supportive. Recently a new support network has been added to the urban farm: my coworkers. It came up in conversation that the chickens love produce so now I am finding wonderful donations of apples, celery etc for the girls left in my cubicle. We are very appreciative of the extra treats for the girls, and below is a movie of them destroying an apple. 

The entire apple was gone in less five minutes!

Bees: Part II

The night of getting the bees home from the post office, I had to install them into the hive I had built the night before. The basic steps of bee installation are as follows.
1. Wait until dusk so the bees are less likely to fly away since it is "sleepy time"
2. Spray the bees down with sugar water so they are all "drunk" and less likely to sting
3. Gently tamp the cage on the ground so all the bees fall to one area then pry open the top
4. Pull the queen cage out. (The queen bee is in a tiny box with a few attendants during shipping.) Find the end with the cork on it, remove that to expose the candy block (The candy keeps the queen in for a few days before she can eat her way out so that the rest of the bees don't abandon the hive.)
5. Rubber band the queen box to one of the sides of the hive. (Again so the bees don't abandon the hive.)
6. "Pour" the rest of the bees into the hive and then cover the hive

Like most of the things we try for the first time, I ran into problems. However when you are literally in a swarm of pissed off bees this not the best place to experiment!

Problem #1 The sugar water clogged my spray bottle so the bees were only half sugared making them less docile.

Problem #2 I dropped the queen cage back into the rest of the bees which meant I had to put aside my fear and put my hand into a box with 1,500 bees and get the tiny box out. Yikes!!!

Problem #3 The cork got stuck in the queen box and Jeff had to run to get me a screw to wedge it out.

Even with all of this, the entire operation went very well. I only got stung once (of course it was after I had finished and was walking away.) And in the end all the bees stayed in their new home and Jeff got a great show of watching me (from a distance) deal with this. I had to laugh though when I looked over at him and in one hand he had the digital camera and the other the broom. When it was all said and done, I asked him what the broom was for... he said he wasn't sure but it just seemed like a good idea.... I couldn't' have agreed more.

Yes, I covered the ends of my pants and sleeves in tape just in case!

A New Addition

Like we have said before, our home is an ongoing experiment, and we have yet again decided to try our hand at a new craft- beekeeping! Last Christmas, Jeff got me a book on backyard beekeeping. I have read that and everything else I could find on the internet and finally ordered my three pound package of Russian bees, which are, believe it or not, known to have a sunnier disposition than Italian honey bees, which are the other commonly raised honey bees. I ordered the bees from the most wonderful apiary in Ohio which meant they had to be mailed. (Yes, I tried to find a local source but they never returned my calls.) The woman who runs the apiary informed me that I needed to call my local post office and make them aware the bees were coming and once they arrived, the post office would call me to pick them up. I timidly called the post office. They didn't so much as flinch- you would have thought I was the hundredth person that day with bees being mailed! The day they came, I got woken up at 5:45 in the morning with a call from the post office. I threw the first thing I could find on and dashed to the post office. The front door was locked since it was well before they opened but the cleaning lady let me in. I walked up to the desk and after a few "hellos", the gentleman who had just woken me came out with the box of bees.

I was surprised by how small the box was and by how quiet they were. On the ride home, I put them on the car floor in the front seat and headed back to the homestead. Of course, only when I am driving around with three pound of bees in my car, would I get cut off in traffic. I slammed on the brakes and the box slid forward and fell back. My heart stopped. I prayed that the screen on the side of the box was secure. The funny thing is, I barely heard buzzing. They must be the nicest hive on the planet, and I am the luckiest idiot urban farmer also. I got home and sprayed them down the sugar water so they would have additional food to the can of sugar water in their box, and then I dashed off to the office. That night I would have to install the bees into the bee hive but for right then I was just glad the bees came before I had to go to work. It would be very awkward to explain to my boss why I had to leave a meeting to pick up a bee hive...

The hive on their ride home in my car!

Home Appraisal

One of the challenges of urban farming is the delicate balance of strangers you sometimes have to let in your home with the clandestine animals we keep in said home.  A few weeks ago, we decided to get our home appraised to possibly refinance to a better interest rate. This is all fine and good until you get to the part where we have to let the appraiser in our house! Hmm.... we chatted about it and decided to just rock the fact that we have chickens living in our basement. He came on a Monday morning and since this whole refinance thing was my idea, Jeff was conveniently away at work and I had to come home to let the appraiser in. I was praying that we could go around the outside of the house first so I could get a gauge on what kind of guy he was. He showed up, hopped out of his truck introduced himself and first thing he said was to ask to go in the basement to see the HVAC set up. My blood pressure shot through the roof! Having no choice, I walked him through the kitchen and as I open the basement door, I said, "You are going to have the best story at your office today." He looked at me confused, and I followed up with "We are the ultimate DIYers combined with self sufficient paranoia." By that point he seemed more nervous than I felt, but I just kept walking down the basement stairs. He came down and suddenly saw the chicken pen. He was silent. It felt like forever before he said something and I thought I might pass out. "Wow, that is really interesting" he muttered. I began explaining the value of home chickens and how it all works. He asked a few questions and by end seemed really impressed and interested in the girls and it all worked out just fine. (He also said that he wasn't going to put a value on the chicken coop because that would move with the house! ha!) What a relief! Now I just hope my house is worth what I think it is! 

Chicken Outlaws?

Should we get ski masks too?

Spring Chickens

Spring seems to have raised the chickens' spirits as much as our own. As the last few weeks of winter dwindled away, the girls seemed more subdued and lethargic than their usual noisy, clucking, scratching, and strutting selves. And on top of this, egg production slowed down substantially, even stopping completely for about 2 weeks. We thought a nice improvised dust bath in their pen would cheer them up since one of their favorite activities is to dig up big dirt holes in the yard in the warmer months, when we can bring them outside, and bask in a fresh coat of nice refreshing dirt... So we filled a cardboard box with some sand and put it in their pen, expecting an outpouring of joy and gratitude as the girls enjoyed their very own dust bath. Surely this would raise their spirits? No dice. Other than pecking a hole in the cardboard file box, they couldnt have cared less. One of them even pooped in the "dust bath". We like to think it wasnt intentional to show us what they think of their dust bath... Well, just as we were beginning to contemplate whether the chickens might be ill and require a trip to the vet, the days began to get longer and temperatures began rising out of the arctic lows of this past winter. Eggs began appearing in the nesting box again, and the daily morning racket of clucking and screeching and scratching and flapping around has returned. Now we are getting just as many, if not perhaps more eggs as we were before, and the girls seem like their old selves again. It appears that they've even seen fit to use their dust bath for its intended purpose rather than for a toilet. Best of all, the arrival of spring means the return of their favorite  treats in the world --grass and weeds from out in the yard. They seem to love this more than anything, even the ridiculously expensive dried meal worms we bought them at the pet store. Cant wait to let them run around outside in the yard again. It seems they were just as demoralized by the long winter and as rejuvenated by the arrival of spring as were are. 

The Duck's New Home

Jeff describes our home as an ongoing experiment and sometimes our adventures work out well and other times we don't realize what we are getting ourselves into. Unfortunately, the ducks turned out to be in the later category. Over the last few weeks, we have been having more and more problems with them. Their bedding needed to be cleaned weekly as opposed to the chickens which only need to be changed every two to three weeks. Even when I did clean them every week, which was expensive and time consuming, they still smelled. They were also beginning to out grow their pen. As much as I loved Quack and Louie, my responsibility as an urban farmer is to always maintain the health and well being of all my animals and sadly, I could no longer provide that for the ducks. We made the tough decision to find a new home for the ducks. Through craigslist, we found a local hobby farmer who took them. This isn't like when our parents tell us the family dog is going to the farm to live! Quack and Louie are going to  a small country farm that has three ponds, a heated shed in the winter, two other Peking ducks friends and countless other chickens. The gentleman who took the ducks doesn't want them for food- they are just pets for his kids! While I miss the ducks tremendously, I am glad they are now living the ultimate duck life! (The chickens also seemed pleased to have the basement back to themselves!)