Snoskred – Life in the Country

While out picking up chicken treats this afternoon I stopped to get some human food as well. There was yogurt on special, 2 for $3 at Coles and one of the flavours was caramel tart or something like that, so I thought I would give it a try.

YUCK YUCK YUCK.

I tasted two spoonfuls and threw it out. It was absolutely awful.

Turns out this yogurt was fat free and sugar free – they used artificial sweetener in there.

MY GOD WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THIS TO THEMSELVES?

I am not even going to bother trying the second one. I am still trying to get the taste of the first one out of my mouth.

I’ll stick to ones that use real sugar thanks. And nothing fat free. I like fat. The worst thing that happened to this world was all this fat free nonsense. IMHO, of course.

A couple of my chicken friends and I went along to the Goulburn Poultry Auction last Sunday. If only I had 10x the room, I would have arrived home with a massive and very pretty rooster, some gorgeous Australorps, a Brown Leghorn hen and about 20 bantam game birds of some description or other. There were a lot of gorgeous game birds up for auction there. Nobody knows why that kind of bird is so attractive to me. It is just the way the cookie crumbles.

But as I only have a little space in the coop and run, I came home with Blackie and Floppy. These were named by the other half. I have been oddly silent on the naming front. I thought names would come to me but they have not.

Blackie is a Bantam Rosecomb. She is a shy girl who prefers being up on the roost to socialising with the other girls. Given some time I am sure she will get used to the others and get down to interact, scratch, peck and chase mealworms. Until then she is getting spoilt with room service.

Floppy is a Bantam Ancona. She stood out to me at the auction because she kept trying to jump into her water cup. She has shiny black feathers in between her white dappling. Personality plus!

She had some rip roaring fights with the Light Sussex on Sunday, to the point that the other half climbed into the coop to referee for an hour or so. Since then things have calmed down a fair bit and I believe they have sorted out the pecking order. I can’t be sure who is above who at this stage, it is hard to tell.

Light Sussex looks so innocent in this photo however she had climbed up onto the roost after one of those fights which would not be out of place in a chicken action movie. She is still a bit pecky with the two new girls, but nowhere near the flapping screaming tooting fights we saw on Sunday. She was bottom of the pecking order before the new girls arrived and I am pretty sure she wanted to make sure she didn’t stay there. She has grown a lot in the last 2 weeks.

These top of the pecking order ladies sat by and watched the fighting, barely batting an eyelid. They know they are top chicken. It is an attitude. And look how meaty their little chicken breasts are getting.. their chicken feather outfits don’t meet in the middle anymore.. plenty of mealworms, spinach, treats and scratching about. When they jump down from the roost you can hear how meaty and well built they are from anywhere in the house, they make a discernible landing thunk.

Light Sussex with Red Comb in the background.

The girls happily doing their doings while the garden is being watered.. It looks warm but this past week has been awful weather – atrocious winds and icy cold. It never got to 6 degrees in Goulburn on Sunday and the winds were scary, roaring and rattling the sheds. I am so over these cold winds. I want to be able to go and sit in the yard and enjoy watching my girls.

This morning I awoke to a happy – our first egg! I don’t know who laid it.

Finally, the run and coop have been mated together. We could not have had a worse day for it with winds reaching up to 100kms an hour. It was craizy scary around here tree wise, with a lot of branches falling including one falling across my newly planted seedlings this evening.

Here are some pics of the completed coop & run. Sorry these are iphone pics, not the best I’ve ever taken.

Purple comb was the first one to venture out bravely into their new scary world.

The chookadoos finally braved the scary winds and came out to check out their new outdoor area.

It was really windy from so many different directions they weren’t quite sure where to look.

Red comb showing you why I fell in love with her.. and Light Sussex in the background looking for mealworms!

I try to give them a new and different treat each day. Today was a pear, fresh baby spinach, curl worms from the garden and mealworms to lure them out into the run. They enjoyed the pear enormously but it took them most of the day to eat the majority of it and they have some left for tomorrow – the baby spinach did not last very long at all. The Light Sussex eats all of the curl worms while the other girls just eat their heads and leave the rest.

Not only did we get this job completed today but I also finished weeding and turning the garden bed, planted the lemon tree which had been waiting for a shovel in order to be planted, planted over 30 new seedlings including rainbow silverbeet, lettuce, parsley, cauliflower, kale and strawberry.

All this in huge winds. I feel like I’ve eaten about a kilo of dirt and sand. I also feel extremely well satisfied with myself.

Apparently I have a new mortal enemy.

Surprisingly it is something so tiny I could easily hold it in one hand, if I could catch it.

In the garden you can just see in the picture above, the thing full of weeds.. since we moved in here we heard rustling in that garden. Seeing as it was summer at the time we assumed it was lizards. We assumed wrong.

On Saturday morning I was getting ready to do the gardening – more on that in a future post. I saw the little black and white cat from next door sitting on the fence next to the garden looking intently into the garden. I went out and chased the kitty away because I don’t want them roaming here now we have the chickens.

When I got in there to pull out the weeds last Saturday, out of the corner of my eye I saw something brown run across the concrete into the shed. It stopped just inside the door and I could clearly see it was a MOUSE. Oh noes!

My general philosophy with animals is live and let live. I have never been involved with trapping and killing animals in my lifetime. The Other Half on the other hand, is a farm boy. He apparently used to trap mice in his sleep or something. So when I told him about the mouse, he tells me that now that I have chickens mice are my mortal enemy. Mice will attract snakes as well!

I saw the mouse again that afternoon, at least I assumed it was the same one. It was running back to the garden but when it found out I was still in there, it went back to the shed. I also found some small lizards.

The Other Half came home with 6 traps for mice, ones that kill the mice very quickly so they do not suffer. I would be very unhappy if they did suffer.

We have a huge oval next door to the house and the people who live out the back are elderly and have very overgrown gardens. I sincerely doubt we’ll ever be without mice given these conditions. But they had made themselves a very nice nest in our garden which I found when I was pulling out the weeds made from dryer fluff, paper, small bits of wood like woodchips but they came from our coop building efforts, and chewed off bits of some other recycling items which were in the garage, cardboard and others.

The dryer fluff indicates to me that either these mice have been inside the house collecting it or they somehow found a way into our rubbish bins because that is where the dryer fluff goes. It has never gone out into the shed.

The laundry has a door to the outside and it also has a door to the inside which is *always* closed and the cats never get to go in there unless they sneak in when I am bringing groceries in. I always bring them in the first door and then close it, and then open the inner door so the cats can’t get out. So now that explains why the cats seem to do a lot of sniffing the floor in there.

We set up the traps with cheese on Saturday night. We have since caught 4 mice.