Good job, Baby Buff and Victoria is so beautiful!
Baby about ten minutes before I checked under her, probably sitting her egg, lol!
Victoria keeping her and I company
Light peachy tan with some tiny white speckles
All three from today: Baby, Amelia and Clara
Thanks! Will of course post pictures of Victoria's eggs when she starts laying. Good to hear about the BOGS!Thank you, she is a lovely lady.
That sounds like an awesome day. We have a Know Your Farms Tour twice a year here in NC, but nothing like that. I have never heard of a knife with voltage.
Thank you, she is a lovely lady.
Our tour with Fresh Fork yesterday was excellent. Rowan and I got to milk a cow and taste the warm milk as well as taste test Gurnsey, Holstein and Jersey milk from the county, we like the Gurnsey and Jersey better than the Holstein. Next we went to a small organic grain processor. We got to see wheat shot out of a cannon and puffed into a cage and took home some fresh steel cut oats.
My favorite stop though was at Wholesome Valley where we got to see their pastured pigs (whose amazing bacon and chops we love), cattle, turkeys and chickens. In addition to the sex-links and meat birds they had a small flock of Buckeyes that they are experimenting with this year! Two Buckeye roosters were watching over the huge flock of laying girls as well. They have huge pastures to roam and several big movable tractor coops. I didn't care for the nesting/egg gathering set up they had. The floors were slanted which is fine but it was all carpeted and most of the eggs we collected were quite dirty, though it was interesting to see the range of colors from the same breed, I tried to explain laying cycles to my mom but she just though I meant that the dark eggs were fresher, lol. We had a delicious lunch there and they had a big store with lots of organic and natural products, produce, meat and dairy. I definitely want to take my husband back there.
We also went to an Amish family's house who make raw sauerkraut, it's just lacto-fermented with some himalayan salt and is delicious, I took home a big jar. Their front lawn was being grazed on by sheep, right after I was wondering why all these other houses had manicured lawns in the middle of agriculture. Last stop was to process chickens at an another Amish family's home, he's one of only a few people in the state who process chickens for others, including 4-H-ers (he has a separate facility for this with an inspector and they have tested negative for ecoli and salmonella all three years and row that they have been open which apparently is unheard of. They had Cornish X and Rangers and used a knife with voltage so that the chickens were knocked out when it touched them. I just plucked feathers but we got a demo on the rest and got to take home some of the meat.
We ended at Mitchell's Ice Cream where our tour began and used our free tokens. I got the special flavor created in honor of Catalan Chef Ferran Adria coming to visit Cleveland- it's Olive Oil, Orange and Juniper, tasted like gin! The husband watched the chickens yesterday, I didn't even get to see them because we left when it was dark and got home when it was dark. Baby skipped yesterday and laid her second egg today, which I got to watch. It has a nice white bloom on it so they look lavender like Amelia's first few eggs which are now terra cotta.
LOVE Victoria, such a perfect name for her!! And love your stories... lips on her comb.... I can honestly say I never heard that before LOL. Mine carry on and are more loud when they lay than when they first started laying.... hope yours settle down.So apparently I underestimated Baby Buff today. After seeing Rowan onto the bus and supervising free range time while picking up twigs and branches for an hour, I was cold wet and in need of a shower. While drying off upstairs I heard honking from outside. My husband has a long weekend off so I asked him to go see what the ruckus was while I got dressed. He came back inside when I got downstairs and said Baby was in the nest box and did not appreciate having the lid lifted up and squawked at him to go away. So I went out there and sure enough she is singing the egg song, loudly, non-stop, from the nest box. She had been checking the nests out yesterday but her comb and wattles are still pretty small, though a deeper pink than before and has been squatting for almost a week. I stroked her and talked to her and told her the egg song is for after you lay, but she wouldn't quiet down, so I picked her up. She still had little outbursts while snuggling except when I had my lips on her comb and was stoking her wattles. Meanwhile Clara was laying in the corner and when I picked up her egg, Baby carried on with the egg song. So I thought, she's just getting excited about the idea of laying, she's practicing being a big girl. That or she's going to be one of those odd pullets who goes broody before laying their first egg. I set her down to take Clara's egg inside and she leaves the coop and sings the song for Clara.
After lunch she is back in the nest box again squawking. We are getting ready to go grocery shopping at Earth Fare (where we spent way too much money on grass fed meat, organic snacks and other food, sigh). Before we left, my husband asked if I checked under Baby to see if she had laid. I hadn't thought she had, but checked anyway. Sure enough she was sitting on her first little pullet egg, singing the egg song, probably waiting for me to acknowledge that she had laid and tell her good job. Who knows at what point she had laid it, could have been minutes or hours, it was still warm but it was under her fluff. She could have laid it before Clara and I just didn't see it in the nest because its small and light. Once I scooped her and the egg up, told her she was a good girl and set her down in the run, she went to eat some shell, food and drink water and didn't return to the nest box for the rest of the day. So Baby beat Morgaine to laying, even though Morgaines comb and wattles are twice as large and red. I hope she doesn't carry on so long and loudly every time.
Also I got an early (by a little less than a month) birthday present, a pair of BOGS winter muck boots, black with grey and purple plaid, though I kinda wish they had had the brown. Tomorrow we are going on a multi farm tour with our CSA and I needed a pair of boots. The boy got a pair of light up camo ones.
Baby about ten minutes before I checked under her, probably sitting her egg, lol!
Victoria keeping her and I company
Light peachy tan with some tiny white speckles
All three from today: Baby, Amelia and Clara
For those interested. I know a little off topic but here is our kitchen remodel project we are working on. This is before the cabinets were taken out. You can see the messed up ceiling in the picture.
Here is after we took almost all the cabinets out.
The ceiling was very damaged and since it was built in the 1960's it really was not safe to pull everything down, so we covered it up with plywood to even it out. We did have cabinets on the left wall but we just drywalled it and it'll be left with no cabinets so the kitchen is not so tight anymore. I have a pretty wallpaper picked out already to go on that wall.
So with the ceiling prepped, I put up textured paintable wallpaper. It has the look of tiles.
Here it is with the wallpaper done. It looked so much better then the previous damaged wall.
I painted it a solid blue first. Then I sponged on a little darker blue to bring out the tiled look.
We still have a lot more work to do. The cabinets will arrive a week from tomorrow. They'll cover most of the brown wall that you see. It's nice that the ceiling is done. One step at a time, I guess.
That sounds awesome!! I don't think there's anything around here like that. Although I heard of a few places in Lancaster where you can stay at an Amish house with them overnight. Sounds interesting. That's only about an hour from me.
They'll be 5 months old next weekend, although I'll be out of town so I'll have to take their monthly pictures before then. 
Shady is lovely and I adore Victoria! I used to be a Plymouth Rock girl, but those Dorkings sure have stolen my heart! 
