More eye swelling, fried tomatoes

Two Face's eye is bigger. In a last ditch effort to fix this, I'm injecting oxytetracycline into her subcutaneously (under the skin) and filling her eye cavity with a bacterial eye cream. Her eye is so swollen out if I pull down on her eyelid there's a huge cavern between her lids and her eyes. Much area to fill up with goo. Before I filled her with goo I rubbed her face with a hot cloth and some mucus came out her nose, but I wasn't able to get a lot out. Other than half her face looking like she has radiation poisoning, she seems to be doing well. She's eating and drinking, although it takes her awhile because she can't see out one side and she's hesitant.




Other news: fried green tomatoes and purple potato salad.

Sick chicken, and luffas

First, Bill the neighbor is gone for two weeks. He's staying at his daughter's, who is on vacation with her husband and kids. Bill is taking care of their dog. He's been gone for about three days now, and Dia keeps going over to his back porch and looking for him. When we go outside and let her out of the yard she runs right into his yard. She misses pancakes. This is a picture of her in his yard looking around for him.


We have a luffa that is getting large! Luffa sponges (the kind you buy to use in the shower) are dried luffa vegetable with the skin peeled off. We're trying our hand at a couple plants this year.



And we have a sick chicken. We actually have several sick chickens, but they are all mostly just sneezy and congested, but this one really got hit over the head with the sick stick. We're calling her 'two face' for reasons that are about to become apparent.

Left side:

Right side:


Front on:


And lastly, to wash the 'ick' out of your own eyes for viewing our sick chicken, a picture of one of our sunflowers.

Why Dia Got Fat

Dia’s Update, or Why Dia Got Fat
We bought Dia a bag of small treats and took them over to Bill and asked him to give her ONE of those when she comes over to sit with him. We tied the gate shut, so she can’t get out on her own now, but we told him he’s welcome to let her out as long as he keeps an eye on her. So I went out to feed the chickens and lock them up that night and Dia is out with me and Bill comes out on his porch and gives her a treat.
When Rog was over there talking to Bill about her getting fat he asked casually what Bill had been feeding her. “Oh, you know, whatever I have. Bread, ground beef, pancakes.”

Pancakes?

Dia has a friend

So Dia has been packing on some pounds. She's getting rounder. We think she's wandered into 'overweight' zone. We've cut her food back half a cup for two weeks now and haven't been giving her treats. No visible results. Today we discovered why.

While we're at work, she lets herself out of the backyard by opening the gate. She then goes over to our neighbor's house, where she sits with him and he feeds her. She goes back in the backyard before we get home. Apparently, this is a ritual they've had for a long time now.



We have corn! It's really great: fat and sweet. You can eat it raw and it's so good.

We also have a bumper crop of banana peppers. We've responded to this by stuffing them with a cream cheese and hot sausage mix. Goood stuff.

I canned seven cans of pickles today. Two quarts and four pints of lime pickles.

For Sale

The Helpful Gnome is breaking into sales this season. We anticipate selling at the market next year, but this year we planted extra to sell a bit out of the house. We're selling potatoes, catnip, and lemon basil. It's all organic and grown from organic seeds. Lemon basil, for those who have not tried it, is a very potent scented, flat leaf basil that smells like basil and lemon pepper.

The basil and catnip are dried. They are sold in $1 pouches, with a Gnome label. Here are pictures of the pouches:



For potatoes, currently, we have both All Blue and Sangre. All Blues have a dark blue/purple skin and light blue flesh. They retain color when cooked, so you can make purple mashed potatoes, purple french fries, etc. The Blues have a rougher skin with some brown, like a russet. It's not dirt, it's just the nature of the skin. The Sangre's have a thin, rosy pink skin and white flesh.

We're selling the potatoes for $5 a sack, which is approximately $2 a pound.






If you are interested in purchasing basil, catnip, or potatoes, email the Gnome at helpfulgnome.gmail.com

Catnip

We're also growing catnip. This has made Jeza and Kysoc both very happy.


Other misc. highlights include Dia's excursion into a bag of medicated chicken feed and, not surprisingly, getting sick. She did managed to refrain from vomiting all over the house, which we are grateful for.

Potatoes and garden

So much to update I'm going to break this down into several posts in order to make them more organized. This post is for our garden, which is doing very well! We have corn that is most likely ready to eat (we're trying it tomorrow), a baby eggplant, very productive pepper plants (purple jalapenos, red chilies and sweet bananas will be pictured), and lots and lots of potatoes. We will be selling potatoes this season. Details on that will be emerging later.

Of Life and Death (A Sad Post)

So this is a sad post. You might cry; I know I did. Feel free to skip on over if you’re not up for it.

So remember how we just bought 3 Barred Rock pullets at the auction? And I wrote a short note about how they weren’t adjusting well? (Yes, yes, you know where this is going.)

Well, the good news is we managed to catch the bugger that fled and was living in the raspberry bushes. She survived 36 hours in the wild with no worse for wear.
Anyway, so before the auction started I was going through all the small animals and found this UPS box with 3 chickens literally stuffed into it. I pulled the chickens out and looked them over and they seemed young and healthy, although one of them was MUCH smaller than the others.

I bought them, took them home, and put them in a stall away from my flock to watch them. The small bird appeared to be missing her tail in addition to just being small. She also slept ALL THE TIME. The others also seemed tired and stressed, but she gave the impression of Mono in chicken form.

The next day I let them out in the chicken pen to get them some fresh air and meet the flock. They hung out there for a few hours. The small one, once again, falling asleep every few minutes. I picked her up and went over her very carefully and found several troubling things. First, she fell asleep in my hand while I was holding her. Second, she sneezed twice. I picked some crusty stuff off her nose and a trail of mucus came out. And most horrifying to me, she had a large fluid filled sac on her breast. Roger was standing next to me, and I just said, ‘Rog, I think we need to dispatch her.’ And he went and got the ax and I held her until she fell asleep and we killed her.

I’m worried about the other two, as one of them had some crusty stuff on her beak after close inspection. The other did not. I think they have more than a 50% chance of recovering if they also have whatever it was… they do not have any blisters on their skin and I haven’t heard them sneeze at all. I am worried about my flock, as they have been exposed. It was minimal exposure in a large grassy area, but they are also being kept in the same barn, although divided by a wall. My flock has been vaccinated for Marek’s (the most common fatal chicken malady) and is on a medicated feed to prevent Cocci, another horrible fatal disease. After consulting my chicken health book, I believe they have a cold, the flu (yes, the bird flu), or bronchitis.

All of which have a low mortality rate in healthy chickens. So it’s most likely the worst thing that can happen is everyone gets sneezy for a week and recovers. And no, the bird flu usually does not transfer to humans, unless it’s very severe. If the whole flock dies, I’ll start worrying about catching bird flu. I did add a broad spectrum antibiotic (tetracycline) to the water in case it is bronchitis.
I also discovered what the blister was. It’s called a breast blister, and it’s from rubbing on a cage or the ground constantly. She was very small and lacking her tail, so I wonder if she was crowded in a battery cage. Poor girl had a really horrible life.

Please buy your eggs from people that raise their chickens well. Even some 'local' or 'free range' places raise sick birds or keep them in crowded or stressful places.

New baby chicks

We went to Dinky's Auction House on Friday night. It's a huge, 10 ring auction house that sells EVERYTHING from loose nails and screws to cars, ducks, cows, refrigerators, and guinea pigs. We stayed in the small animal ring because I wanted to score a box of chicks. We sat through 2 hours of small animal auctioning before we left. Guinea chicks were a big hit; they sold between $3 and $5 a chick. (They were sold by the box, usually of 6, 10, or 20, but the bidding was price per chick.) Really cute rabbits went for $10 a rabbit... big eating rabbits sold for about $2. I got a box of 10 Araucana's for $1 a piece! A gentleman next to me tried to raise to $2 but he didn't call fast enough and the auctioneer called it for me.

I also bought a box of Barred Rock pullets. They're causing me trouble, so more updates on them when I get them sorted out. Suffice to say, one of them ran away into the woods and I haven't seen it in 24 hours and the other two are having a hard time adjusting.