Blue eggs and strawberries

Blue egg! We're getting about 4 eggs a day now. This is our first blue egg! Hopefully more will come quickly!

Our strawberry plants are putting out huge amounts of runners! I dug up a bunch and potted them. I had no idea how wild these would go. The runners are these long tentacles that produce other baby plants. Some of the runners made babies that made runners and other babies. One of the pics below is a double runner... a baby making a baby. The other pic is my giant bowl of runners. We'll try to keep the plants alive until the spring and replant them in another bed.



And lastly, just for fun, a couple of pics of Roger and I at the 'Taste of Bloomington' is which a food festival here in town. All the restaurants in town set up booths and sell $2 dishes. So you can go to like, 5 booths over the course of the evening and taste a bunch of food. We ate a lot.

Incubation!

Sorry again for the delayed update... life at The Gnome has become very much day-job oriented around here. We haven't started building the coop yet because we have a friend who has a mess of wood at his place that he's giving us, but right now it's not accessible because it's on a steep hill, and right now it's so muddy from the massive snow and then the melt we can't get the truck up the hill. After the next big freeze we'll go up there. I'm thinking about making it considerably larger since the wood is so long... considering putting the chicks in the kiddie pool again in the basement and making a separate, very large coop outside. We'll see what happens when we get the wood here.

Another friend of ours has Cuckoo Marans that he hatches and gave us about 15 hatching eggs. They look very much like Barred Rocks but a bit blurrier and lay very dark chocolate colored eggs. Wikipedia Article Here

We warmed up the incubator and are trying them out. He thinks we'll be lucky to get half of them to hatch because it was so cold when they were laid some of them were half frozen by the time he collected them.

The eggs are incubated at 99-101 degrees for 21 days or so.

Double Yolk

First, let us apologize profusely for not updating in two weeks! The day after Dia got the Cone of Shame we went on a cruise for a Caribbean Thanksgiving. We were there for a week, and now back, we've been pretty unproductive on the homestead.

We did get a 'double yolk' egg. A double yolk is a HUGE egg, with, well, two yolks in it. Thinking about it, we feel really bad for the poor chicken that laid this monster.

Here's a video of our cracking it:



If you are interested in seeing pictures of the cruise, you're welcome to go to our facebook album: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2733315&id=6822433&l=7677ec9205

I will post this one for good measure, because it's one of our favorites, and we never dress up:

Raccoons and possums

You know you're living on a homestead when you go home for lunch and have to change before returning to work because a possum bled on you.

A raccoon has killed three of our chickens. Ripped the heads right off and then left the bodies relatively uneaten. Raccoons, we have learned, kill for sport.

I bought a larger trap, this one with two doors. Pictures to come. I set the old trap on one side of the barn and the new one with the chickens and baited them with stale bread and catfood.

The first day we caught a chicken. I went down in the morning and noticed it was sprung and got excited... especially when I saw what we caught was huge and striped.

But it was just a black and white chicken, standing rather dumbly waiting to be freed. It of course had seized the opportunity to eat all the bait while it was waiting for me to find it.

The second day I caught a possum. Neighbor Bill shot the possum for me, and while disposing it of I got blood on my pants... big clots of blood. It was pretty disgusting.

The good news is that the chickens are laying like crazy! We had 5 eggs yesterday!

Eggs and pumpkins

The eggs have been coming slowly but surely. We've been having usually one a day. We're not sure how many are laying. We do believe that some of them are being stolen, because we put an egg in a nest and watched it, and after three days it disappeared. No yolk, no shell pieces, just completely gone. We're suspecting a snake. The internet suggests putting golf balls in the nests for the snake to swallow and eventually die. However, the internet also warns that killing the snake will allow the rats and mine population to grow.


The eggs are pretty fantastic. The shells are really tough and the yolk is really thick. It's like pudding.

We carved pumpkins last night. We used a tracing kit for the first time. Roger's came out looking just like the pattern. Mine was... a bit improvised.

ANOTHER EGG

Another egg!!!! I would post a picture of it... but it looks just like the last egg. But I love it!