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Saturday, November 19, 2011

Meet Kitten

This is Kitten. She is a Blue/Black Bearded Japanese Bantam Silkie. 
Our 1 year old was part of a trio. She and her sister Bunny and along with rooster Ralphie hail from Ohio 
Her hobbies are speed walking and being fluffy. She's a bit of a prig about the quality of her treats.


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It was a Mumford and Sons day complete with a rainbow

Typical Summer Morning.

Can't begin to tell you how wonderful it is to have this memory: 

Coffee mug in hand, pajamas and knee high rubber boots. Smells like Idaho.. I love it.

Grown Up Talk.



Listen People. Chickens die a lot.. on their own.

So No. I don't mind eating chicken. I like it. It tastes good. 
But--I won't kill any of my own chickens.
And-- I'm not shocked and shaken when we lose a chicken now and then.
It's part of having chickens.
I might complain about it a LOT though.. I'm working on that.

A few of my "Grown Up" chicken keeper friends have no problem dispatching a neck like they were snap peas. Swift and Vulcan .

Therein lies my 'Chicken Hypocrisy' debate.. Were I to seriously "Keep it Real" barn yard style I would be like this;




Lately I've been looking at the pages of people and first of all... I'm not really sure y'all realize how beautiful your worlds are, but you don't have nosy neighbors who don't believe that you should be eating your own eggs. 

So for those of you who are limited zoning  

Riddle Me This: do you dispatch your roosters or re-home them?

I've gone back and forth about culling a chick who starts to show signs of being of the unwanted sex. Sorry Guys... although I'm sure some of you had it coming.
(I'm looking at you mean anti-social neighbor whose dog pissed on my shoe )

Children don't like it when you kill things they name.  And honestly folks I'm too big of a bleeding heart to look into their big eyes and say, "Sorry baby but we gonna kill him, bless your heart". 

Him of course are the male chicks you have irresponsibly let your children name--and then had to rehome-all our roosters of the BBCE microfarm....
Spike (White Crested Blue Polish), Forrest/Jenny (Turken), Kramer (Splash White Showgirl) and last but not least Ralphie as in Christmas Story (Black/Blue Bearded Silkie)

He really does look like what Ralphie would look like.. if he were a chicken. How could I kill something who represents Raphie? I mean come on people. 

Got distracted.. sorry

So absolutely no disrespect to those of you Farm Sturdy people who aren't me and have no problem with this. I mean that in the best sense.

How does everyone handle this?

What are some good ways to learn to buck up and do whats right or......WELL, come on they're little kids.. they'll believe pretty much anything.




Dead Fancy Bird Zen

It doesn't matter how far I travel I'm always reminded that born and raised in Idaho back in the 1970s was about living in a farming community. Everyone had chickens, gardens, squash patches, fruit trees and most of all grown up trees. Big trees.
I took from this upbringing the revelation that there is inherent good in those who care for their environment. Their land, their family, their character.

So why am I writing about a Dead Fancy Bird? 
HRH Margaret is.. or rather, was, my fancy breed bird. She was a Belgian d'Uccle Mille Fleur.

My Spidy-senses should have been tipped off by the fact that her name weighed more than she did. 

If anyone has happened to catch my previous posts, on my ill-fated dabblings into the magic of hatching eggs, you will understand the following better than anyone else.


Maggie was the lone chick to have survived my inept hatching contraptions and various flock attacks by dogs and the weather.  She was almost a year old, and quite gorgeous. You might remember that I ordered all those wonderful fancy eggs not too long ago. Yep. I thought I was Caroline fricking Ingalls. In reality it was a little closer to this:



Anyhow-- she managed to survive my best attempts to snuff her here at Chicken Survivor Island.
Over this last year it seems I've become the female equivalent of Lenny from the Grapes of Wrath.
Thank God someone talked me out of rabbits. Gretchen Anderson might have had to give some quote on how many Backyard Chicken Keepers go off the deep end.

Ok.. I have to stay focused.

Maggie's breed type and champion lines were what attracted me to her. Her brother Winston died last year from-- I kid you not-- a heart attack after a vicious puppy barking incident involving my chihuahua.
Heart attacks in certain fowl are not uncommon. This can actually happen in some breeds of birds... and I knew that.
I also knew that even with champion breed lines, certain birds requires a home for which those types of breeds are more suited.

So...at the end of the day I'm left with no one to blame and a Dead Fancy Bird. I get the Zen and learned my lesson from her death. So please don't flame me with hate mail.

Still, the Idaho Matriarch in me didn't like not having something to show for the effort. Needless to say I have a ziploc bag full of beautiful speckled super soft feathers that I'm determined to make into jewelry.
I'm sure my creations will be picked up immediately for Paris Fashion Week and I'll start a charity in HRH Maggie's name dedicated to congenital heart defect among fancy bird breeds.

But most likely they will end up gracing our Holiday Tree... glued to macaroni art and covered in glitter.

I promise to think about my Dead Fancy Bird Zen every time I look at the feathers.

Damnit I'm still here...

Well hey y'all. I missed you too. Gotta say that I LOVED that people actually noticed and said something. *tear* .. oh you all do give a rats ass. *thank you* And sometimes that's enough.. lately it means a lot.

The soundtrack to this post is Jeff Buckley's cover of Hallelujah... the album cut. He gets too noodle-y in the live version.

As a Mother and Human being.. it's been hard to not really get a sense of coming change...

I had to take a break from blogging and at times eating while sitting. Our reality as a family has had to do some important but challenging shifting. We are one of the fortunate here in the Boise Valley to be able to continue to maintain a normal way life. Our family still lives and loves our home.
Change is coming to our little piece of heaven by means of improvement and incredible sadness.

The centerpiece of Family Micro Farm is our beloved trees. Oak, Maple, Elm, Apple, Cherry, Apricot.... we have more than a few of each. It seems the main trees are in the way of a Power line that the city of Boise is moving for a much needed improvement to our area. It's something that has left me a little out of my head.. especially since what we understood after our inquiry about the project is that our property would not be impacted. Until of course they showed up to cut our trees in half. So we are working it out together.. hopefully we can come to a good place.

 Our family has also grown and it means adjusting schedules, more mouths to feed, bathe, and sometimes try to ignore. I kid. Sort of.

The Flock is doing well. We've had losses in the last few months. I'll be blogging more about them in the next few minutes.


So in short...thank you.. for giving a damn. And I mean that sincerely