Dust Bath Refresh

The last time we were at the farm we brought back a gigantic tire to use as a mega chicken dust bath. We finally got it set up this past weekend. 

I found another free sand listing on marketplace, and we picked up a bunch of 5 gallon pails. Some of that sand ended up in the giant tire along with some coconut husk fiber, dirt, and diatomaceous earth.

Leftover sand for future projects...

Since we had extra sand, we also topped up the other dust baths. 

Using some dirt left a few big pots available for repurposing. I am attempting to make additional nesting boxes for the chickens. So far, they haven't been interested. 

They also haven't tested out the new dust bath. I wonder if the tire is too tall for them to realize what's inside. I guess I need to build some chicken steps. 😂

Garden Replant

My poor garden took a beating while we were gone. Only two of my basil plants made it. The rest look like they were never there. 😭 Did something eat them or did they whither away from wind/heat/lack of water? My two Roma tomato plants also shriveled up and I couldn't see the rosemary I planted. A couple pepper plants were gone too. 

The trellis plants look okay- transplants all alive and the seeds have sprouted. My cucumbers have sprouted too. The ones struggling are the items I planted inside holes in flattened cardboard boxes, intending to put mulch on top but ran out of time before we left. The weeds have pushed the cardboard up, and at my quick look around I couldn't tell if any of the seeds were growing. Sigh. 

Thankfully the garden center still had plant starts, so I restocked the tomatoes, peppers, and herbs, along with a bean plant and a basil plant. The basil isn't a kind I'm excited about, but I want fresh basil, so I'll plant it and start some new basil from seed. 

Thawed Items

Our fridge is packed with salvaged thawed items, chicken broth and a whole chicken to name a few. 

I found a soup recipe that calls for a whole chicken. A bit misleading because you make broth with the whole chicken and then make soup afterwards from parts of both the meat and broth. Still, an easy enough recipe and the broth smells really good. 

The formerly frozen chicken broth I decided to freeze dry. I've freeze dried broth before, and it turned out fine. This is a bit of an experiment because this particular chicken broth is not very flavorful. I think we added too much water to the roaster when we were making the broth. I'm curious if freeze drying it will improve the flavor since all of the water will be taken out. 

Instead of filling the trays and freezing them in the freezer, I put empty trays in the freeze dryer and filled them directly in the machine with a long spouted funnel.

That worked very slick! Now, how many days will it take to freeze dry them???

Mulberry Foraging

There's a big mulberry tree close to G's work that's plumb full of berries. 

Jaron and I stopped by today and picked for about an hour. Jaron loved being able to stretch an arm out and grab berries to eat while I picked. Sometimes he squawked at me because I wasn't close enough to the tree for him to reach a berry. 😂 I'm not sure how many he ate, but a few fell out of my carrier when I took him out at the end. 

We picked roughly a gallon. The trick is to "tickle" the berries and they fall into the pail.

Mulberries are pretty delicate and don't last long fresh, so I'll freeze the bulk of them. Last year I dehydrated them and we didn't love the texture (probably because I over dried them 😅). Freezing is easier, so we'll go with that! 

Foraging Compost

Mama chickens teaching their chicks to forage the compost pile. 😊 (Blurry picture due to morning sunlight and not wanting to get too close and spook them). 

That's one of the best things about chicks hatched by a hen instead of via incubator - they learn how to be chickens from chickens instead of needing to figure it out themselves. 
 

Freezer Refresh

Monday night we arrived home from a vacation to the Baltic Sea (a post for another day, stay tuned!). 

It's always good to be home after a long trip, and Monday was no exception. Jaron had fallen asleep in his car seat on the way home, so even though I was drooping with exhaustion myself, I took the opportunity to do a few things, like check our animals and bring the suitcases inside (G arrived home about an hour after me). 

I went into the laundry room to turn on the water- due to a leaky outdoor faucet we had shut off the water to the whole house while we were gone (our chore people turned it on and off every time they came). I noticed a strange smell in the laundry room, kind of like rotten eggs. That didn't make any sense because the diapers had all been washed and hung to dry before we left, and all of the eggs had been cleaned out of the incubator. Nothing should have been stinky in there. 

Uh oh, water on the floor. It was near our upright freezer, not close to anything that could be leaking. 

My first thought was that one of us had left the freezer door open a tiny bit (it happened once before 🤦‍♀️). But the freezer opened normally. I shut it without registering the puddle of water at the bottom. Oh no! 

It's a pretty old freezer, so I thought it had died. What actually happened: it was plugged into the same breaker as our water softener. Because we had shut the water off to the whole house, when the water softener went to run, it blew the breaker because there wasn't any water to run through it. The breaker obviously shut off power to the freezer. So our entire vacation, everything in the freezer was melting. 

Thankfully, it wasn't packed full. I threw a lot of vegetables on the compost pile, which the chickens appreciated. The last of my stored breastmilk was also dumped on the compost pile. It was expired, and I wasn't planning to feed it to Jaron, but I had plans to try making soap / lotion with it. Bummer. 

The meat was the worst loss. Thankfully, some of the meat still had ice on it, and we separated that from the totally thawed items. Our dog Jip will feast like a king! We actually refroze some of the completely thawed meat to be labeled and fed to Jip another time. 

G and I were both so exhausted, we only took the time to move the items into the fridge or compost pile. The cleaning had to wait for another day. Our basement isn't baby-proofed, which made cleaning it out quite tricky with Jaron underfoot. Finally I brought the baby tower to the laundry room and forced him to hang out in there. Not his favorite thing in the world.

I tried magna tiles on the drier (worked for a while), soapy water and bath toys in the utility sink (he ate the bubbles), and finally snacks on the drier. Between all of those, I got the job done. 🥳 

What do you mean I can't eat soap?

Not pleased to be trapped (also battling jet lag).

Okay, I guess I'll play. 

Using towels to soak up the standing water. Gross, but none of the shelves can come out. I washed them right away and they came out just fine. 

Did one wipe down with soapy water, then a second wipe down with vinegar/vodka as a disinfectant. 

Hopefully good as new!

Dirt Montage

My little planting buddy. 

He has a pail of dirt with "tools" in the garden to keep him entertained. Further entertainment was provided by the puddle of rainwater caught by the cardboard box.

He went back and forth between this bucket and a pot of lemon balm (in a pot because it spreads so quickly). I ended up taking out the lemon balm seedlings temporarily because he dug it up so much. 

That excitement quickly wore off and he wanted to use my tool, a hori hori knife. Nope. Mine. But every time I set it down, Jaron was watching like a hawk to grab it. When he tired of that he "helped" collect all the plant starts I had laid out in the garden. Thanks buddy, please leave them there! 

I'm trying to teach him to watch his feet and that some plants and okay to step on and some aren't. Slow progress. 😅 He kept stepping on the herbs I just planted. I think they'll bounce back though. Thankfully I had cages around my peppers, so he wasn't able to step on those. They aren't nearly as forgiving.