Tool Cleaning Bucket

I didn't use all the sand in the chicken dust baths. In between making them, I made a tool cleaning bucket. 

Pretty simple - Fill a bucket halfway with sand. Add a cup of mineral oil. Wait an hour then stir. Repeat. 

To use, brush dirt off your tool then plunge the blade in the bucket. The sand is abrasive and polished the metal, the mineral oil coats the metal and keeps it from rusting. 

I tested it on a shovel. 

Looks nice and shiny, although I think I could add more mineral oil in the bucket. Seems a little patchy.

Chicken Dust Baths

Gotta deal with those chicken mites...

The chickens have a routine of dust bathing among the lilacs in the early afternoon, but there are a few additions that work well to get rid of mites and other crawling insects. 

Diatomaceous earth is the main thing; it's pulverized diatoms (microscopic organisms made of silica) which shred the insects that walk over them. Wood ash can also help. Sulfur dust is good at repelling parasites. 

This website has percentages for mixing the different ingredients. 

I picked up a few buckets of sand for free from someone on Facebook marketplace. We already had diatomaceous earth and sulfur from past gardening years. I collected a bucket of ash from our fire pit. Then I mixed everything in a tote. 

A tire holds an awful lot of sand, etc.

Finally ready!

And look, one of the infected mamas used it right away! 

She rolled all over, flipping sand everywhere. Those mites don't stand a chance! 

One tire doesn't allow for much chicken bathing. We didn't have many options to add another. Then, on our way to church Sunday we noticed someone had dumped a couple tires in a center median. I half jokingly said we should take them home with us. A few days later, one tire was gone, but the thick one was still there...

G swung by after work and picked it up for me as a surprise. 😊

Nice and deep for chickens to dig. 

I used up the last of the sand and the collected ash. It didn't come quite up to the top, but I think it'll be okay. They won't be able to scratch so much out this way. 

Someone else enjoys getting dust baths...

He's been mesmerized by the gravel in the driveway. He spun in an entire circle checking out all the gravel. And surprisingly only one rock ended up in his mouth! 

Wanderers

Our neighbors don't want our birds on their side of the fence. I happened to look out the window as I often do and saw a flash of buff feathers through a gap in the fence. 

So Jaron and I went out to take a look. Sure enough, both chicken mamas were scratching with their chicks on the wrong side. 

We walked around the fence to our neighbors' property and I herded the chickens as best I could so they would go back through the gap under the fence. The chicks went first and their mamas followed.

Whew! Big relief. 

The other chickens and ducks have been wandering and foraging in the beautiful weather we've had. It's impacting their egg shell colors in a good way. 

The ducks haven't had dark eggs in weeks! Some of them never, but take a look at the most recent egg haul:

The chickens too have had many more shades in their eggs. 

Jaron loves looking at eggs. I found this out one afternoon while I threw a load of laundry in. Jaron had been playing with his toys when all of a sudden it was too quiet... He had found a basket of eggs we brought back from the farm and was picking them up and putting them down again. 

He was very gentle and didn't crack any, but I will admit I didn't last very long letting him explore the basket. 😅

Potatoes in Hay

Somewhere in my Internet perusals I came across a YouTube video of guys who did a potato planting experiment. They tested how many eyes a chunk should have for best harvest and they tested a number of popular growing methods for best results. 

The winners of the experiments were using a whole potato and the Ruth Stout method. Container plantings didn't result in a great yield, but the convenience of being able to move them to our garage and harvest in December was too good to skip, so I plan to plant some that way too.

The whole potato method is self explanatory. I'd never heard of the Ruth Stout method, but after a little research I discovered it's super easy. Also, we have a bunch of spent hay, so we have everything we need!

Start by putting potatoes on the ground, 12" apart. 

I started with a ruler and ended up using my foot as a measurement. 

Some of the seed potatoes had gigantic sprouts already. I chose to leave them attached and arranged them so the sprouts ran along the ground. 

Next, I spaced the onions. 

I also spread out some garlic bulbs I discovered drying out in the fruit room. Oops, forgot about those we harvested last fall... 

No way we're eating them so I might as well see if they grow. I had a few dried out potatoes left from our fall harvest and a few hard carrots, so I planted those as well. 

The last step is to cover them with about 8" of mulch/straw. 

It keeps the weeds down and retains moisture. According to my research, we won't even need to water them. 

Next year we can reuse the bed and simply add more hay over top. Perfect. 

Carbon Steel Initiation

We got a new pan, a wok to replace our electric wok which had the nonstick coating flaking off. 

It's carbon steel, which is cared for similarly to cast iron. It gets seasoned with use, and the more you use it, the more nonstick it gets. 

It came with a coat of wax over the entire thing to protect the carbon steel from rusting and the seasoning from getting scratched. There were special instructions for first use. 

The person who sold it to us recommended putting it in the oven on warm on top of some old towels to catch the wax. 

It took a couple of times in the oven, mostly because I kept getting interrupted during the process. I did use paper towels to wipe off the melted wax that didn't drip onto the sacrificial shirt. 

We inaugurated the dewaxed and freshly seasoned pan with stir fry veggies of course! 

Now I'm curious... What else do you use a wok for???
 

Vanilla Mother

Somehow I came across this video on YouTube. Infinite vanilla extract? Using a mother jar? Consider me intrigued. 

Simple enough concept - have a big jar with all your beans and alcohol, fill a smaller jar for daily use, top up the mother jar as you take from it. The mother jar sits and extracts until you need it. 

The only rules are, fill up your "daily use" jar when it gets down to 1/3 left. Never drain the mother jar more than halfway empty. Always add a couple beans to the mother jar when you refill with alcohol. 

So, I combined both of my vanilla extract batches (one Madagascar and one Mexican), plus the vanilla extract I got as a Christmas gift from a friend and the jar of vanilla I found in my baking supply crate. 

The jar I wanted to use had cucumber chips in it, so I took those out. It's just a little bigger than a standard quart mason jar. 

We don't love eating the cucumber chips as a snack. Might as well try something new. I pulverized them in my spice grinder to make cucumber ranch powder. Who knows how I'll use that, but we have it available! 😂 Man, I make some weird things sometimes. 

Here's the mother jar with everything in it.

The most frustrating thing was trying to get all of the residual vanilla beans out of the old jars, haha. Lots of pouring back and forth... 

Of course, pouring all that vanilla from bottle to bottle resulted in a bit of a spill. Instead of wasting the vanilla, I dumped some sugar on it to absorb the extract. I'll use the vanilla sugar and some type of baked good. 

I poured off two jars to use right now. Well, one is going in the fruit room to be my backup. 

A Tale of Two Chickens

A friend of ours who raises chickens supplements their feed with Flock Armor, an egg and immune boosting powder. He's had great success with it. G sent me a picture of the package and it was all ingredients we had at home or would be easy to source. I smell a DIY project coming on! 

Of course I ran the ingredient list through chat gpt to get correct ratios. I also had chat adjust the recipe so one batch could be mixed in with 100lbs of feed (our normal chicken feed batch amount). Here's what it came up with for 12 chickens and 6 ducks: 

I had oregano from our garden last year and a bunch of old turmeric G brought into our marriage along with just enough nutritional yeast for the recipe. I had a jar of very old garlic powder I brought into our marriage that got used up. Lots of old spices used up! 

I ran a few things through the spice grinder, just to smooth it out a bit. Then I stirred it together and put it back into the empty brewer's yeast container. 😅

The chickens seemed intrigued by the sprinkling of powder I dusted over their feed. They don't have a great sense of smell, but all of these spices must have been strong enough for them to catch a whiff. 

I also dusted it over the feed bowls of our two mama chickens. Yes, those two broody hens up in the haymow hatched their eggs! 

They did a good job incubating them. We counted 16 hatched chicks. Unfortunately, most of them were dead when we found them; only five survived. 😭 

At first, we thought the cats had been picking off the chicks. The hens still had eggs underneath them that hadn't hatched yet, and G spent a good chunk of time making a fortification around the hens so the cats couldn't get to them easily. 

We debated pulling one hen and the hatched chicks and leaving the other pen to hatch the remaining 9 eggs. We weren't sure if the other hen would stick around to incubate the eggs if the chicks were gone. But, our incubator is up and running (another batch of duck eggs), so if she abandoned them, we would be able to transition the unhatched eggs into the incubator. After they hatched, we could reunite them with their mothers. 

That's what we ended up doing. G grabbed one of the moms and the four chicks and moved them to the back area where the goats kidded. Unfortunately, as soon as the chicks were gone, the other hen jumped down to fight the other hen for her babies. That's when we wondered if the dead chicks were a casualty of the moms fighting.

It wasn't until G left the shed and felt bugs crawling all over him that we realized there's a mite infestation in the haymow. Chicken mites don't transfer to humans; they love sucking chicken blood at night. During the day they hide in cracks, wood, and most likely in our case, hay bales. G checked the two mamas and found lots of the bugs on both. Ugh. The mites probably feasted on the babies and they weren't strong enough to withstand the attack. 

How to get rid of mites? Clean the coop, diatomaceous earth, and dust baths. These poor hens probably weren't leaving their nest long enough to take a dust bath. Mites have a lifespan of only 5-7 days, so we should be able to clear them out soon. 

G separated the two moms, sprinkled diatomaceous earth on the hay, and got them all settled with feed and water. He split the chicks up- two for each hen.

Only one more egg hatched after we relocated the eggs to the incubator, and the darker hen seemed to want it. She fluffed up as soon as she heard it peeping and came up to the door of her pen, ready to fight G for her baby. 

So, we have two good broody hens who are also good moms. Hopefully they'll be able to keep them alive and well once we turn them loose.