Chick magnet?

There are a lot of chicken-y kinds of things going on around here right now. Since our chicken fiasco a month ago, we've been working on trying to increase our chicken numbers, hoping for some more hens. We would like to be in a position to provide a dozen eggs a week to around 10 customers by the summer of 2013. There are three different ways we're attempting to increase numbers right now.

First off, Orrin found a couple farms in the area that hatched some chicks recently, so he brought home five Rhode Island Red chicks, who were probably 1 to 2 weeks old when he got them. They are about three weeks old now. He also bought five Buff Orpington day-old chicks, they are now 2 weeks old. All ten chicks seem very energetic and healthy.

Second, we borrowed an incubator from some friends, and 23 days ago we put 11 eggs into it. Our lovely Rhode Island Red rooster recently died for some unknown reason, and so we collected eggs from the Rhode Island hens for the next few days, hoping that they had been fertilized before the rooster died. The general incubation period for chickens is 21 days, and just like clockwork, on the 21^st day (2 days ago), several eggs pipped. Two chicks made their way out of their shells by that evening, three hatched yesterday, and one more had hatched by the time we woke up this morning. One that was born yesterday seemed to be weaker than the others, and didn't fluff out like the others did. That one died this morning. Out of 11 eggs, we found that two did not get fertilized, three did not hatch, and six were born. After that one died this morning, we have 5 vibrant little chicks. It's amazing how much smaller than the Buff's they look, who are only 1 ½ weeks older than them. The 3-week old Rhode Island Red's are so much bigger still that we moved the Red chicks to another brooder, as we didn't want any of the day-old's to get trampled.

The last thing we did to increase our chicken numbers was to put five eggs under a Buff Orpington who recently went broody. Oh, I guess I should mention that after the Rhode Island Red rooster died, we bought a Buff Orpington rooster, so we are now saving Buff Orpington eggs. You may recall that the last broody hen was a Buff Orpington, and you'd be correct. We have two Buff hens, and the current broody hen is not the hen that was broody last month. We have learned our lesson about trying to leave a hen with eggs in the coop with the rest of the chickens, and have put the eggs in a nest of hay up in the cow shed, where this particular hen likes to lay her eggs. We hope it'll be out of the way enough that she and the babies will be left alone when they hatch.

So we now have 15 baby chicks, with the potential for five more from the broody hen. If all those hatch and are healthy, hopefully at least half of all the chicks will be hens, giving us about 10 more laying hens in approximately six months. 

What's in a Name?

We have now been on our farm for a year and a half, and only in the last month have we finally decided on a farm name. It turned out to be way more challenging than I would have thought. We wanted to come up with a name that was meaningful to us, yet easy to pronounce for the public. Our ideas came from all over the place. At one point, we thought about trying to come up with a name based on the local indians (mi'kmaq), because we figure they would have been the stewards of this land long before we came here. It was too hard to find a name that was pronounceable that we liked, and we didn't tend to like the English versions of the names that were meaningful to us.

Then we started thinking about Italy. Italy is a special place to us, as we spent 5 weeks there in the winter of 2006/2007. We enjoyed the hilltop towns, rolling pastures and vineyards, among other things. We thought about names like “Good Earth” or “Beautiful Earth” in Italian, but nothing seemed to flow when we added the word “farm” at the end of it.

So what's the name?

Mirella Rose Farm.

Here's why: Mirella is the name of a character that we like in one of our favorite movies, an Italian movie called “The Best of Youth”. Rose was my mother's middle name, plus it's our favorite flower. Orrin collected English roses when we lived in California, and eventually - when there's time - we'll create an ornamental garden here largely based on the collection he's re-created since being in Canada. He had over 100 plants that we were forced to leave in the States because of Canada's rules around plants, but he's re-built the collection somewhat since then. And lastly, if Oliver had been a girl, he would have been named Mirella Rose.

We've been rolling the words around in our mouths, getting used to the name, and I think it's just right.

So come visit us here at Mirella Rose Farm. And soon you'll be able to buy food from us, too.

Tap, tap, tap!

It's maple sugaring time! Yesterday we put 11 spiles (taps) into maple trees not too far from the house, and hope to put another 10 or so in, once we gather some additional buckets. We are tapping red maples, as we haven't found any sugar maples nearby. We have found a few in a couple far-off corners of the property, but nothing convenient enough for carrying full buckets back and forth for boiling. Red maples require more boiling down than sugar maples, because there is not as much sugar in the sap. For red's, it'll probably take around 50 gallons of sap to produce 1 gallon of syrup. For sugar's, it's 30 or 40 gallons to produce 1 gallon. Last year we just played around with it, and boiled down our sap inside the house. It produced way too much condensation from the evaporating water, not to mention all the electricity required, so this year we're set up with an outside fire pit that Orrin made. He used bricks to create a U-shaped enclosure that is tall enough to have a decent-sized fire inside, and a grate on top to place the pots. We had tapped the trees around 2pm yesterday, and by about noon today Orrin was getting the fire going and had collected 12 gallons of sap to get us started. We had it boiling down most of the day, continually adding sap to the pot as the level in the pot dropped.

The taps weren't running today, because the temperatures hadn't dropped below freezing last night. The optimal time for tapping is when the daytime temperatures are above freezing, and the nighttime temperatures are below freezing. Hopefully the weather will cooperate so we can be tapping for the next two to three weeks.

We're sure looking forward to the first syrup. As Oliver would say, “It's de-wish-ous!”

"Breaking" News

Our first chick-raising experiment turned out to be yet another lesson in farm life, rather than a success story. We had put six eggs under our broody Buff Orpington hen to start, about 4 weeks ago. A week or two ago, one of the eggs got crushed in the nest somehow, so then we were down to five. A few days ago, we started hearing chirping from inside the eggs, which was pretty exciting. The next morning, there was a baby chick under the hen! An hour or so later, Orrin went back to check on them, and saw that one of the commercial chickens that we had recently added to the flock had killed the chick and was in the process of eating it. Yikes! Orrin then tried moving the hen and her remaining eggs out of the henhouse and into a separate space, but she abandoned the eggs and headed back into the coop to sit on the (now empty) nest that she had been sitting on for the past 3 weeks. So then Orrin moved the eggs back into the henhouse, but put them into one of the higher nest boxes, hopefully out of reach of the aggressive commercial chickens. Of the remaining four eggs, one was half-rotten, so it must have stopped developing early on; two others died in the shell, right around the time they should have been hatching; and the last one would have been fine except that it, too, got eaten by another chicken.

What did we learn from this experience?

1. Keep the broody hen and her eggs separate from the rest of the flock. We didn't have any problems with the heritage hens, but those damn commercial hens have turned out to be way more aggressive.
2. Start later in the spring. Because that hen went broody, we gave her some eggs to see what would happen, but the cold may have contributed to the deaths of a couple of the chicks.
3. We won't be keeping the commercial hens in the flock, long term. They lay pretty well, but we don't want that kind of aggressive behavior in the flock, so we won't be saving any of their eggs to increase the flock.

We're glad we only sacrificed six eggs on this experiment, and hope the next round is more successful. We've got another broody hen, so we'll be trying this process again soon, and will probably put ten or so eggs under her. We'll stick with Rhode Island Red eggs, since that's our rooster.

And then he was gone

Sadly, I have to say that the baby sheep died. We feel terrible about it, because we feel responsible. The day after he was born, we noticed that the ewe didn't seem to want to let him nurse, but we weren't standing there watching them all day, so we didn't know if he had nursed at other times when we weren't around. That afternoon, Sunday, I was away for a couple of hours, and came home to find Orrin in the house with the baby curled up on his lap. He said that he'd found the baby in the sheep shed, collapsed on the ground from weakness. Orrin brought him inside and laid him near the woodstove to keep warm, then went back outside, flipped the ewe over onto her back (sheep become very docile when held on their back) and milked into a small bucket. He went back into the house and used a baby syringe to feed some milk to the baby. Shortly after he'd done that is when I arrived home. I grabbed a heating pad to try to give the baby some additional warmth, and then went and called someone locally who used to raise sheep, for advice. When I came back downstairs, the baby had died. We were kind of in shock, and as I said, feel terrible about it. From talking to other folks, we learned that we need to make sure the baby nurses within 45 minutes to an hour after being born, so they get the first milk, colostrum, and so the mother and baby make that connection.

We realized that the times that are really difficult here are when we learn the most. What will we do the next time we think an animal is going to give birth? Keep an eye on them until the baby is born, and make sure the mother nurses them. In the long run, we won't want to keep animals that aren't very maternal, but we sure don't want to let the babies die because of that. We'll just keep track of that, and try to build up a herd of animals, whichever type they may be, that have a strong instinct to care for their young.

It's a boy!

While Orrin was out feeding and watering the animals this morning, he noticed that the Shetland sheep, Olive, wasn't interested in eating. Normally the animals are ravenous when he takes hay out to them, so this kind of behavior was unusual. She was due to have a baby any time, and he took her disinterest in food as a potential sign that she was going into labor. So he kicked the Jacob ram out of the pen – he was loose but would never go far from the Jacob female. We were gone for most of the day, and when we got home this evening, we went up to the sheep/cow shed to see if there was a new baby or two. There was a beautiful little curly black sheep, tucked in with Olive! Sometimes sheep can have multiples, but in this case there was just the one. We were kind of hoping for a female, so we would have another Shetland to help increase the herd, so now we'll have to decide what to do with the male. I would have taken a picture, but our camera recently met its demise at the hands of a certain boy.

Following up to my last post about bacon, we spent almost the entire next day trying to smoke the remaining 7 lbs in the barbeque. We had a heck of a time trying to get “billowing smoke”, as one of our book resources told us we should have. What finally ended up working was heating up a bunch of briquettes, then spreading out the hot ashes in a cast-iron pan and laying somewhat dried apple wood chips on top. Wet chips just kept putting out the briquettes, but wet ones that had been allowed to dry somewhat seemed to do a better job. We ended up with bacon that was quite smoky (definitely what we wanted), but still too salty, even after I had re-rinsed the meat that morning. The whole salt thing is very perplexing to me, as I didn't use even close to as much salt as the recipe called for, and yet it is way too salty.

Bacon Drama

We have been spending a lot of time with our pork these days. The other day I made sausage for the first time, which was so incredibly easy (if you don't bother with casings), that I can't believe I hadn't done it before. Basically, ground pork + herbs/spices + molding into patties = sausage. Who knew? OK, you probably did, but it was a nice surprise to me. I imagine I'll be doing that a lot more with ground pork in the future.

On the other spectrum of difficulty, we spent much of the day attempting to make bacon for the first time. A few days ago, we thawed one of the pork bellies from the freezer, which was 8 lbs of pork. We laid the pieces out flat on cookie sheets and casserole dishes (three were required) and rubbed a lot of salt and a little bit of pepper into the meat, then drizzled a little apple cider on top. We covered them and put them in the fridge to cure for 2 days (recommendations on curing seem to range from 24 hrs to 7 days). This morning, we tried using the grill to smoke the pork, as that seemed like the best option since we don't have a smokehouse. The book we were using as a reference said to soak wood chips for at least an hour, ignite them, then when they are smoldering place them on one side of the grill and the meat on the opposite side. What we pretty quickly found challenging was that you can't ignite wet wood chips! Orrin then did some on-line research and someone suggested lighting a few briquettes and then adding the chips to that. We tried that several times, but the wet chips kept putting out the briquettes and we had to reheat them. Finally, the chips must have dried out enough that they started to take the heat from the briquettes, and began smoking. We almost threw in the towel and were going to try it again tomorrow, but decided to put about 1 lb of the pork on the grill to try to smoke it, to at least practice on that. It's tricky to keep the grill on low enough to not cook the meat, yet still provide enough heat to keep the chips smoldering. We were trying for 210F in the grill, but mostly it was around 150 or 160F. Once we got to 150F in the meat (the recommended temperature), we stopped, which was late this afternoon. We cooked up our first batch of bacon and definitely got the smoky taste but also found that it was way too salty, so I must not have rinsed off enough of the salt from the meat, or else I put way too much on the first place (which I didn't actually think was possible, since I was following a recipe, and since the point of the salt is to draw out the water from the meat). I'll try rinsing the remaining meat some more before we start up again tomorrow. We chopped up the remains from today and threw it into the pot of lentils that was cooking on the stove for dinner, and it was delicious – and not too salty.

And hey, we made bacon!