State of the Homestead

It's been a crazy week and not always a happy one. The homestead has been rife with drastic climate change, savage attacks and even death. Several deaths. But only one was murder.

First off, Greg has joined the club that until now only Iko and I were members. A grumpy scorpion, angry at being disturbed, stung Greg on the foot. Many colorful cuss words and smashing ensued. 

I know Greg thought I was being a drama queen a few months back when a scorpion stung me while in bed. He doesn't think that anymore. ;-)  Fortunately, the pain lasted only two days.

This week we also sent five roosters to chicken heaven. I had hoped to dispatch them over a month ago, but I didn't want to butcher them alone and we always seemed to have something else to do while Greg was here.

Being older birds, I figured they were tough so I boiled them for the dogs. (I regularly cook chicken for the dogs anyway.) As it simmered in the pot, the aroma was heavenly, so I took a little bite to see how tough it was. OMG! It was the best chicken I had ever tasted.

The dark meat was really dark and the white meat actually had flavor. Unlike store bought chickens, the legs were long and straight and the skin was a beautiful white with pink undertones. Greg is already making plans to build an automated chicken plucker so we don't spend so much time plucking next time.

But death also came in fur this week. I was working on edits when a coyote sprinted not six feet in front of my studio window. I dashed out as soon as I saw him, but he was gone in a heartbeat. So were one of my hens. I looked for her several times yesterday, but there was no sign of my poor chicken anywhere.

I'm glad Tank wasn't with me. I don't think I could have stopped him from giving chase. I might have to carry a gun from now on though.

We'd been in the 80s most of the week, but yesterday in the space of five minutes, it dropped down into the 40s. I still have tomatoes, peppers and eggplants on the vine so I covered them up and hope they'll make it for a few more weeks.

Our project for most of this week was a remodel of the greenhouse. The plastic sheeting didn't work, getting torn off with the first big winds of the spring, so this time we riveted hard plastic sheets together. 

One half of the greenhouse will be an actual greenhouse. But we're turning the other half into a second chicken yard. We'll be separating by breed in 2011 and we realized part of the greenhouse would be the perfect size for a smaller chicken yard.

The weather turned on us before we could finish though. I'll post pictures as soon as it's done. It looks pretty cool so far.

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Today is Black Friday. Will you be out today? Let me know how the crowds are. I'm going to lie low until Monday. Meanwhile, I'm going to look for that dastardly coyote.