It’s the longest day today, and interestingly, it comes at the end of the longest week.
I am behind on the journal’s Summer Solstice issue, but I have decided to give myself some grace. It will get done. This week, my son had music camp, and tonight, on the Solstice, I got to listen to amazing children playing beautiful music. It was a little bit of heaven, but it has been a really busy week.
We were away from the homestead for many hours today, and my little turkeys are getting bigger but still babies, especially in their hearts,. I was worried about being away all day. It was pretty late when we made it home, but I forgot it was the longest day. It was still daylight, and all my turkeys were safe.
When I went out later to put the ducks to bed after dark, I got the best Summer Solstice gift. The fireflies were epic! I have never seen them so magnificent.
I did my best to record them. You can kind of get a sense of the magic here. Aren’t they sparkly?
Tonight, I got to experience my favorite parts of being alive and a human–music and nature. My son has become a pretty amazing cellist. It’s really a joy to watch him work. Then, I got this gift of the fireflies.
I have to try to soak this up. Life is short. I hope, on this shortest night, you are soaking up your favorite things.
I have a carton of eggs that I keep in the refrigerator just for us. I labeled the carton “The Misfits.” These are the eggs that come out very small or unusually large or with a strange shape or maybe they are a pale color and the poop stains the shell even after I wash them. I have often thought about how much I love these “misfits.”
They are not the perfect eggs from our flock in dark brown or light cream or blue-green with a beautiful shape, so I don’t put them in the egg cartons that I sell to our egg customers. I have the idea that people wouldn’t want to pay for the “misfits” because they are not perfectly-shaped like the ones in the grocery store. They are so beautiful to me, but I have always loved the misfits.
But lately I have been thinking about how the perfect eggs are a big lie. They are simply a lie told to us by a food system that keeps us detached from the reality of our food and where it comes from. And I feel that lie is a part of an even bigger lie about the uniformity of nature. It’s one Americans have told themselves so powerfully and so often that we can’t see the beauty in the diversity in the nature we are a part of.
Nature is beautiful in its diversity. Not all eggs are perfectly egg shaped. From our flock, we get round eggs, pointy eggs, skinny eggs, and we have one hen who just lays the tiniest little egg all the time. Sometimes, there are big eggs with double yolks. A couple of times we had an egg with a shell inside of an egg. It’s all fantastic and interesting. The egg companies take their “misfits” and use them in other products, so people who only get eggs in the grocery store never get to see the beauty in all that diversity. Oh, we miss so much!
When I researched to see what the egg companies did with their oddly-shaped eggs, I read that some people are scared to eat eggs that are oddly shaped. It’s so interesting to me that we are scared of what is different. I guess I can see a human needing to be wary of anything different, as you wouldn’t want to eat a bad egg, but we definitely need education because it’s not necessary to fear something just because it is different.
With all this in my mind, I decided last week to put some of my misfits into the egg cartons for the egg customers. It was just a couple of eggs in the 18 pack but hopefully enough to remind the wonderful humans who buy our eggs that not all eggs are the same size and shape. Goodness comes in all shapes, sizes, and colors.
It’s been a little chaotic on our little homestead the past few weeks. It is mostly related to my turkeys. I don’t know if all turkeys are like this, but my turkeys are mama’s babies and demand a lot of time and attention. They are magnificent and beautiful and so smart, but they are also a challenge. I spend a good bit of time every day having “turkey time.”
They are big enough to spend time outside during the day, outside of their brooder, but they don’t want to be out there by themselves. So I have to sit out there with them for hours. I have much work to do, so I usually sit on a tree stump and grade papers while the turkeys fly around and do their turkey thing. Sometimes, they fly on my head. Sometimes, they get into my lap. Mostly, they just run around and scratch and eat bugs, but as soon as I try to leave, they run after me and then sit at the fence and cry. And cry. And then cry some more.
Ron cannot hear it. It’s too high pitched for his old ears, but mine are not old enough yet, which means I hear it all, feel like a terrible turkey mama,, which I totally am, and then head back outside with my laptop and sit on the hard tree stump to do my work. My tailbone is very sore.
I put them to bed early tonight. My son said, “You’re putting them to bed? It’s only 6:30!”
I said, “Shh. Don’t tell them what time it is.”
And I put them back in the brooder box and told them mama was getting some alone time.
So I get to write this evening.
I hope you are all doing well. There is so much going on. I’m worried about our food supply without proper safety inspections. Are any of you worried about this as well? We grow a lot of our food, but I still rely on the grocery store for quite a few things. I hate the thought of our food getting less safe. I mean, it’s already not great.
Ron and I are keeping up with things but just barely. Poor Ron is still planting and being bitten by black flies, but I think he’s nearing the end. He’s moving the tomatoes from the planters he started the seeds in to the garden today. When he gets to the tomatoes and peppers, he’s getting close to done. I hope he can rest a little. He’s tired too. We both have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning.
I made the first round of rhubarb jelly, and I took pictures of the process so I can share the recipe with you. The jelly is already almost gone because we all love it. It’s beautiful jelly.
I will share my pictures and recipe tomorrow–if my turkeys will allow it.
Spring is keeping us busy. Ron is planting. I am raising baby turkeys, pruning fruit trees, and keeping a young cellist on track with a very busy May schedule. I have found that December and May are the two busiest months in my son’s musician life, but I think Mays are the busiest. It’s a very good busy, though. All of these performances are giving him such good experiences, and of course, even though I am constantly planning travel, food, water, and wardrobe, I am rewarded for my efforts with beautiful music. It has been a good spring.
Last week, it was a bit hot, and I am thankful that it cooled down. Yesterday it rained. It has been a pretty wet spring, which means tons of black flies and mosquitos (it has been one of the worst years I have ever seen for the black flies), but the garden is very, very happy. So far, Ron has planted peas, potatoes, lettuce, onions, spinach, beets, kohlrabi, and he has all the tomatoes, peppers, and melons started in the house. He has been so busy. I have felt badly for him planting out amongst those epic black flies. I am covered in bites just from my limited time pruning trees and such. I don’t even know how he stands to stay out there some days, but stand it he does.
And the garden is looking beautiful.
And speaking of beautiful, yesterday, after the rain, I got some great pictures of the fruit trees and of Ruby. By the way, we let the ducks come over and hang out with the chickens last week, but the ducks kind of bullied the chickens–except Ruby. I was talking over the fence with my neighbor when I heard a commotion. I looked over, and Ruby had had enough with being bullied. She was throwing down with the ducks!
Before I could get there, she had won, and the ducks moved on. I have no words for how much I admire that hen.
Here are some lovely photos from after the rain yesterday.
I now have eight little turkeys to mother. The other nine are with fantastic parents. I will write more about this journey so far later in the week, but I just had to write quickly tonight because we had our first field trip outside today. I hope to have the video to share soon, but I do have this picture. This one is a girl, I am pretty sure–at least I hope–because she’s the biggest mama’s baby. She comes up to me when everyone else is playing and just wants to be held. She’s working hard in this picture. I think she got a bug!
Oh, my heart. I needed some babies. I haven’t had time to read the news in two days.
I haven’t written much about it because I am too nervous, but I have 19 turkey eggs in the incubator right now. I have read that turkey eggs can be trickier than chicken eggs, and I have read that caring for turkey babies can be a lot trickier than caring for chickens. I have been reading and reading, scared to death I am going to hatch these turkeys and they are going to die. I read they can literally starve to death with food right there with them. I have read you have to check their crops every day between days 3 and 10 to make sure they are getting enough to eat. I have read you have to put something shiny, like a marble, in the waterer to encourage them to drink. Apparently, they will be curious about the a shiny marble, and it will get them to drink.
When we started this venture, I had not read enough about how hard it was going to be to raise turkeys, so I haven’t written much about it. I have been terrified I am going to accidentally kill those babies. However, I am starting to worry that I have done something wrong during incubation, and those babies are never going to hatch anyway.
Today is day 28. They were supposed to hatch today. And I am used to baby chicks who are supposed to hatch on day 21 but will sometimes hatch as early as day 19. Baby chicks are anxious and energetic. I don’t know what to expect with these turkeys, but I can see they might be a little too chill.
Of course, maybe I did something wrong. I candled twice, and things looked good. I started with 22 hatching eggs. On day 10, I candled, and all 22 had potential. On day 24, I removed the egg turner and candled again. I had 19 that looked promising. I could see movement in some, and they were all quite full. But here I am on day 28, and all I have is one pip. And it’s barely a pip.
I am trying to be patient. I read that is not uncommon for them to wait until the end of day 28 or even day 29, but if I don’t have any baby turkeys by tomorrow night, clearly something has gone wrong.
In the meantime, I wait. And the waiting is certainly the hardest part.
I have been talking to the eggs some today. I definitely heard a peep or two, but not much. When I am doing chicken eggs, those eggs will just cheep and cheep so loudly in the last day.
I decided, however, I am going to try something. I found a YouTube video of a mama turkey talking to her babies. I am about to go play it for my turkey eggs. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Cross your fingers for me! And if you have any experience with turkeys, please share any advice you can. I am going to need it. I mean, hopefully!
I just spent an hour trying to get the ducks put to bed. They are so sensitive to routine that anything out of the ordinary causes all kinds of trouble. Every night, I have to come out of the same door with the same bowl with the same peas and say the same things and bend down carefully and then step away carefully or I have messed things and the ducks are upset.
Unfortunately, this is getting hard to do now because poor little Anna Maria. She is getting very, very blind and maybe a little senile. She is pretty old, and she had such a rough start in her early life that she seems older than our other ducks, even though she is the same age. She is getting lost a lot, and I have to help her find her way back to the flock at least once or twice a day.
This is no problem during the day, but when I am trying to put ducks to bed and need everything to happen in the “special duck order,” finding Anna Mara with a flashlight and then carrying her to the duck house is causes some problems.
Tonight, I could never get them back on track. I ended up leaving the bowl of peas outside of the duck house for in the morning and herding those ducks into the duck house against their will. I mean, I started this whole mess at 9:00 PM. It is now almost 10:00 PM. The ducks needed to get put up to be safe.
I realized as I was looking everywhere tonight for Anna Maria that it’s a miracle she is still alive. It is a miracle a predator hasn’t gotten her yet. I pray that doesn’t happen now that I speak about it, but having a blind duck who often gets separated from the flock is a big worry. Every night that I have to go look for her, I worry I won’t find her, but then I remember Boudica.
As long as we are home (and we are home most of the time), Boudica is working. She protects those ducks all day and into the night before I get them put up to give Boudica a rest. She has done such a good job that Anna Maria, our blind duck with struggles, is getting a little senile she’s so old.
I hope this doesn’t get too much worse for a while. I want Anna Maria to have a good quality of life. I think she does. She can find the little plastic swimming pool, and sometimes, when the other ducks are out and about, she just plays in the pool all by herself. I think she likes it. I don’t think she’s too lonely.
But Boudica is very, very good at her job, isn’t she?
Well, friends, I did it. I successfully hatched a batch of baby chicks, and they are now all in the brand new brood box Ron made for them. That brood box is a masterpiece, and I must write about it one day. However, for my story today, you just need to know that it has a large window in the front, so it literally looks like a giant chicken tv.
And, as such, my husband, son, and I have found ourselves watching the baby chickens on “television” several times a day. Last night, we all happened to be out there together watching through the window at how the baby chicks interacted with their world.
“It’s so interesting to think about how their whole world is in that box right now,” my teenager said. “They don’t even know to look out the window.” Oh, that kid has a beautiful mind!
We all talked about how they have everything a baby chick could need or want (besides a mama) right there in that little box–it’s warm, it’s spacious, there’s fresh food and water. And there are many friends to be had. I think I hatched 29 chicks.
“Every now and then the hand of ‘God’ reaches in and adds fresh food and water, and then they are go on their little ways” my son said.
And this led us to a discussion of humans.
We talked about how much there is that humans can’t see or understand, which relates to how we define “God,” though my son pointed out that there are plenty of scientists who have been trying to “look out the window” and see what all is out there. Still, most of us probably don’t even have time to stop and look up at the stars.
I just spent the last four months working non-stop to try to save money and pay off debt before things get really tough economically. Thankfully, we did not have much debt. We are lucky. But we do not own our property outright, so that’s a worry. So, pretty much, for the last several months, if my eyes were open, I was working. I was exhausted mentally and physically and could not move my right arm very well from the repetitive motions. I noticed I was getting more and more grumpy, and I don’t like myself that way.
And then, last week, my jobs were cut back, as I knew they eventually would be. I didn’t “lose” the jobs, but there is just less work–fewer students in college means fewer classes. So, last week, for first time in a long time, I felt like I could breathe a little. As scary as it all is, I was just so thankful to not have to work so much.
The other night, when I went outside to put the ducks to bed, instead of rushing them into the duck house, so I could get back to work, I just stood outside and looked up at the stars. When I did, I realized I had not looked up at the stars in months. What a tragedy that is, right? The stars make me think of our Great Pyrenees Gus, who loved to sit outside and just look up at the stars at night, or the clouds during the day, or a cool bird on the fence. But, right before he died, we sat out under the stars for a long time and just took them in together.
The stars are lovely and remind me of how small I am and how small my problems are and how small even the cruel people in charge really are. They don’t know they’re small–well, maybe on some level they do and it scares them and that’s why they behave as they do. But I guess that’s a whole other issue. Still, doesn’t the vastness of the galaxy just give you some perspective?
Looking up at the stars made me think about how I am just a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. I am a human animal, a mother doing my best to protect my children, keep them safe, ensure the survival of my species because that’s what I am programmed to do, I suppose–and, because I seem to have been born with an urge, make some human art along the way.
But I also have to remember there are so many things I don’t quite understand, how it all fits together, why things fall apart, why cruelty seems to be such a part of it all, but maybe, if I take time to look out the window, I will find some answers. Of course, the older I get, the more I realize that the answer might be that there are no answers.
In the meantime, I am watching the baby chicks. It’s been a few days, and they haven’t looked out the window yet, but give them time, they will soon. And, then, their curious minds will want to know what is outside of that brood box, and the day their feathers come in and they no longer need heat and they get go outside to touch the earth and eat bugs and play in the grass will be the best day.
I have so many stories to tell because my baby chicks hatched today, but Thursdays are heavy work days, which means I have to wait until tomorrow. I just had to show you these beautiful eggs. It’s egg season right now, and my 6’4″ teen son is in heaven. This is what he ate for breakfast…plus coffee and a bowl of yogurt and blueberries.
Then he ate two more eggs for a snack.
Hopefully, that’s all for today. The girls are laying very well though, so we have plenty. I love this time of year. I feel so rich. I even saw Betty Jr., who is 7 years old, laying an egg today. How is that possible?
Oh yeah, Rooster is her father. He has really good genes.
We are in the transition period around here. I have many stories to tell but am only just now feeling well enough to write very much. I think I mentioned the week before last that my son was really sick. Of course, I caught it, and it was a rough one. I don’t think I have been this sick since COVID. But I am so happy to report that I am doing better, and today, for the first time, I was able to do some real work around the homestead.
I did a deep clean on the duck house, even the windows, which I am sure will be completely dirty again when I let them out in the morning, but I tried. I also worked on raking up the straw from around their house and around their food–and at the little warm spot under the dryer vent at the back of the house where the ducks like to hang out every winter. It was so snowy this winter that we put down a lot of straw for the ducks, and now, we have layers of straw to gather and compost. I didn’t get it all finished, but I made good progress. Next weekend I will try to finish that task.
I always wished for a barn for those ducks in the winter, but I don’t think we are ever getting a barn for them. The ducks will be seven years old this year, and I can see that we probably don’t have too many more years with them. In fact, the other night, when I went to give the ducks their peas, I couldn’t find Anna Maria. I was so worried because we have had the owls hanging out again. Hopefully, they are getting the rats, but I worried they maybe got Anna Maria. I found her though, and I knew there was trouble because she let me pick her up.
I brought her into the house to study her and couldn’t find anything wrong until I got to her vent. She had a soft-shelled egg stuck, only it wasn’t that soft. That poor baby! I held her, and Ron very gently got it out. She’s doing fine now, but this is not a good sign. The ducks are laying more soft-shelled eggs than proper eggs right now, so I had to research.
And it’s not easy to research this because it is rare to find anyone who has had Indian Runner ducks this long. In all of the forums I have ever been in, it’s rare anyone has a duck more than three years. Usually, the ducks are killed by predators, but Boudica and I work together to keep those ducks as safe as possible.
Anyway, all I could find was one Reddit thread where a woman asked about ducks in old age laying soft eggs. Only two people responded. One person said, to keep the ducks alive, they would need birth control, that laying eggs as their bodies are failing will kill them. This is devastating to me, but I looked up the birth control, and it’s about $300 per duck. That’s not possible, so I am going to hope and pray they just stop trying to lay. However, I did read that one thing you can do is supplement their diet with Vitamin D. I always thought soft-shelled eggs came from lack of calcium, which made no sense to me because they have a high calcium food. Interestingly, according to what I read, as the ducks age, their bodies stop processing Vitamin D very well, so they need extra. I hope that’s true because I started adding a vitamin mix to their water that has a lot of Vitamin D.
Please cross your fingers for little Anna Maria and Luna and Anna Sophie, our cello-loving duck.
Ron has been busy all week building a brood box for the turkeys. Turkeys! That’s right, I have an incubator full of chicken eggs, and now I have an incubator full of turkey eggs. I’m terrified I am going to mess this up, as I have never hatched turkeys, but I’ll write more about that later.
Mainly, I have to tell you about the brood box. Ron is a person who, if he is going to do something, it is going to be magnificent. You should see the grape arbor he built last year. A tornado could come through here, and that thing will stand. It’s also beautiful because he also has to make things beautiful. It’s the poet in him, I think. The brood box is a masterpiece, and it’s giant. I think, if I can get the eggs to hatch, the babies will do well there.
Ron has also planted some seeds, so it’s all upon us. It’s the transition time, and there is so much to do. It’s a bad time to get sick for sure, but I am thankful to be getting better.
I also have one more little side note that I thought would surely make you smile.
I wrote before about how I try to bring different treats every night for dinner to our rescued deer mouse, Jeremiah, and his friend and roommate, Cynthia. Well, lately, Jeremiah doesn’t want anything different. He only wants pecans. I know he’s stashing them though, so last night, I told him there would be no pecans. I made homemade popcorn because it’s Cynthia’s favorite. Jeremiah likes it too, but he was sad because there were no pecans. I started with the popcorn, and he took it at first but then dropped it. He looked back at me. I had some fresh blueberries, so I gave him a blueberry next. It’s from the grocery store, so he only eats those when there’s nothing better, I guess, so he wouldn’t even take that.
“That’s all there is tonight,” I told him. He looked around at my hands, and I went on about my business of trying to pet Cynthia. Jeremiah gets the “zoomies” at night, so there’s no catching him to pet him.
Anyway, I talked to Cynthia a bit and then looked over to see that Jeremiah had a pecan in his mouth. I knew he had a stash! I guess he was saving them in case I failed to show up with them at some point. He is well prepared I guess.
I hope we are all as good at preparing as Jeremiah. It seems like an important skill to have right now.
