Clean"er" Living

I've been thinking a lot about living a cleaner life...more like cleaner eating.  Not totally organic and not vegetarian or anything like that but just more HOME GROWN!  Over the past few years I have really become more aware of how much sickness, cancer, and adolescent girls have WAY more mature bodies than they did ssssaaayyy 10 years ago.  I chalk all this up to the copious amounts of additives and hormones that are put in our food to enhance size and promote fast growth. 

To decrease my chances of growing a third tit I have taken a few measures of my own to live a  bit cleaner.

1. I had my first garden (of hopefully many) this year and got a lot of crop that I ended up freezing to be able to eat throughout the year.
2. We bought chickens to give us eggs and also when we want fresh chicken meat.
3. My family butchered a steer this year that was grown by my brother so now we have cleaner beef.
4. Lincoln and I are thinking of investing in our own bovine to raise and continue to eat cleaner beef.

A few things that I want to do in the future to help make small changes in our lives is:

• get rid of most plastic containers in our home and replace those with glass.  Rachael is a firm believer and doer in this.  She has been saying it for a few years now and I'm wanting to hop on her wagon.  She packs all her leftovers and lunches for the week in glass containers.  She never reheats or stores food in plastics due to the chemicals that gets on the food after long use and reheating in the microwave. 
• plant a smaller amount of each but more variety of vegetables in the garden like beans, potatoes, peas, and cool weather veggies like broccoli and cauliflower

Saturday morning when I was surfing the net and checking blogs I found this video and article on Yahoo.  It's pretty cute and thought it went well with my post. :) 
http://music.yahoo.com/blogs/our-country/kansas-farm-family-creates-funny-educational-parody-lmfao-203056252.html

New Additions

About 2 weeks ago Lincoln came home from a night shift and said come look at our new chickens babe.  UUHHH it's 6 in the morning but ok.  He had bought a rooster, 4 hens, and got a chick for free from a co-worker.  He had been wanting more hens but after the whole hen bully issue he got a rooster too.  The new chickens are really pretty and fat and make our old ones look terrible but our little chick is so tame.  When you come up to the coop she just runs up to the door and wait for you to come in.  I love picking her up.  Sometimes she gets a little antsy and want to fly up on your shoulder to hang out and observe. 

not sure what's up with blogger but this is the best upload it would give me...line through the center and all

Also in the pic notice my RED hair!!! UUHHH yeah that wasn't planned but I just went with it as I'm trying to let all the color grow off my hair.  It was supposed to be a dirty blond color but my hair reacted bad to the salon color.  I told Lincoln this is what I get for trying to be all high maintenance and change myself.  I have for sure learned my lesson and will for now on just be plain ole dirty blond Megan with Marsha Brady straight hair. :( 

Problems on the Farm

Squash bugs, chicken health, and chicken behaviors are problems that sooner or later all hobby farmers must face.

1. I have been noticing over the past couple of weeks that my garden hasn’t been doing too well. I figured it was because my thumb was turning less green and more brown but I found the cause. I called my Dad the other night and explained to him what was going on and what I saw on my last pass through and he knew right off that I had…..dun dun ddduuuunnnn…….SQUASH BUGS!

Below is more info on these creatures that spread like the plague. I have to get some Seven Dust and douse all my plants and put around my garden or I’m not going to have many crops left. I also noticed recently that all the fun of this little garden adventure has gone out the window. Now that it’s getting hot I dread having to go out and weed. I am always worry about the water supply…am I giving it too much? Is it too dry? What am I going to do with all these damn peppers? I need recipes to put all these good things to use now and to can and use later on. I am really going to have to research this more so I can be more successful. It used to be “Oh look at the cute baby bell pepper….etc” Maybe once I take care of my bug infestation I will be happy about my garden again because it really is living a bit greener.

Click HERE to find out about squash bugs!

2. Like my garden, having chickens is a first for me. As you may recall we started out with 11 chickens, 2 roosters and 9 hens. We cooked one rooster, Lincoln accidently shot the other one and last week a hen died just out of the blue! We are now down to 8 originals but Lincoln plans on getting more hens and for sure one more rooster. I was really surprised the hen died because really I hadn’t noticed any problems that were making her act different. There was one issue and apparently it was the cause of her death.

**Disclaimer this may be graphic/gross to some**

A about a week before her demise I was collecting eggs and one had blood all on the outside. I thought it was strange and mentioned it to Lincoln…he didn’t think much about and to tell you the truth I didn’t think it was anything MAJOR. A few days after that I was out collecting eggs again and one chicken was up on a perch and I saw her rear feathers were all bloody and a mess. (light bulb) The same chicken that gave me a bloody egg. I told Lincoln about it and he just made an off color joke about her and said oh it’s no big deal. UUHH yeah it is, no matter the thing it’s not good for something to bleed from its ASS! Well I was right, of course, the next day I get a text from him saying the chicken is stiff as a board. I said yeah that’s the one I told you yesterday about bleeding!!!! So I immediately got on my phone and was Binging chicken bleeding from butt. WOW! So I found something that sounded pretty good and texted Lincoln to not do anything with it I wanted to inspect the chicken for this injury to see if I was right. Not only did I want to confirm my research but I also wanted to make sure that this wasn’t something I needed to worry about when it came to all my others hens…like a disease. Well come to find out what I found on the internet was right. What it boils down to is my pore little hen had chicken hemorrhoids that made her bleed and she died because of it. There isn’t anything we can do to prevent this from happening, it happens to hens that are overweight, old, or pretty young. I feel like she was a pretty young hen just by her build and comparing her to my others. L So sad her little body just couldn’t take it and the bad part is you can’t stop a chicken from laying eggs so it’s something that happens sometimes.

3. While on my phone with my Dad about my garden I mentioned to him how all my hens except one are missing A LOT of their feathers. I mean the poor little things look like they have the mange. The one who is perfectly fine is a big, fat, ugly thing that I dislike now because I’m convinced she’s a bully. Lincoln had spoken with some co-workers about chickens and they said that it’s normal for them to molt and stuff but I felt like this was more than that because new feathers weren’t coming back they just kept getting balder and balder. When telling my Dad about it he said that I need to put a rooster in with them so he will be like the head honcho and will knock that mean hen off her pedestal. LOL Lincoln had also mentioned that without a rooster one hen will become the dominant one and use these bullying techniques to rule the coop. Well I got news for her NOT IN THIS HOUSE YOU AREN’T, MISSY!!!! Hopefully in a few weeks we will have it sorted out.

So as you can tell…it’s all fun in games until you get bugs and hemorrhoids!

Awe the life of a hobby farmer…such bliss…and to think I want more! J

Happy Farming

Fresh Picks

Monday I picked my very first vegetables. 

2 banana peppers

Wednesday I picked a few more things.  I wasn't sure when to pick what so I picked what I thought looked good just so I could test things out.

I fried the squash and zucchini that night.  It turned out great.

Thursday at work I did a little research on when is the best time to pick certain crops....the ones I am growing of course and THIS website was the most helpful.  I learned that my Wednesday reaping was a little overdue so Thursday I put my knowledge to work and got bags full of vegetables. 

My bounty (left going clockwise): zucchini, squash, cucumber, okra, some variation of banana pepper, and regular banana peppers

The only things that are missing out of what I planted are watermelon, which they still have a while, tomatoes, jalapenos, and bell peppers.  I am so happy with the way my garden is coming along and I feel like I'm going to be canning and trying out a lot of new recipes to help me use all these crops so they don' waste.  Out of the above picture I took about half of that to my Mom Thursday night.  I also plan on taking a few things to my neighbor today or tomorrow to thank them for lending me tools and things when I need them.

While I was out weeding and inspecting the other night I took some pictures of my garden plus of the animals.  My little hobby farm is coming right along and doing wonderful.  If only I could add my frizzle chicken and I'm dying to get a little pot bellied pig but that is going to have to take a lot of talking into....Lincoln says NO! :(

growing squash

Jalapenos

Okra

tomatoes

baby bell pepper

zucchini

banana pepper

My mature garden

Tyson and Hercules

SNAKE!

EEK! 

I just about had a heart attack last night when I put the hens away and went to feed them. 

I bent over to open their food container and right in front of my face on the ledge was a BIG black SNAKE!

I ran out of the coop screaming and jumping around like a little girl. LOL

Lincoln, Casey, and the other guys were cooking fish and Casey came with a hoe but not before Lincoln came with the gun. 

He blew its head off and saved the chickens and me. MY HERO :)

I had just asked Lincoln either the previous day or that same morning if a perfect hole in floor in the back corner of the coop could be a snake hole...if there is such a thing.  He said I don't know!  Of course we didn't know and still don't but the irony. 

Anyways, I had a snake and it freaked me out and now I'm wondering how many more snakes I will encounter this summer?



From the Coop to the Kitchen

I have been complaining about one of our roosters, Pete, for a few weeks now. He is a real nuisance. Gustar is the alpha rooster and Pete makes a lot of trouble for us, Gustar, and the other poor hens he is constantly trying to molest. If we plan on letting the chickens out to run around and eat bugs in the yard we have to make sure they can be out for hours because otherwise Pete is chasing the hens around trying to get on top of them. This causes the hens to squawk and then Gustar is on the hunt…he takes off running after Pete to protect the hens and show him whose boss. LOL Not only does this happen constantly but when we get ready to put the chickens away we will get almost all of them in the coop and Pete will do something that makes someone squawk and out shoots Gustar and then all the hens follow. It is an aggravating yet entertaining battle. LOL We don’t really need two roosters so last night Lincoln killed, plucked, skinned, and cleaned Pete. He put the meat on the smoker today and I received a text this afternoon letting me know that it was good. I know is sounds really hillbilly but I’m really excited about eating our organic chicken.  When I got home from work we did a few things outside and then enjoyed our organic chicken and a baked potato.  It was delicious!

NO ADDITIVES here Bo Pilgrim. ;)

Hobby Farm in the Making

I am fully aware of my surroundings and that I DON”T live on a 600 acre dairy farm any longer BUT is that going to stop me from turning my 1 ACRE home into some what of a hobby farm?....

HECK NO! 

I have my garden which, as I have told, I’m ssssoooo excited about, my sprouts are growing like weeds and I know I’m going to be a successful vegetable farmer. 

On top of that I have been brainstorming about what else I could get over the past month or so. Most of my ideas have got shot down by Lincoln like the mini goat, pot bellied pig, and the guineas. I also suggested maybe we could get some chickens, then we could get eggs and they could get bugs out of the garden. That was shot down too…or so I thought.

Last week we were getting ready for the day and Lincoln asked me if I still wanted some chickens?! 

One of his friends was getting rid of the ones he had to make room for new ones. I said sure. I didn’t put much weight into it just because I knew Lincoln wasn’t keen on having a million farm animals running around the yard and I think he sort of thought I wouldn’t take responsibility for them and would leave it to him. LOL

But he worked out the coop plans over the weekend with one of our friends, gathered supplies from my parent’s house, and had a great coop built by Tuesday afternoon. 

I was thinking some little ramshackle chicken coop but NO SIR this thing is legit. 

Tuesday night Lincoln went off to buy and bring the chickens home. We got 2 roosters and 9 hens. 

One rooster came with a name, Gustar, and the other one we named Pete. 

Gustar

The hens aren’t named yet but I think my favorite one so far is a fat little brown one.

The first night Hercules didn’t know what to think so he sat and barked at his boundary towards the chickens ALL NIGHT LONG! I figured if I could get him used to them then he would leave them alone so the next night when I got home we were going to try it out. 

I pull into the drive way and Lincoln says didn’t you get my text…obviously it was an important one but I hadn’t got it. He said that when he went out to check the chickens had laid 5 eggs! 

We were so excited. 

We walked down to check them out and I brought a hen out in my arms to show to Herc and let him get a sniff. When I squatted down he was sniffing around and the hen started going crazy…this made Herc get really excited. After a few rounds of this he just stepped back still curious but not that interested.

I thought..hhmmm he doesn’t care much for them so I walked a few steps back to the coop and let the hen down on the ground and WOW it was on! 

Before I knew it the hen was running zig zag patterns and Herc was on the hunt. He got shocked and sent back to the house before he could sink his teeth in but the chicken was excited and still on the loose. It went behind the coop by the fence, Lincoln and I tried corralling it but it slipped out of my hands and through the neighbor’s fence.  UHHHGGG

So me, in my rubber boots and wind pants, hop the fence to chase catch the chicken.

It was a cluster to say the least. 

I was running back and forth trying not to bust my butt. 

FINALLY I grab the hen and give it to Lincoln to put away and then I hear a yell….I’M SURE GLAD YOU CAUGHT THAT THING YOU’RE FUN TO WATCH! I turn around and the neighbors were on their way out their driveway and had to stop and enjoy the show…. J I’m so glad I could provide entertainment for everyone.

Lincoln said when we were getting the coop and things together…."Now I’m getting you all this but the chickens and taking care of them is going to be on you." 

SURE

that has already changed and we are only in the first few days. He has talked to all his friends, researched on the internet, and gotten all these ideas how to make our chickens and the coop all it can be. LOL

He even put a fallen limb and an old tire in there for them to roost on and lay eggs in.

Needles to say we are loving our new additions and are very pleased that they are such great producers. 

Who knows what we’ll get into next!