Life At Restoration Farm

The chickens, I no longer think of them as chicks, are doing well at the farm.  I recently stained the coop a lovely barn red and it looks really sharp.

 Several days after that Dan bolted the coop to the back of his tractor and drove it to a new, more central location, at the farm.  The girls are now working 3 farm beds that will be planted later in the season with fall cabbages.  Their first location was just in a fallow area.  Now I feel they are being integrated into the farm process and are real workers.  They are eating cover crop of oats, peas and vetch and this, along with their droppings will be turned under to nourish the soil for the cabbages.  Each week the coop, and every few weeks the fencing, moves down the 150' long bed.

Since I have to be at the farm every evening to put the chickens to bed I have been encouraging friends to come and join me at the farm in the early evenings to watch the sunset.  It is a spectacular time of day at the farm.  It is peaceful and gorgeous and increasingly there are yummy things to taste like asparagus and snap peas and strawberries.  I also make sure to have chilled white wine and an array of delicious appetizers to round out the table spread.   Everyone that has ever taken me up on the offer has asked when they can come back and do it again.  It's wonderful.  The Habitat coup building crew came to check on the girls and got to know the Restoration pigs and oxen as well.  When the chickens got in the way of our plans with friends Linda and Bill Levine on the Saturday night of Memorial Day weekend we moved the party to the farm and had a surprising adventure in dining.

Linda and Bill Levine joining Steve in a toast

Graduation Trip to Florida

In mid May Liz graduated from Miami University and the family went to Florida for a long weekend to celebrate.  Ross came with us and Samantha flew in from Colorado.  The trip was great and we had a wonderful celebration.  Unfortunately things did not go as well for the dogs.  On friday afternoon the housekeeper let them out and they did not come back.  During the entire graduation ceremony I was on the phone with her as the time grew increasingly late and still no dogs.  By 5 I told her there was nothing left she could do.  I was hoping they would come home for dinner and called Trish, the combination House/Dog/Chicken sitter for the weekend to alert her to the problem.  It wasn't until after 6 that it occurred to me to have Trish listen to the phone message machine.  Sure enough there was a message the the girls had been picked up by the dog catcher.  When Trish called it was after 6 on friday evening so the girls would have to stay in the slammer overnight and she could post $30 bail in the morning to get them out.  Trish now calls them her jail birds.

Rare Chick

The real birds fared even worse that weekend.  No one really knows what happened.  I left with a list of chick numbers and breeds in the trailer at the farm and a sparse set of instructions on chicken care.  A different person had volunteered to close up the coop each night.  I was trying to spread the work around so no one person would be too burdened by the job.  Farmer Dan took care of opening up and feeding each morning.  In fact it was not a good plan.  When I returned on Tuesday morning there were 3 birds missing.  No one person was really ever watching or counting so no one knew how or when they disappeared.  There was no sign of attack but it was also several days perhaps since they had been gone.  My hope is that they were taken by a person and are being cared for somewhere.  One of the missing chicks was rare chick so that makes me think it might have been a person.  The farm is pretty deserted on Sundays and there are lots of tourists wandering around.  Lesly did the Sat night close up and she was particularly sensitive to rare chick's state of solitariness so she knows rare chick was there for sure on Saturday night but other than that there are no real clues.  I checked to see if they had wandered off and attached themselves to the flock at the Restoration but no such luck.  The 3 lost chicks were Rare Chick, a Partridge Rock, and a Black Australorp.

The day I left for Florida Dan and Caroline took the 3 chicks I had promised to raise for them for their backyard, so now there are 26 chicks at the farm.  Since that time there have been no more losses.  Twice I have found a chick wandering outside the fencing but they have quickly gone back in, under, or through when coaxed.  I still count every night to make sure they are all in.  This week I am again in Florida, taking care of my mom while my dad is away.  Farmer Dan is opening the coop each morning and feeding and watering the girls.  My husband Steve, with Security Dan"s help (and vice versa) are doing the the night shift.  Steve calls me every night after doing a head count and closing the door.  He's a good man.  The Dans too.  I am lucky and grateful to have all this support.

Too Busy to Blog

Once the season at the farm got into full swing my days got long and full and I have not written in over a month.  By now the chicks are no longer chicks at all...young adults I would say.   We are still probably more than a month from any egg laying but there are feathers all over the coop and chicken yard as the girls lose their chick feathers and start to put on an adult coat.

The first time there were feathers in the yard it was a near disaster.  A hawk attacked my girls, specifically one of the black and white Dominiques.  It was a tuesday and I left the farm around 6 to go home and feed the dogs and get ready for my tennis game from 7:30-9pm.  I planned to come back to the farm after the game and close the coop.  It was late but I figured the girls would be ok for a short while.  I had done this at home in the driveway and no one had come to harm.  HOWEVER, by 6:45 I had a call from Dan the Farmer that Dan the Security Guard had called saying he had come upon the hawk attacking one of the chicks.  The hawk had been scared off but many of the chicks had flown either over or through the fence in a panic and were now hiding in the surrounding woods.  He would wait till someone arrived.

I drove to the farm in my tennis shorts and sneakers, expecting the worst.  I called my tennis friends and alerted them that I was having a chicken emergency and would be late.  I approached the coop with my heart pounding.  There were a lot of Dominique feathers but no blood or sign of a wounded chicken.  I started crawling through the nearby brambles searching for the missing girls...about a dozen or more of them had fled.

They were hiding in what they presumed, and correctly, were the thickest brambles and hardest to reach places.  As the thorns and branches tore at my naked legs I tried to coax, flush, and grab chicks as the sky grew increasingly dark.  As I chased the birds toward the coop Dan, the security guard was surprisingly good at scooping them up and depositing them in the yard.  Farmer Dan, with his 2 year old Ada in his arms, was also doing a heroic job of reaching under logs and grabbing chicks.  When the roundup ended it was pretty dark but amazingly all the Dominiques, five, were accounted for.  Except for some missing tail feathers no one seemed to be hurt.  I counted and recounted the birds until I was convinced that all were there except one of the dark brown Partridge Rocks.  I didn't want to leave but it was too dark to hunt in the woods.  We stood there for about 5 minutes, not wanting to call it quits when I finally said OK, lets go , there is nothing more we can do, when the last little chick came walking out of the woods on her own.  We grabbed her, put her in the coop, and locked up for the night.  Amazingly all birds were accounted for...and I quickly ran off to the tennis courts to make my apologies to the tennis crew.  They were all very understanding, having seen the chicks growing up each week, and were patient with my poor tennis strokes for the few remaining minutes of the evening's game.