The Hatch Is On!

I set eggs in my incubator 20 days ago and as of tonight the first egg has pipped.  The only sign is a tiny crack in the shell and a few weak peeps every once in a while.

For hours nothing much changed, but as it got closer to morning the chick became more active.  Little by little the crack grew along the side and the peeps became louder and more frequent.

Finally after several large movements, the shell yawned open and revealed a tiny, wet, exhausted baby chick.

After breaking out of the egg, the chick rested in the wreckage of it's shell, recovering from the great ordeal of hatching.

Slowly but surely, the chick gained energy and began to move around in the incubator.  At first it's peeps were the frightened, loud peeps that young chicks make, but as it adjusted to it's new environment, the peeps calmed down to the happy exploratory peeps.  It began the process of learning it's body and new environment, resting often between small bouts of movement.  It will dry in the warm air of the incubator and will hang out in there until the other eggs hatch.  Baby chicks don't need food or water for the first 24-48 hours after hatching because they are still using the remainder of the yolk for sustenance. 

So far only the first chick has hatched, and none of the other eggs have pipped yet.  I think this chick may have gotten an early start on it's siblings and I expect the rest to hatch on schedule today.  I am hopeful that most of the eggs will hatch and I am looking forward to meeting the new additions to my flock.

Butcher Day: Fresh Pork For The Freezer

My fresh pork adventure began last summer.  I worked out an agreement with a farmer friend of mine that lives up the road a little way from my house.  I traded hours of helping her on the farm for half a pig raised on their property.  In the trade I would also have a bit of a lesson in butchery and sausage production (and a tasty sample of home made blood sausage called Boudin Noir).  I also learned many lessons in farming last summer that has helped to shape my own future plans for farming.

My share of the pork was waiting in a chest cooler on the farm as half a skinned hog carcass.  The hog had been slaughtered a couple of nights ago and allowed to rest before the butchering process began.  They saved the head to use in making the sausage because the jowls and neck of the pig have rich and tender pieces of meat.  The head was skinned and boiled and the usable meat removed to be used later to make Boudin Noir.  While that was cooking I set to work carving up my half of the pig. This pig was on the smaller side and my half had a hanging weight of about 70 pounds.  I was given lessons on how to divide the carcass into prime cuts which are basically sections of carcass that focus on specific areas of the body like the shoulder, ribs, belly and ham.  Each of the prime cuts were cut into smaller items like roasts, pork chops, hams and bacon.  All of the trimmings would be made into sausage later - I requested Italian sausage as I love to make spaghetti sauce.  I didn't have a ton of extra trimmings, but enough to get a few pounds of sausage I hope.  My friend also has a smoker and will be smoking a few of my ham roasts and pork hocks and bacon for me.

The majority of the carcass became pork chops for me.  I don't have a lot of people to feed in my house, so having quick things to cook like chops are the most convenient for me.  I did keep a good sized shoulder roast and a couple of smaller ham roasts and the tenderloin of course.  The bones will be roasted and then boiled into a rich broth that I will use in many of my future meals.  The extra fat can be used in everyday cooking and I think I may try using some lard in a batch of my homemade soaps.

In the midst of the butchering of my pig I was asked to help out with the slaughter of a second pig while I was there.  My friend used a .22 rifle at close range and dropped the pig with a single shot to the head.  There was no struggle and no fear for the pig and it was over so quickly that the sadness of death for this animal was fleeting as the work of processing this carcass began.  I helped to collect the blood from the pig as this was an important ingredient in the Boudin Noir they were making.  He made a deep cut into the throat and bled the carcass out shortly after it dropped from the shot.  Then he used his tractor to lift the body up off the ground and carried to a more convenient work space.  This hog weighed in at 340 pounds before it was gutted and skinned.  The final hanging weight of the carcass came in around 255 pounds afterward, nearly twice the size of the pig that I was taking home today.

My butchering day was a long one.  It took me about 9 hours to take a half hog down into manageable cuts.  I am certainly not a professional butcher by any stretch of the imagination, but now I know that butchering a pig isn't as intimidating as it seems.  It just takes some patience and time and some good friends that are willing to teach the needed skills.  It also feels good to know that I helped to support a local farmer and that my freezer is well stocked with fresh happy, healthy pork.  I am really happy with the outcome of this little adventure that began many months ago and I will remember this day long into the future as I enjoy many delicious meals thanks to this very special pig.

Progress In The Incubator

The eggs that I have in my incubator are due for hatching in about one week and I am getting excited!  At the end of the first week they were just barely visible through the shells when I candled them using a small flashlight.

You can see the small dark circle just to the left of the O on the egg.  This was only 5 days after setting them in the incubator.

A week later and the embryos are actively moving around in the eggs and there are clearly visible vein patterns.

The embryos have also increased in size dramatically and fill about 1/3 of the space inside.  The picture shows one curled against the far side of the egg.

A couple of the eggs were quitters, meaning that they had started to develop and then died for some reason.

This egg is at the same point in the incubation process as the one pictured above, but it lacks the vein development of the other eggs in the batch.  The dark area of the embryo is also smaller than the normally developing eggs and there is no movement visible inside the egg.  At this point I was fairly certain that these eggs were not viable, so I removed them from the incubator so they wouldn't rot and cause problems for the healthy eggs in the batch.

In a few more days I will stop turning the eggs so they can prepare for the process of hatching.  In a week I should be enjoying the peeps of a new round of baby chicks, meaning spring is officially on it's way!

Potting Up Broccoli and Basil

It has been a little over a month since I planted my first round of spring seeds and they have really started to take off.  Some of my seedlings are doing so well that they are quickly outgrowing the tiny starter cell they are in.  Today I decided it was the right time to do some transplanting.  The tiny broccoli plants had already started growing their second true leaves and the roots were starting to become a tangled mess beneath the tray.  They were in desperate need of more room.

One by one I transferred each seedling into it's own three inch pot where they will remain until they are big enough to handle life under the protection of a low tunnel.

The first planting of basil was also doing very well and I decided to transplant the largest of the seedlings into larger pots before they too became stressed from such cramped living conditions.

They also went into three inch pots, but they will likely enjoy the warmth of the indoors until late April when I begin to harden them off.  Once they get a couple more sets of leaves I will top them to encourage a bushier growth habit.  

I should be transplanting the rest of the basil in a week or so when they get big enough to justify moving them.  Until then, the young seedlings will remain in the starting tray alongside the slower growing peppers and celery.

Free Ranging Chickens

Now that the garden in mostly down for the year I have been letting my chickens out to free range in it during the day when I am home.  I don't really like the idea of keeping them in a pen all the time, but it is generally for their protection from predators like foxes, eagles, hawks, and neighboring dogs.  When I am home I can monitor them and they can still get out to explore the yard scratching and pecking to their hearts content.

They spend most of their time hanging around the compost pile and scratching up the beds that I had turned over and covered with leaves.  Needless to say the leaves are everywhere, but the chickens are fertilizing as they go, so I don't really mind.  I do have to keep my garlic bed and my lettuce bed covered to keep the chickens from destroying them.  I discovered that some of my garlic had sprouted and the girls were snacking on the sprouts where they poked through the mulch.

I love hanging out with them as they work their way around the yard.  They are always excited to see me and come running when I walk out the door to see if I have treats.  The roosters I have with these hens do a good job of keeping the hens together and I don't think they would hesitate to attack a predator, should one be bold enough to visit my yard.  Still they are friendly and have never attacked me, so all in all I think I kept the right ones.

Yesterday they tried to follow me into the house and then just hung out around the porch for a while.  What a sight to open my door to a flock of inquisitive chickens!

Last Year's Final Crop: Parsnip

I am now in the mode of preparing garden beds for spring crops and one of the beds that still needed to be addressed was last summer's pepper bed.  I had inter-planted parsnips with the peppers and after the peppers were done for the year, I just let the bed die back over the colder days of winter.  Now that the days are getting warmer again I decided to get around to digging the parsnips out of the ground where they were hiding.  I need to have the bed ready for transplanting in a few weeks since I plan on using it for my spring crop of broccoli.

Slowly I turned over the soil of the bed with my shovel and one by one I dug out a small number of good sized parsnips.  When they are harvested at this time of the year they are very sweet and tender and make a great side dish for any number of meals.

Seed Starting Progress

So far this season I have done three separate plantings of seeds that will be going into my garden this spring once the weather warms up a bit.  The first planting involved celery, broccoli, peppers and basil.  I started the celery and peppers so early because I know from past experience that they are both very slow growing and I wanted them to be a decent size by the time they were ready to be planted in the garden.  The broccoli will be one of my first crops from the garden this spring and I am already preparing a bed for them to go into when they are ready in a month or so.  The basil may have been planted a bit too early, but if worst comes to worst I can always trim it and dry it for future use or sell them as seedlings at the farmer's market in the spring.

The second planting was my onions seeds.  I am trying a different technique this year and have tried to plant 4 seeds in each cell.  When they get transplanted into the garden these seedlings will stay in clusters of four which will hopefully make it easier for me to keep them weeded and easier to harvest later in the season.

The yellow onions are the ones filled in nicely on the left side of the tray.  They look like they are happy growing in their tray and hopefully will continue to grow that well after they go out into the garden.  The red onions on the right side of the tray have been having a much slower germination than I would have hoped.  I think I will still get quite a few more to come up, but they are definitely not doing as well as the yellow onions are.  I may have to do another planting of seeds to make sure that I have enough for all my cooking needs over the next year.  

My third planting was another round of peppers and celery since those seeds didn't seem to germinate in large numbers either.  I also filled in 24 cells with various tomato seedlings that included two varieties of paste tomatoes that I hope will produce well for me this year.  I also planted another round of basil.  I guess that I will be making a lot of pesto this year if I can't sell fresh basil at the farmers market.

I still plan on planting one more round of onion seeds in a couple of weeks, but after that I think I will be finished with starting my indoor seedlings for the year.  The next stage of my garden will involve a lot of transplanting and the seasonal dance of moving seedlings outdoors daily to start getting them hardened off to the conditions in my garden.  Spring really isn't far off now.

Setting Eggs in the Incubator

Spring will be here in a few short weeks and part of the plan for this year is to grow more of my own chickens for meat and eggs.  My flock of chickens has a couple of roosters in it, so I will be using my own eggs for hatching since I am fairly certain that they are fertilized.  The roosters that are in with the hens right now will be going to freezer camp in a few short weeks once these eggs hatch.  The roosters that are in the bachelor pen will get their turn with the hens when the chicks are big enough to be moved outside.  The chicks will get to grow in the smaller pen for a few months until they can fend for themselves against the mature hens in the large pen.

I will be using an incubator to hatch my own chicks this year so that should reduce the costs of raising them for meat by a few dollars.  I think I spent over $50 last year on chicks alone, so not paying for chicks this year is definitely a plus.  I plan on growing a couple of mid sized batches of chicks this summer to space out the time consuming butchering process.  I will most likely be butchering most of the roosters and possibly some of the hens depending on how many of each I get from a hatch.  The roosters are usually larger and grow faster than the hens and I would like to keep at least a few hens for eggs since I expect the older girls will go through a molt this year and stop laying for a time.  My plan is to cycle out the older hens once the younger ones start laying well and to try to keep a balance of young layers in the flock.

As far as the incubating process goes I will be using a Hovabator incubator that I bought several years ago when I realized that I may not have a broody hen when I want one.  I got the most basic model that I could afford so there is no automatic egg turner in my hovabator.  I will be turning the eggs by hand every few hours for the next 18 days and hopefully they will start to hatch in about 21 days.  This incubator uses a small heating element and a fan to regulate the temperature of the eggs.  There is a plastic tray that sits in the bottom that gets filled with water to keep the humidity levels in the correct range during incubation.

I tested it out a few days ago to make sure that it would be able to hold the correct temp.  Last night I plugged it in again to allow it to warm up enough to be ready for eggs this morning.  I have been collecting fresh eggs for the past few days and saving them pointy end down in an egg carton on the counter.  I am only using eggs that were clean and didn't need washing for hatching since any bacteria on the egg decreases the odds of having a healthy chick.  I marked opposite sides of each egg with an x and o so I will be able to keep track of turning them.

I filled one of the troughs with water and then gently set the eggs x side up in the turner.  The thermometer sitting on top of the eggs will help me monitor the air temperature inside the incubator.  It needs to stay right around 100 degrees for the chicks to develop properly.  I gently set the cover back down and checked the temperature every so often to make sure that it was warming up properly for the eggs.  Each time I open it the temperature will drop, so I need to make sure that I don't let it stay cool for too long when I am turning the eggs.  In a few days I will candle them to see if they are beginning to develop properly.

Thinning Out the Basil

My basil seeds have gotten off to a great start this year.  Nearly every tiny seed that I planted has germinated and the tiny cells they are in were sure to quickly become overcrowded.  I waited until the first set of true leaves appeared which was only about 10 days after they germinated.

 Nearly every cell had two or more seedlings, so I very carefully used my scissors to trim the extra seedlings down to soil level.  I didn't want to disturb the delicate root systems of the tiny seedlings, so pulling out the extra plants wasn't an option.  The trimmed seedlings will simply die back and decompose leaving the whole cell for the surviving plant.  

The plants are much less crowded now and they will hopefully take the extra light and nutrients to grow quickly.  When they are big enough I will transplant them into larger pots since it will be some time until they will be able to get planted out in the garden.  I am hoping to have them fill in some space around my tomato plants to help deter pests and to shade out weeds.  If they do well, I may try selling bundles of basil at the local farmer's market.