I love my life. But there does seem to be quite a lot of it.
Between my job (not inherited that castle in Spain yet), keeping us well fed, tending the garden, the animals and ensuring the house doesn’t fill with dog hair like an enormous house-shaped pillow…well, the days are full. But I know you’re yearning for news about all the beasties here, so I present to you the Chicken Chronicles: The Reader’s Digest Version.
By the way, before I get too far along, this post is dedicated to my friend Gail, at Clay and Limestone. Not only did she offer the phrase Chicken Chronicles in comments about how she enjoys my chickens’ antics, she also manages to do all that life, garden, job stuff and blog too. My hat’s off to you, Gail!
First, Polish hen Edith went broody this summer. For those of you who are not chicken mammas and pappas, that means she decided motherhood was all she needed to fulfill her destiny in life. She took to her nest box and refused to budge. Well, I have a fairly laissez-faire policy when it comes to nature, so I figured, let’s see where this takes us.
Frankly, as laissez-faire can be, the whole thing was messy. Long story short, all the other hens added to Edith’s clutch so that she ended up trying to sit on about 15 eggs—an impossible task for a little Polish hen. To complicate matters, Tina Turner, a beautiful buff Polish hen, was swayed by Edith’s efforts and decided to hatch a batch of her own. She was easily dissuaded for a more carefree life among the motherless hens.
Back to Edith…After about three weeks it was clear that nothing was going to happen on the baby making front, so I took matters into my own hands. Actually, I took Edith into my own hands and took her off the eggs to get rid of them.
Voila! There was a chick under her!
Now, I will dip into the details just a bit here, even though this is the Reader’s Digest version. Edith is not the birth mother. T. Boone Chickens, our enormous rooster, does not do the wild thing with the Polish hens. I don’t know if it’s because he prefers the more full-figured hens or if the Polish girls are just too fast for him, but I’ve never seen him do the deed with one of the mop-headed girls. I suspect that the new chicken is from Dorthy or Meredith, our Easter egg chickens.
So…to get back to the story. Edith and her baby were separated so that the other chickens didn’t commit infanticide, as chickens will do. After a suitable and appropriate maternity leave Edith and her young were re-integrated back into the flock. It was an endearing sight to see her alerting the baby to bugs, tomato morsels and blueberry treats. At night she would sit with the baby under her. After the baby grew too large to sit on, she would put her wing protectively over the baby as they sat side-by-side.
Baby and Edith, his adoptive mum
The baby is now about 13 weeks old.
So far we’re calling the baby “Baby.” Clever, no?
The reason is that the baby will eventually be named Ricky or Lucy, names picked out by Carol at May Dreams Gardens. But one of the names has not yet stuck because I still don’t know if Baby is a Lucy or a Ricky. We should know in another month or so. But I will tell you this. Baby has really, really big feet like T. Boone Chickens. And Baby looks like a cross between Dorothy and Meredith, the Easter egg chickens. We will never know who the birth mother is without DNA testing.
Oh, and Baby loves Edith, his adopted and devoted mum. She is his true mum.
Robin
Here it is September 12. The air conditioner is off and the windows are open—at least when it’s not too chilly anyway. I spent the afternoon rotating out the summer clothes and bringing out the sweaters and long pants. Where did summer go?
My blog here at Bumblebee has been quiet. That’s not because I’m not growing food and flowers and herbs. It’s because at some point I have to make a choice between living my life or writing about it. With my consulting job, little dogs, chickens, cat, garden, house plants—not to say anything about the husband and son home from college—I felt pulled to so many directions. I have been falling into bed at night thinking of everything that didn’t get done.
So, consider this a little bit of a catch-up post with just a few photos that I neglected to share until now.
In one of the beds leading to the front door I planted a variety of coleus and nestled a birdbath planted with succulents. At first the coleus looked a bit sparse, with a lot of mulch showing. I pinched it back and before long it was so bushy and tall that the birdbath was lost in the dark burgundy, black and green foliage of the coleus.
The birdbath has these little orangish flowers that open in the sunlight, creating a beautiful display. I have to admit that I was inspired by Debra Lee Baldwin’s Succulent Container Gardens, which I received as a review copy and drooled over but neglected to write about until now. Buy the book. You will love it.
I have decided that succulents have a big future in my garden, since watering takes a great deal of time and the succulents can fend for themselves.
After two bad tomato years due to fusarium wilt and late blight, we have finally had a good tomato year. I had to dig new beds in a whole new area of the yard as well as plant some hybrids in an attempt to foil the fusarium wilt. I am considering solarizing a large area of the potager next year. I don’t look forward to the ugliness of plastic on the ground or having so much area out of production, but it may come to that.
In the meantime, we had a good year for strawberries, lettuces, cucumbers, the most adorable and sweet tigger melons and herbs. Herbs galore! Our needs here are fairly simple, so I continued to focus on ornamentation in the potager as well as production. But pots do need watering, don’t they. *sigh*
I have some fun news to share about the chickens, but that must wait for another day.
Robin
I never really understood the interest in growing monster vegetables to see how big they can get. To me, the point of vegetable growing is to eat the things. But more often than not once a vegetable reaches gigantic proportions it is no longer edible.
But perhaps it’s akin to my fascination with sunflowers. I have grown short, bouquet-worthy sunflowers. I have grown stunning, nearly black sunflowers. I have grown dainty sunflowers. But what I really adore is a colossal sunflower. Towering sunflowers. The kind of sunflowers that makes visitors stop and say, “Is that real?”
Until this year the tallest sunflowers I have grown were Mammoth. They grew to about 8 or 9 feet, towering over the rest of the garden.
But this year I grew Titans—the biggest yet. I measured them this morning at 12 feet tall.
Visitors ask me if they are staked because it seems so improbable that a flower on a single stem that tall could stand up without assistance. But the stalks are nearly as round as my wrist, so they are standing tall all on their own.
Now, what’s bigger than a Titan?
Robin
