random musings

I don’t have one specific thing to write about or a theme under which I can gather my thoughts, so today I thought I’d just share a jumble of random musings with you and see how that goes. (Not that that’s never happened before!)

I’ve begun to really look forward to Thursdays. Of all the days in the week, Thursdays seem the least stressful to me. Sue probably feels there are better days since she still has a rehearsal in the evening on Thursdays, but I just have to sit here and type. I do try to accomplish something once I get home. Tonight my project was to organize the freezer, as much as possible, and get a definitive list of what chickens we have remaining to sell. Here is the freezer (yes, it needs defrosting)… as you can see, we’re stocked to the top. Underneath this top layer are 20 chickens! Amazeballs. Now that I’ve gone through everything, re-arranged things so I know what’s where, I have a definitive list of what’s remaining, how much it weighs, and when it was processed. We only have two left from our first processing day this summer – I thought we had way more. We also have 9 farmed out to others’ freezers. Today we sold nine! Or rather, we cemented a deal with them. We’ve sold or given away 21 chickens this summer. That’s pretty good. We ended up with 8 NFS chickens that we can use for ourselves. Now we just need to empty our freezer before next processing season so we can defrost it!

I’ve been enjoying the flowers that this monsoon season has brought out. I love the morning glories that Arizona considers an invasive species. But they are so joyful to drive by as I go through the gate in the morning. They aren’t bothering anything else around them. Most of the place is mowed, so we don’t have any trouble with them in trees or anything. I enjoy seeing them along our front facing fence line. Also this year, we learned about the little flowering plant on the right. Often called Rams Head or Elephant Tusk, Proboscidea Louisianica is native to the southern states of the US. It is a relative of the Sesame Seed and the seed pods are often picked green and pickled, like okra. The native Americans also ate the seeds and used the dried pods as an ingredient in black dye used in basket weaving. I found this great new app called Pl@ntNet that allows you to identify plants by uploading a photo. It’s how I finally found out what the heck this was! Check it out, you can add to the database for your region, which I think is pretty cool.

Sue found this photo in her draft e-mails. She was going to send it to me, but hadn’t ever got that far. I opened it and laughed. It looks like Thumper is investigating the camera, while Scooby keeps and eye on those rascal chickens. We still see the rooster chasing the goats around on occasion. Funniest thing to witness. One night, when I was keeping track of a rattler until the firemen could get there. Thumper kept looking in to the top window of the chicken coop… I think he wanted to see what I was looking at… every time he popped up there, the little Banty hen that was roosting there would let out a loud scream “Aaaack!!!” Thumper would run away, only to come back less than a minute later and do it all again. Goats are clowns.

I can tell you that the trees planted on Tuesday are still alive! So far it looks like everyone survived their transplanting just fine. 15 planted, untold numbers to go. Guess this is the end of today’s musings. I don’t really have any idea what’ll be going on this weekend. We might work on getting the trees covered with cardboard and heavy mulch. Maybe I’ll be able to sow the winter greens in the circle garden. You just never know what adventure lies ahead. We’ll share it with you though! Until then, as always~
Thanks for reading!

Today’s Weather: Last couple of days have been rather warm, but not insufferably hot. Today the high was 91°. What’s been wonderful is that the evenings are cooling down so nicely; currently, at 7:50 p.m., it is 77° with 33% humidity. Winds are WSW at 6mph, barometric pressure is at 29.75 inHg. Zero chance of rain, although earlier we were at 40% chance. We should be getting some moisture over the weekend, which would be quite nice. Sunrise today was at 6:06, sunset at 6:18.

Egg Report: Wednesday – 25 chicken, 2 duck. Thursday – 32 chicken, 2 duck. Before I started writing tonight, I did a bit of online research regarding the affect of weather temperatures on egg production in chickens. So, yes – temperatures do affect production. I guess we knew that, but it seems really quite random with our chickens. We could have large numbers one warm day only to end up with smaller numbers on another. I supposed I could graph the egg to temperature ratios, but that sounds like too much math to me. The reason I even got into this, is today is rather a bit warmer than yesterday, but the numbers today are greater. We are slowing down, because we are only getting around 12 hours of daylight, and the optimum is 14 hours for egg production. Time for those guys to begin replenishing their bodies. I want to remind you that – at our height of production this year, we were getting upwards of 45 eggs a day, and sometimes 50+. As a comparison.

Fun Photo: Today’s offering is from Sue. She thought the sight of these two (huge) squirrels contemplating the funny human writing on the side of the SeaTrain, was rather cute. Do you think they’re trying to decide what the heck it says? Or do you think that one is saying, “Wow. Dude. We could store soooo many acorns in that.” —- you know, now that I’m really looking at this photo… I’m not sure that these are squirrels. They might be young Coatimudi, those tails seem awfully long. Here’s a Coati photo for you… what do you think? Maybe???