Good Morning! in 2018

[WLLady]

okay.....too hot and dry here to plant....my poor grass is crisping up already! i hate sand. hate it!
so i'm waiting until it's a little cooler before i plant the garden. because i'll need to water it for HOURS to get it wet enough to even support life. good news is once i cut off the weeds they're DEAD dead....
i do want to get the garden in soon though.....
we have lettuce and garlic (both of which are a bit wilty from lack of water, even though i'm watering. the strawberries are in full bloom.....asparagus is just finishing.....rhubarb is NUTS. potatoes are up but feeling the heat too. my carrots baked in the ground and never sprouted, and my spinach is all burnt off. sigh. did i mention i hate sand?!
so hopefully cooler on the weekend.

[SusanH]

Sorry to hear about your garden WLL, that must be so frustrating. I am dreading long dry spells because I am on a cistern and depend on rainwater for everything. I can order a tanker of city water (bleagh!!) but I am afraid the chlorine etc would kill my spoiled plants. I am going to try to put eavestroughs and rainbarrels on the outbuildings. My only saving grace is mulch, and lots of it, and mixing in massive quantities of compost. I use raised beds so I can keep the organic matter concentrated.
And as the grass in the lawn dries and dies, I gleefully plan to overseed with clover which stays green through drought. Chickens and bees love clover, and you don't have to mow.
My asparagus came in finally and is now bolted. The season was so short, I missed it! I have to plant some rhubarb. I wonder if it's too late or I have to wait until fall.

[windwalkingwolf]

Good morning all. I have 14 broody hens, and counting! Three have gone down on nests already occupied. Nests they weren't even laying in to begin with. One has "adopted" another hens' brood, and is co-parenting with her, without having to do any of the hard work of sitting eggs. Two went broody on open shelves over 4 feet in the air, two are under my front porch, One is in an old wheelbarrow in the open section of the barn, that my boar has access to, and I have NO idea why he hasn't eaten her eggs yet...three hens on the floor in the cover-all, three in the milkhouse, and two in carriers in my kitchen. Three more are starting to make the rhythmic chucking sound they make just before they go down for the count. Plus, three geese and a duck are sitting nests, and now a turkey is thinking seriously about it, AND, now one of the muscovy girls is laying eggs in one of the goose nests, the dirty bugger.
I'm going a little bananas running all over the place, making sure everyone is safe and has food and water should they want it, and removing freshly laid eggs. The Easter Eggers are the worst, 4/5 broodies I have right now are EEs. Of the ones that are setting where I can get at them, I'm not letting them set their own eggs any more...I'm already going to have easter eggers coming out my ears!
I'm surprised I'm actually getting any eggs, it's a broody pandemic out there!
Anybody want any EE eggs? Hatch them, eat them, feed them to your dog, I don't care...just get them out of my sight before I do something dumb like hatch more of the . They're worse than rabbits this year.

[SusanH]

Are you coming to Odessa on Sunday? I haven't had eggs since my chickens were killed. I refuse to buy grocery eggs.

[baronrenfrew]

Jan....why do you have that many chickens? What's your secret to keeping predators away?

if something is out here at night...its a goner.

[windwalkingwolf]

Are you coming to Odessa on Sunday? I haven't had eggs since my chickens were killed. I refuse to buy grocery eggs.

No, sorry, I'm not going down that way for several weeks that I know of. If plans change, I'll let you know! I had three dozen coloured eggs to spare, and those have been spoken for, but I still get several a day despite the broody disease LOL

Jan....why do you have that many chickens? What's your secret to keeping predators away?

if something is out here at night...its a goner.

Why do I have that many? I ask myself that question a couple of times a year. I don't have any good answers, so we'll consign it to being on of the Great Mysteries. My secret to keeping the predators away is a good dog. When we lost Askem almost two years ago, the hungries started moving in and I lost a LOT of birds last year. Got Penny as a puppy in the Spring last year, by the winter she'd learned her job and hit her stride, and we've had almost zero losses since. The canids and coons have learned not to come onto "my" side of the road, or anywhere near the barn, but chickens will be chickens and have no concept of such things. If they wander too far, especially into the cornfields behind my place, I wouldn't count on Penny making it there in time...but so far this year, fingers crossed, the only ones we've lost have been two fat meat chickens to cars, and one duck has mysteriously disappeared without a trace. I'm hopeful she's got a nest, but I doubt it...ducks are predator magnets. As for aerial predators, there's a family of crows in the top of my silo, and starlings IN the silo. They do a most excellent job (if a noisy one) of keeping away anything large and hungry. I *DO*, very occasionally, lose a small chick to the crows. One will come up lame or is slow and lags behind mother, they WILL pick it off, but it happens so rarely that I consider it a fair trade.

[SusanH]

What did you do to teach Penny her job? I am sure my two are deterring predators by being their goofy dog-smelly selves, but they could learn more advanced skills if I knew what/how to teach them. They also try to keep the road safe from bicyclists, unfortunately, the way the cats protect us from any infestation of pens or Kleenex.
I've heard people use ducks for herding. This intrigues me. Are ducks smart enough to learn useful skills? Mine definitely "drive " the chicks, and the eight of them, five chicks, three ducklings, tend to hang out together. I wouldn't tangle with anything as loud as those ducks.

[baronrenfrew]

I have a few books on dog training (thats me, all theory) and one thing you can do is walk the dog on a leash around the perimeter. “check the house” is a command example. inside you can do the same thing, teach the dog to check every room and every window. They’ll train the dog to corner a “suspect” and hold them there. Then, on occasion, go on a trip w the dog (shopping) and leave a window open and have a friend climb a ladder into the house. the dog would catch the scent on an outside walk and corner the suspect inside.

no reason this couldn’t be done on a bigger scale with a perimeter fence. Better to make it easy with dog gates through cattle fences. thats my plan with the next dog.

[baronrenfrew]

[baronrenfrew]

a great place to start is to find the books from these monks who are famous for training german shepherds (and their owners for a fee)

This is a copied piece from wikipedia.

New Skete is the collective term for two Orthodox Christian monastic communities in Cambridge, New York (geographically in the neighboring town of White Creek):

The Monks of New Skete, a men's monastery founded in 1966 and
the Nuns of New Skete, a women's monastery founded in 1969.
The communities are under the omophorion of the Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church in America. The Monks are best known for their breeding of German Shepherds, and the training of all breeds in basic obedience. The Monks have written several dog-training manuals, including The Art of Raising a Puppy and How to Be Your Dog's Best Friend: The Classic Training Manual for Dog Owners. The Nuns are best known for their gourmet cheesecakes which are available on-line and in their gift shop.

https://newsketemonks.com