2025, animals, Farming Update, home, pets, Uncategorized

Comb Over

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Today’s Farming Update is from Ben.

Two blogs in a row about Chickens! Who’d a thunk?

Get your long johns out for this coming week. Better yet, just stay inside until next Saturday. Nature is trying to kill you this week.

No further progress on the bathroom this week, still waiting on the countertops. We heard the electrician was on vacation last week, and when I pestered the boss electrician yesterday, he said two guys were on vacation and he’d get them out when back. Huh. Are they still on vacation or is he bluffing me? Could be either one.

Good thing our neighbors went on vacation again so we could do some more laundry.

The guys put heavy paper down on the floor when they started remodeling, and that’s still there, so we stopped the Roomba at the first of the year. Thank goodness for cordless vacuums, am I right?? So Much Dog Hair! My goodness…

Out in the shop I’ve finally figured out what I want to do for bolt storage. I cleaned out under the shop work bench, (That’s Luna helping me in the header photo) which hasn’t been cleaned out in 30 years, and I bought some good heavy duty storage bins to replace the old anti-freeze jugs we’ve been using since dad cut the sides out of them 40 years ago. I lined up a few bins that I’ve used over the years to see the progression in storage:

I’m not sure where the metal cans came from. They were up in the old shed ‘attic’. Dad made the yellow antifreeze jugs, I went to the small red bins, and now I’m doing the clear ones.

When these wear out it will be someone else’s problem.

A month ago, as egg prices were increasing, I thought I better look into getting chicks ordered in case they’re months out like they were a few years ago. To my surprise, nothing seemed to be delayed. I put 40 or 50 chicks in the cart, but didn’t want to order yet.

And then the company sent an email saying they’ve been overwhelmed, the website is down, and they’re not taking any more orders for this year. Well heck. I thought it seemed too good to be true. I started looking up other hatcheries. All seemed to be months out on orders. I know the local Fleet Farm will have chicks this spring, which is new for them. And the local Tractor Supply always has chicks, but again, this year, better get there as they’re coming off the truck to get any. And I saw even some of the local grain elevator will have chicks, but they’re also saying, ‘First come, First served’. Way back in the OLD old days, Rochester had two full-fledged chick hatcheries, and one of the buildings is still there, subdivided into multiple small businesses.

I haven’t seen the local elevators have live chicks in many years.

I found a small hatchery out in Willmar, MN that could get me chicks in April, and I got my order in. I did ponder just hatching my own. Guess I still could. I hope the new place is able to follow through.

I mentioned to daughter that we’re giving her Monday off because it’s Presidents Day and the college is closed. Kelly still has work, but daughter and I can take the day off. Then I proceeded to tell her about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, asking what she remembered about them. I suspect sometimes she claims no knowledge because it’s easier than telling me what she does know. I told her about General George Washington, being the first President, and the dollar bill, and then started on Abraham Lincoln and the civil war, and his assassination, which led me to question the difference between murder and assassination (yep, politics, that’s what I thought) — and then I got a phone call which took a few minutes. When I got off the phone, daughter said, “What about having Monday off?” and I got the giggles. All of this information and she focused on what I said ten minutes ago?? I guess I should have known her priorities. And then, two hours later, she texted me a paragraph on Abraham Lincoln. Hmm! Maybe she was listening after all? Now I’m really curious: did she look that up herself or did they talk about it at her program? The kid never stops fascinating me.

This rooster was waiting for me to put corn out. 2 PHOTOS

Notice his comb? Not the traditional one you pictured in your head, is it.

And this rooster:

He got frostbite on his comb. He’ll be OK.

Did you know, there are 9 different types of rooster combs.

Credit: https://bitchinchickens.com/2020/06/01/chicken-combs-wattles/

Chickens always look pissed off.

My current batch of chickens is really not cold weather hardy. Last week I was getting 12 – 16 dozen eggs / day. Then the weather got cold again and I’m down to 4-8 eggs / day. Some varieties are more winter hardy than others. The fancier the breed, the more ‘delicate’ they are. I’m sticking with tried and true this spring: Black Australorp and Barred Rock.

WHAT ELSE IS THERE ABOUT CHICKENS SHOULD WE TALK ABOUT?

WHAT HAVE YOU LOOKED UP THIS WEEK?

57 thoughts on “Comb Over”

  1. Sometimes I think looking up stuff should be an Olympic sport because I would probably excel. Just last night looked up to see if there are dates yet for the annual rubber stamping show out at Canterbury Downs, the conversion rate for 90 mm to inches, looked up to see if I had the right ziocode for a friend who lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky, And a couple of different books …to see if the Hennepin County Library system had them.

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  2. I also have a funny kid story today. Woke up at 5:55 to my doorbell alerting me to someone at the front door. Clicked it open to see YA shoveling from the house down to the front walk. When she came back inside I asked her why… she said she has a delivery coming between 7 and 10. The world is such a funny place these days.

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  3. I have always wondered how chickens were bred to lay unfertilized eggs and to lay them throughout the year. Other birds don’t do that, do they? It seems like a waste of personal resources.

    Yesterday I looked up the info on the Alvin submersible sub to make sure I had the facts right. I also looked up the facts on the Hunley, a Confederate Civil War sub that disappeared and wasn’t relocated until 1995.

    I’ve been reading a book this week about Greenwich Village from 1910 fo 1960 called The Republic of Dreams. Most of the characters described therein are not pictured and so I’ve been looking for their photos.

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  4. We’ve been watching episodes of Wolf Hall on PBS. Robin asked me about Henry VIII’s daughter Mary and I was able to tell her that Mary succeeded her half brother Edward to the throne after he died, that Mary was catholic, married Phillip of Spain, tried to undo the Reformation and was known as “Bloody Mary”, but that was about the limit of my knowledge so we looked her up.

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    1. DUring my research forays on Ancestry.com, I found that my Scottish forebearers, several who were the bastard sons of Scottish Earls caught up in the Jacobite movement involving Mary Queen of Scots, ended up with daughters who were royal Ladies-in-Waiting. So it appears that the illegitimate children of these guys were dealt with by exporting them to America or exporting the women to the royal court. The name Kearsley kept popping up, but really the branches of these trees are so wildly difficult to follow. The old Earls really got around, I guess.

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      1. Try FamilySearch.com sponsored by the Latter Day Saints. Easy to navigate. Reliable. You don’t have to be a Mormon to use it. Nor do they try to convert you.

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        1. I have intermittently used that site. It eventually revealed itself as wildly inaccurate. Some of the pre and post revolutionary information on people was incomplete and just wrong. So I feel pretty burned by that information.

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        2. Ancestry can also be unreliable. You can’t trust anything not supported by documentation and you have to question whether the documentation is for the right person.
          One of Robin’s ancestors, a GGG grandfather, is included in over 80 other family trees and every single one of them is demonstrably wrong. They all copied each other, apparently.

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        3. Yes, there is a lot of that. I have learned to check carefully before copying. There are 2 Daniel Strattons born in the 1750s. One is my forebearer. The other is not.

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        4. At FamilySearch are opportunities to contest what they have. It’s important to that sponsor, LDS, to be accurate as it relates to their practices of “baptism for the dead.” Anything you could contribute to correcting deficiencies would likely be appreciated.

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        5. That’s not been my experience. People don’t like to hear that whole branches of their family tree are bogus, even when they are.

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        6. One of the failings of Ancestry.com is that it doesn’t allow people who aren’t members to send messages to people who have inaccurate information in their family trees. I know there are numerous errors posted there about people on my family tree, because I can log in for free using the library account. But I can’t tell them where they’re wrong without paying a fee to Ancestry. Familysearch.org is free, and you can recommend changes without paying anything, so I find that ore accurate.

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  5. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    Re: Chickens. HMMM. Well, the emergence of urban and suburban chicken coops is a wonder to me. Having grown up around Grandma’s chicken flock, and having been pecked mightily by the chickens who did not want their eggs gathered by me, I do not get the fascination. I have a Master Gardener acquaintance with a small flock in her back yard. Those chicks have a chicken mansion, with heated floors. If I return to life as a chicken, let me be one of her chickens. Nice life. I also get tired of hearing about the trauma inflicted on local flocks (and their owners) by foxes, raptors, raccoons, and neighbors. People forget to put a chicken wire ceiling on the top of the coop, so the local wildlife views those chickens as a buffet. Many people do not understand in any way, the way farming or hobby farming is subject to the forces of nature, including predatory wildlife.

    RE: research and looking up stuff. Sometimes I do not remember all the items I look up. Often it is authors and their work, when did Teddy Kennedy die, and drug side effects. Weather predictions are big with me too. See below.

    Yesterday I had a really difficult day. These weather systems coming through with barometric and temperature changes are causing me to have severe migraines. Yesterday was one of those days. I got up then went back to bed to sleep it off. Winter will end, right? During our winters in AZ the weather systems were not as marked, although they were present. But then I forgot how this affects my system.

    Ben, I am glad you found chicks again. Who knew?

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    2. Ooh, I remember those angry hens that would peck as I went with my grandmother to collect eggs. The bantam roosters were comically aggressive. Grandma had bandaid all over her arms from those hens.

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      2. Daughter takes a homemade “shield” with her when she collects eggs. Kelly has gotten bites and bruises on her arms from biting hens.
        I’m lucky I have tougher skin at this point.

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  6. February 14-17 is the Great Backyard Bird Count.
    Unfortunately, I don’t get to count my 4 budgies.
    Ben gets to count his chickens but not those that are un-hatched.

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  7. I frequently try and find some joke or meme that illustrates what I want to relate, either in personal emails or here on the Trail. It’s kind of a silly waste of time.
    Husband and I, when reading something aloud from another era, will look up a word we don’t know, i.e. some piece of clothing mentioned.

    That first chicken photo, Ben – what a beautiful color!

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  10. Back when I was in high school, I subscribed to the catalog from the Murray McMurray hatchery in Iowa. It wasn’t because I was in the market for chickens. It was, I think, because I was amused by the name Murray McMurray and because the catalog featured quotes from Murray himself, who was personally deceased, along with a photo of him with a chicken on his shoulder.

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  11. I looked up the mileage rate that can be claimed for tax purposes. It is 67 cents per mile. I’m not preparing a claim, just trying to figure out the bargain I got by taking the train to California a couple weeks ago on a discounted railpass ticket. I went from Fullerton California to Chicago for $29.90. Pretty good deal, I’m thinking. The ticket was on sale early in January, $299 for 10 rides. It’s usually $499, which is still cheap for how far you can go… If anyone from the twin cities thinks about going to Florida, for example, you can get there for $99 each way most of the year.

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    1. I was looking up Amtrak to Charleston SC to visit a niece and Grandniece there. Winona to Chicago, to DC, to Charleston. Takes 4 days. Which we don’t really have that much time. And getting a sleeper, a middle or upper class sleeper (as opposed to just a bunk) is more money.
      Not ruling it out, just won’t be able to do it this summer.

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  12. About week ago I looked up the temperature in Ohio, since I was going to talk with someone there. The AI assisted search told me the high that day was going to be 88 degrees Fahrenheit.

    I sometimes like to argue with AI.

    Occasionally I stop to think about how someone who was my mother’s age, or my grandmother’s, might have had a few lines of a poem or a song floating in their consciousness, and been unable to come up with where it came from. They could ask someone, but didn’t have any way to research it.

    Google searches are sort of miraculous in that way. For awhile I had a vague memory of a song from the 70’s with the line “didn’t it rain, didn’t it rain….didn’t it rain that day.” The line “didn’t it rain” was from an old gospel song, but I couldn’t locate the song I was thinking of. Finally one rainy day I got determined to find it. It was by Pure Prairie League. Thank you, internet. Thank you, youTube.

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    2. I too have had some success with just one phrase of a song. The trouble comes when it’s just an instrumental. There’s a song, probably from some 1960s movie, that has going through my head off and on for months. I hum it to people who might recognize it, but no success yet.

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  13. I’ll be honest and admit that I have ambivalent feelings about chickens. They both fascinate me and creep me out just a little bit. It’s the determined look in their eyes, I think. They just seem like they’d like to take a big chunk out of you if they could.

    That said, I really do like to eat their eggs. And I made chicken and rice soup the other day. Not really all that sorry, girls…

    I like backyard coops and I wish I could have one. There are so many things I can’t have here. We might all be wishing we had our own coops so we could have our own eggs.

    I agree about using internet search browsers. I look up everything, every single little whim, these days. I don’t use google very often though. My most recent google search was for an address for someone. I use DuckDuckGo most often these days. I don’t really know if I’m being tracked less that way. I doubt it.

    Last night I looked up the cost of an average flat in Cornwall. Then I looked up the conversion rate of pounds to dollars. This morning I looked up untreated wool and wool felting. Then I ended up with a set of felting needles and felted wool slippers in a shopping cart. C’est la vie.

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  14. I took a friend (who is from Cincinnati and moved to Northfield a year and a half ago) up to see The Root Beer Lady at the History Theater in St. Paul yesterday. The one-woman, one-act play was highly enjoyable and gave an interesting overview of Dorothy’s life. We enjoyed a bottle of root beer with her label and the slogan, “Kwitchurbeliakin.” I think Bobbi enjoyed the experience. She oohed and aahed over the State Capitol building as we crossed Wabasha Street to get back onto 35E south.

    We drove home, picked up a pizza at B&L pizza, then went to Imminent Brewing for a micro-brew and to see the Tony Rook bluegrass band. Another friend joined us there, and gave me a loaf of fresh-baked bread in exchange for a jar of salve I made and one of Barb’s (Blackhoof) soaps. BTW: Barb is closing her website and is currently selling the last of her soaps. When they’re gone, they’re gone forever.
    https://meadowwildsoaps.ecwid.com/

    I use GoogleEarth to look up all kinds of places. It’s one of my favorite searches.

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  17. I look up stuff so often I’m hardly aware of it. Watched “An Affair to Remember” on Netflix. Afterward had to explore what year it came out, Deborah Kerr, Cathleen Nesbitt… Any little thing I want to know, if I’m near the computer, I can find it.
    The Information Age – useful, but not always a great thing…

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  20. is that a pea comb on the rooster with a flat top?

    i’m looking up songs in the public domain because one of my guitar guys is the head of the company that does video and camera work for things like community meetings at town halls and school board meetings and stuff like that. He says they have a room that can be used for podcasts, and he thought that three of us in the guitar evening sessions should start a new podcast and go with songs that are in the public domain so that we don’t get into any troubles and do a history and a playing of the tunes and I thought that would be cool and there are lots of old tunes that I love

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