Girls get their wings!

The girls are 12 days old now and are still cute and fluffy, but starting to get bigger quickly.

They have full sets of wing feathers now, and some cute little tail feathers also.

 

 

And here is a beauty shot of Buffie (not a name, really, just short for Buff Orpington)  She seems to be the one that loves being held the most, and also ends up in the most pictures.

The Cuteness has arrived

 

Aren't they Cute?

We took a class on raising Chickens today from Seattle Tilth and brought home these three lovely Chicks with us.  They were all born on Wednesday, which makes them 4 days old, and cuter than cute can be.  They are hopefully all girls, and will start laying eggs in 4-5 months.  There is a chance that one will be a boy, they are only 90% accurate when they sort them, but we won't know for a couple months at least, so we will jsut keep our fingers crossed.

To be clear, these are not pet chickens.  They are cute and sweet, and will be very nice birds, but they certainly might end up on the table eventually.  They are primarily for eggs, but if any of them are boys........  For this reason Tom insists that they not have names.  He wants to call them 1, 2 and 3.  I think they will get nicknames.

 

This is a Black Australorp.  I think she is the cutest.  She is also very mellow and loves to be held.  She will be a big girl, 7 lbs, and should be friendly and a good layer.  As you can see in her picture, at 4 days they are startign to get a few big girl feathers on their wings.  They should start coming in pretty quick, so i will keep you posted with lots of pictures.

 

This classic yellow chick is a Buff Orpington.  She will be the biggest hen in the group, but they are also typically very docile, and good layers.

This is her, sleeping, while still standing up.  She is kinda like one of those drinking bird toys that slowly leans down then hits the cup and pops up.  She slowly tips forward then her beak hits the ground and she pops up.

The last little girl is a  Barred Plymouth Rock.  Barred means black and white stripes.  She is a production version, meaning she will be the smallest, only 5 lbs or so, but will lay the most eggs by far.

In other news we are starting to plan for our vegetable garden, so i will post once we start working on constructing the raised beds, and of course will be posting lots of cute Chick pictures over the next few weeks.

Smells like home

One thing i loved about growing up in San Jose was the delicious garlic that came from just down the road in Gilroy.  When the wind blew the right way you could smell fresh garlic in the air, and in the summer there was even a festival full of delicious garlicy food and fun.  Eventually i moved away, down to southern california.  It is a long drive back to San Jose from San Diego, seven or eight hours.  There is a particular part of the drive where you come down out of the hills, and the garlic smell hits you.  This was always a signal to me that i was almost home, giving me that wake up needed to get the last bit of the long drive done.

This is the time of year to plant garlic, for harvest next summer, so i asked Mom to send me some wonderful gilroy garlic to plant at the new house.  And was very excited when this package showed up on my doorstep.

Planting garlic is a really simple process.  All you need to do is get some good quality garlic and pull it apart.  The larger cloves are best for planting, and the smaller center cloves are going in my Garlic Potato soup tonight.

I chose a planting bed that we have already in front of our garage that gets plenty of light i think. The first step was to turn the soil.  Then i piled up some really great compost on top to make a nice little raised bed.  All you do is plant the little cloves six inches apart and inch or two bellow the surface.

While i was at it i also planted some onion sets, individually, and in groups for green onions too.  Hopefully it all comes out well next summer.

The great cider Experiment

So i decided not to let the bears dissuade my dreams of hard cider. There is a farm near our new house that runs a farm store August through October, and i discovered when i visited that they actually press their own fresh cider.  It is really fresh too, no preservatives and not pasturized, and also SUPER yummy.  I decided to buy a bunch, and do soem experimenting with hard cider making.

Here are my six batches of cider.  Each is 1 gallon and each is a bit different.

On the far right is what i call "Wild Child"  which is basically just straight cider.  I didn't add any yeast, and i didn't do anything to kill the wild yeast.   It may or may not work at all, and it could taste yummy, or really yucky.  It all depends on what kinds of wild yeast found its way onto the apples and then into the cider.  This one isn't really bubbling much yet, but that is to be expected.

Next to it is cider that i brought up to 155 degrees, pasteurizing it, and killing all the wild yeast.  this allows you to put in your own yeast, for better quality control.  I added Champagne yeast, for a nice dry cider.Some people do not like heating and claim flavor, color and clarity are all affected in the final product.  we shall see, but this one is definitely fermenting the fastest.

On the other 4 i killed the yeast with Camden tablets.  this creates some sort of chemical environment that takes care of them, but supposedly does not affect the taste or clarity of the final product.  They all have the champagne yeast also.  On the left is just cider, then cider with honey added, cider with brown sugar added, and cider wih brown sugar and honey.  The honey and sugar will not make the cider sweater, but it will make the alcohol content higher.  It will also affect the flavor i think.

All five with the champagne yeast added are bubbling away nicely at this point.  They all have little airlocks on top, and are sitting in our kiddy pool (in case they bubble over)  in a cool dark room.  They will probably do that for a couple weeks, and then rest awhile before bottling.

Before i set them aside, i used a hydrometer to take measurements that will allow me to know the ABV %.  The readings were between 1.08 and 1.05, so i will end up with quite the range of ABV's.  I will keep you posted on how it goes over the next few weeks, and of course how it tastes!

lightening and thunder and hail, oh my

We are having some crazy weather at the moment.  Lots of thunder and lightening.  You knwo how you are supposed to count after the lightening to know how far away it is?  Well this im mostly impossible.  there is little to no time difference, meaning the lightening is at my house.  Tom even ran outside to make sure there were no trees on fire.  While he was out there it started raining really hard.  Then i realized it was actually hail.  not giant hail, but big, and it built up on the porch quite a bit.  Let me tell you, hail is really loud on a metal roof.  poor Shakespear is not so happy,  he is hiding behind the couch.

1-0, Bears

Those are my beautiful apple trees.  The one on the left has green apples, and the little one on the right has small reddish apples.  Unfortunately, when I went out to pick the apples, and they were GONE.  There are maybe a dozen left, that i can't reach, which i assume is why the bears didn't get them.  There are also several that look like this:

apparently the bears are picky. This is all they left behind.....

This means no home picked apple cider this year, which is too bad because i found out you can rent cider presses from homebrew shops.  Maybe we will buy some apples or cider and make some hard cider anyways as practice, but it wont be quite the same.

 

While i was out with the camera i did take some other pictures of the house.  This is the porch. And here is what the lawn looks like today.  you can compare to the one i posted last time.  Much greener, and as you can see the leaves on some of the trees are starting to fall.

Here is one of my favorite trees.  It is behind the house, and is begging for a tire swing.

Does a Bear Shit in the Woods?

So, Hubby and I just bought our first house, and it is already quite the adventure.  It is in Fall City, which, to clarify, is not actually a city.  It is part of unincorporated King county, has no government, and no real boundaries.  Earlier this week, when it was really windy for the first time this season, a tree fell and blocked the main road out of here.  Turns out this falls under the jurisdiction of the state patrol.

What Fall City does have though is wildlife.  On Wednesday i found a little green frog in my kitchen.  We also have bears.  And it turns out they do not shit in the woods, they prefer my lawn.  Now, i have yet to actaully see one, but i am pretty sure they sneak down in the evening to eat the apples off our trees and then poop.  I plan to go harvest as many apples as possible this week to dissuade them.

This leads me to what i will mostly be posting here.  We have a house that was originally build in 1936 situated on 2 beautiful acres, and i have a bunch of projects planned.  The first project is to get totally moved out of our old rental and unpacked here, but there are a couple other projects that need to happen quickly.

Once i pick all the apples from the two apple trees we inherited,  i will need something to do with them.  I would like to make hard cider, but that will require either a press or a juicer, and plenty of other supplies.  We also have a bunch of leaves that have started to fall, so i need to figure out where to put them.  The plan is to compost them, and use it come spring to plant a garden.  I have yet to decide where to put the compost, or really how to do it, but i will let you know when i do.

For now i will leave you with a picture of the lawn, and a promise of more to come.  This picture was actually taken back in August.  The grass is now all green again, and covered in bear poo.