Parking Lot Sugarin? Not Quite..

   I know this blog is mostly dedicated for chicken talk but I've been desperately itching to try my hand out with my very own backyard sugarin'. Unfortunately, when I look out my window to my "backyard" all I see is some cracked black top and three snow covered cars. Gotta love apartment life right?
    So instead, I took a little ride to my parents house in Cheshire and convinced my hibernating father to come out into the cold with me and tap some trees. The conversation went something like this.
  
Me: "C'mon Dad, lets do it, it'll be so awesome."
Dad: "But honey, it's so cold out, you don't wanna go out there, let's just do it on a nice warm day."
Me: "Pleeeeeeassseeee."

So after teasing him a little bit about being a big softy with the cold, I finally convinced him. Together we used a couple old water jugs with some holes screwed in them, a couple pipe nipples from Tractor Supply, and some some old wire to keep the jugs secure. The end result? We tapped only two trees. I've heard that about 35 gallons of sap will be boiled down to one gallon of syrup....If I'm lucky, I'll probably get enough syrup for one pancake. At the very least it will be one delicious pancake!
     I'll keep you posted with how my syrup endeavors go...that is if anyone out there in blogger land even reads this. Anyone? Maybe?

"Teacher! The Chicken Ate my Homework!"

What are bantams good for?
...meat?....no
..eggs?....no
...eating your homework?...bingo!

It's strange but true, my little apartment pet bantam will NOT leave my papers alone. If I don't keep an eye on her little chicken butt every two seconds, she'll be pecking at my homework....and yess she will consume it.
 
"Hey teacher the chicken ate my homework!".....I don't think that one would go over so well.

Still, it truly baffles me. I'll throw her pieces of lettuce and vegetables...she won't touch em'. When it comes to a nice yummy sheet of toxic ink paper, chow time!.... STRANGE

Anyways, I think we all have a case of cabin fever here. Little Pidge deals with it by eating toxic ink paper, and as for me?..Well I deal with it by attempting to take runs out in the snow. Both ideas very stupid...That spring breeze I felt around Valentines Day didn't help either. It had me fantasizing about planting a garden in two feet of snow.If I didn't have about a zillion articles to write for my class, who knows, I just might have attempted it.

Please let spring come and save my sanity!

A Neat Way to Make a Broody Hen Useful

 
 ^ (Here's a hint.)^

 (Even though it's winter, put yourself in the following position for just a minute.)
            It's a cool spring morning. Drops of dew still cling to the grass beneath your feet. You stroll out to the chicken coop and run your hands over each nest for that smooth warm lump. So far, the girls have been getting back into the swing of spring and laying an egg a day.... but then you reach the last nest. There she is, with that permanent scowl, in the same spot she's been in since last month: the one broody hen. Barely laying more than a few eggs in almost 30 days, she's proven herself pretty darn useless.
       This is a problem we've likely all had to deal with. It seems as though every year there is at least on hen with the dreams of hatching out her own eggs, and each hen always manages to maintain that same poker face! I swear, no human being has ever or will ever given me a dirty look as evil as the glower I receive each year from the broody hen.
        But if you're a big ole' softy like myself, you still probably don't have the heart to cull them just because they aren't being productive.
         So what do you do when life gives you lemons?! You give it fertilized eggs of a different bird so it can hatch em' out!!      Well....you know what I mean.
         Last summer, I stuck a fertilized peking duck egg underneath my broody buff orpington. She hatched it out and was happily a cluckin' and a frettin' over the little ball of fuzz underneath her, loving it as if it were her own. That little duckling was healthier and happier than any incubator hatched chick I've ever seen and the mother was pretty happy too.

 (Diane again with her little one Stan)


        To do this, any kind of fertilized bird egg will work. It's great because (A.) you don't have to worry about using a fire hazard heat lamp and (B.) you don't get stuck with more chicks than you want by buying them through the mail. Being a foster mom is also a perfect job for a broody hen that's too old to be useful for egg laying anyways. An old retired hen will readily hatch out any fertilized egg you give her and will likely be an even more attentive mother.