Pre-Spring Update

2012-02-29T23:19:00.003-08:00

Spring is nearly here, or at least it feels that way. It's been such a warm winter that all the trees are a bit confused. I borrowed a tree pruning book from a neighbor and have been doing minor attempts at pruning. I started with the street trees that our neighbor, Urban Releaf, planted when we first moved in and then did just some minor pruning of our plum and pear trees. The apricot tree doesn't seem to need much yet and the fig can wait as well.

Santa Rosa Plum

Bleinheim Apricot

I put on my bee suit as well and reviewed the hive. They're busy and the upper super has honey. I'll need to add another shallow super soon as they start to fill the hive more quickly. I wanted to find the queen but I wasn't able to take all the frames out of the deep super since I injured my thumb a few weeks ago and having only one opposable thumb made it difficult to extract them delicately so I kept pissing off the bees.

Lastly, since the massacre our two remaining chickens stopped laying for a couple months, either from the shock or the natural winter ebb. They did start up again a few weeks ago and have been laying pretty regularly since. We also got five new chicks from BioFuel Oasis last week. I went with all Americaunas because they've seemed to have had the best temperament of all the breeds we've tried, although I'm pretty happy with the Buffs so far.

About four days old.

Chicken Massacre

2011-11-19T17:58:00.000-08:00

I arrived home on Thursday to find a note in our mailbox from our neighbor. It said her dog had gotten in the backyard again and killed a chicken. I went to the back expecting to find one dead chicken that had most likely escaped but instead I found a complete massacre. There were feathers and dead chickens everywhere in their pen. Out of nine chickens, there were only three alive and one only barely.

I started cleaning up when the neighbor came out. She was very apologetic but when I told her how many had been killed she was completely confused. She had grabbed her dogs almost immediately and found only one dead chicken, the one that had been escaping the pen lately. She said all the rest were still alive and the dogs were still outside of the pen wanting to get in but hadn't. So that leaves the mystery of what happened after. Either the same dogs returned or another dog came in got in the same way. Whichever animal it was had broken through the fenced chicken area at a weak spot that was temporary and not well built. From there it was like a fox in a hen house.

There was a lot of outrage among some friends regarding the neighbor's dogs. I can't blame her or them too much, though. I had made a hole in our fence and failed to patch it, even after she commented on it. And I think it's in a dog's nature to go after chickens so I don't feel that they're especially violent and to be concerned about otherwise. I would just like to solve the mystery of the second attacker.

Butter, the only untouched survivor. I'm not sure how she escaped injury but besides a bit of shock she's doing well and even laid an egg today.

Half and Half has one bite wound that doesn't look too bad but it also seems she has a broken leg. Hopefully she'll pull through, otherwise Butter is going to be one lonely chicken.

The third one that had survived, Winky our zombie chicken, didn't make it through the night. The rest: DOA.

Finca 57

Pre-Spring Update

Chicken Massacre