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dragonlady7So I don't recall when I last wrote anything on here.
Dude and I went to Rochester on Saturday, and met my sister at my BFF's house. Farmkid had never been to Rochester before but she's met my BFF's kids before, so they were delighted to all play together. She's right between them in age, and she generally prefers girls as her playmates, so sometimes she paired off with the younger girl, but the boy is older and has more advanced playing ideas, so sometimes she paired off with him instead, and in general they had a decently good playing dynamic. It can be a problem, because the two siblings are really used to one another and the girl especially gets jealous if her brother pays too much attention to anybody else, but Farmkid seemed pretty reasonable at heading that off.
We all went to the Strong Museum of Play on Sunday-- and Dude left and went home to Buffalo rather than joining us at the museum.
Four adults and three children is just about right for the Museum of Play, which is an overstimulating paradise of insanity.
Pennsic is going on currently, and we got some text messages from friends there that they were re-enacting Port Court on Sunday night. I'm sure I explained Port Court at some point but I just don't know now; suffice to say, it's one of those things that was never actually a thing but has become A Thing through sheer dint of persistence, mostly by people uninvolved in the original incident. But it did mean that we broke out a bottle of port and each had a thimbleful, just to be able to text photographic evidence back to the revellers.
We left Monday morning, and I rode back with Farmsister and the kid back to the farm. It was a great way for me to not have to drive, for once.
The a/c just died in her car, alas, so that was a little bit much, but it wasn't so horribly hot on Monday.
We arrived at about half past noon, and wolfed some lunch and then had to do the whole day's work in an afternoon. Fortunately it was manageable-- got the eggs packed, and the room set up for slaughter, and everything cleaned and set up.
Thenunicornduke came over and we harvested a bit over half of my field of flax. It's now stooked (gathered into sheaves) and propped up vertically to dry out a bit. Then we need to ripple it, which is pulling it through a kind of comb thing to get the seed pods off and collect the seeds. Then after that it'll need retting, which is when you get the outer straw part to rot so you can free the inner fibers.
Then we can dry it again and figure out the rest of the processing equipment and do that over the summer. So that was fun, it's always fun to work withunicornduke although sometimes a bit humbling-- just like the farmers here, she's much faster than I am at any kind of handwork. I was getting the hang of it, though. Flax is dead easy to harvest-- you just pull it up by the roots, and it just comes right up.
Still need to harvest the other half, and of course all the rippling... It's uh, a lot of flax. And I don't know what we'll do exactly, but it seems worth the experiment.
So today was a chicken processing day, and all was on pace to go normally-- down two workers, we thought we'd be a bit slow, but it was a light load; this group of chickens had some mortality in the brooder and then had a terrible run-in with a pair of owls their first night out on pasture, and so there were significantly fewer of them than there ought to have been. (Usually a batch is 150-180; this group was 135.)
After catching the chickens, a few crew members paused to finish morning chores, running feed and water out to the various animals on pasture, and while they were tending to the egg hens, one of the young men discovered a great blue heron tangled in the hen's electro-mesh fence. He gently unwound it, and put it into a feed bucket with an egg basket upside-down on top so it couldn't get away; he could see that it had an injury on its leg, he said from a fish-hook-- I'm not sure if he saw the hook and removed it, or what, because we couldn't spot an injury, later.
We put it into a dog crate with a bowl of water, so that it had room to raise its head to drink, and so nothing would bother it, and he resolved to take it to the bird sanctuary up the road after we were done working on the chickens.
I was shocked by how enormous and yet how small it was. They're huge birds, when you see them flying-- great wingspan, distinctive curve-necked and trailing-legged posture as they fly, big slow wingbeats, enormous beaks-- but really they only weigh maybe five to six pounds, they're so long and lean. This one was clearly not well, and was just folded up so small it fit easily in the lower part of a five-gallon bucket, its legs just limp under it, neck all folded down, eyes wide and very still and frightened, big yellow lizard eye unblinking and fixed but alert, watching us, waiting for us to leave it alone. But if it had been well, it could easily have burst out of the bucket and been away, it was clearly too exhausted to move. In the dog crate it lay with its neck in the water bowl and kept its head turning around and around, watching everything that came near, but it made no attempt to stand, to get its feet properly under it or move its wings at all.
My mother was there, babysitting Farmkid, though, and she volunteered to call around and find out who could really care for an injured heron.
And it was good she did; the bird sanctuary does not handle migratory birds, which the heron is. So she called the state Dep't of Environmental Conservation (DEC), and they said oh somebody will have to call you back, so she waited an hour and got no reply so she called a different number within the DEC and finally got given another line, and called them and they said "oh we can only help if there's an enforcement issue"-- i.e. the animal is loose and being destructive and needs to be captured. Since we had the thing well in hand and trapped carefully in a safe place, they were not able to help us.
But they did have the number for a wildlife rehabilitation place, so Mom tried them instead, and they were finally able to give her the number of a place that could take the heron.
It was about half an hour's drive away. But my dad had come over to work on the house a bit, so he was willing to take over babysitting for not only Farmkid but one of the Overqualified Moms who helps with the chickens had brought her daughters too for a playdate, and so the three girls were playing.
So Mom left them with Dad, and drove with this wild bird in a cage over to this vet's office.
They were all super pumped to help this bird, and were very familiar with herons. They were able to diagnose immediately that it's main problem was shock and dehydration, and that with just a bit of care it'd be fine.
This is the part that sort of surprised me, though-- when it's recovered, they're going to call us back and we're to come fetch it and put it back where we found it!!! Which, I mean, of course-- it's a regular, we've been seeing it here for years, it makes sense we should put it back into a place it knows-- it just seems really funny that we're to go pick it up and all.
I didn't get a photo but my sister did, it's on her Instagram.
We flew (ha) through the chicken processing anyway, even short-handed, and had finished by 10:30. One of the helpers really wanted us to just move on to doing the packaging, and so at her urging we just went ahead and kept going. Which was good; we got through the majority of it before lunch, and then at lunch the post office called, we had a box of chicks there even though they were supposed to arrive tomorrow, and so my sister went and had to clean out a brooder to prepare for that, so we didn't have her help packaging after lunch. Fortunately, we only had eight chickens left to do whole. There was a lot more cutting up to do, but I don't usually help with that. So instead I let everyone else go off and do other jobs, and I did all the cleanup, slowly, by myself, and so by the time I was done, they were done cutting up the rest of the chickens, and so I could keep going and get all the cleaning done and the room set back up for egg-washing, which is what it is the rest of the time.
I was pretty sore by the end of all that, but I got my sister to come back and do the heavy lifting parts of cleanup (I literally just mean lifting the heavy things that everyone but me can do alone and I can only do with help). And then it was done, and the other more qualified farm types had all gone on to do other important constructive things.
The veg manager's main important constructive thing (in my view anyway) was that he discovered that the melons are beginning to come ripe-- he brought in a canteloupe that's just reached the first blush of perfection and we devoured it for dinner. (along with the traditional chicken day pizza, of course.)
I should get off my ass and go pull more flax but I think I'll be in bed with the lights out before it's actually dark out. Sorry, flax. Maybe tomorrow.
Dude and I went to Rochester on Saturday, and met my sister at my BFF's house. Farmkid had never been to Rochester before but she's met my BFF's kids before, so they were delighted to all play together. She's right between them in age, and she generally prefers girls as her playmates, so sometimes she paired off with the younger girl, but the boy is older and has more advanced playing ideas, so sometimes she paired off with him instead, and in general they had a decently good playing dynamic. It can be a problem, because the two siblings are really used to one another and the girl especially gets jealous if her brother pays too much attention to anybody else, but Farmkid seemed pretty reasonable at heading that off.
We all went to the Strong Museum of Play on Sunday-- and Dude left and went home to Buffalo rather than joining us at the museum.
Four adults and three children is just about right for the Museum of Play, which is an overstimulating paradise of insanity.
Pennsic is going on currently, and we got some text messages from friends there that they were re-enacting Port Court on Sunday night. I'm sure I explained Port Court at some point but I just don't know now; suffice to say, it's one of those things that was never actually a thing but has become A Thing through sheer dint of persistence, mostly by people uninvolved in the original incident. But it did mean that we broke out a bottle of port and each had a thimbleful, just to be able to text photographic evidence back to the revellers.
We left Monday morning, and I rode back with Farmsister and the kid back to the farm. It was a great way for me to not have to drive, for once.
The a/c just died in her car, alas, so that was a little bit much, but it wasn't so horribly hot on Monday.
We arrived at about half past noon, and wolfed some lunch and then had to do the whole day's work in an afternoon. Fortunately it was manageable-- got the eggs packed, and the room set up for slaughter, and everything cleaned and set up.
Then
unicornduke came over and we harvested a bit over half of my field of flax. It's now stooked (gathered into sheaves) and propped up vertically to dry out a bit. Then we need to ripple it, which is pulling it through a kind of comb thing to get the seed pods off and collect the seeds. Then after that it'll need retting, which is when you get the outer straw part to rot so you can free the inner fibers.Then we can dry it again and figure out the rest of the processing equipment and do that over the summer. So that was fun, it's always fun to work with
unicornduke although sometimes a bit humbling-- just like the farmers here, she's much faster than I am at any kind of handwork. I was getting the hang of it, though. Flax is dead easy to harvest-- you just pull it up by the roots, and it just comes right up.Still need to harvest the other half, and of course all the rippling... It's uh, a lot of flax. And I don't know what we'll do exactly, but it seems worth the experiment.
So today was a chicken processing day, and all was on pace to go normally-- down two workers, we thought we'd be a bit slow, but it was a light load; this group of chickens had some mortality in the brooder and then had a terrible run-in with a pair of owls their first night out on pasture, and so there were significantly fewer of them than there ought to have been. (Usually a batch is 150-180; this group was 135.)
After catching the chickens, a few crew members paused to finish morning chores, running feed and water out to the various animals on pasture, and while they were tending to the egg hens, one of the young men discovered a great blue heron tangled in the hen's electro-mesh fence. He gently unwound it, and put it into a feed bucket with an egg basket upside-down on top so it couldn't get away; he could see that it had an injury on its leg, he said from a fish-hook-- I'm not sure if he saw the hook and removed it, or what, because we couldn't spot an injury, later.
We put it into a dog crate with a bowl of water, so that it had room to raise its head to drink, and so nothing would bother it, and he resolved to take it to the bird sanctuary up the road after we were done working on the chickens.
I was shocked by how enormous and yet how small it was. They're huge birds, when you see them flying-- great wingspan, distinctive curve-necked and trailing-legged posture as they fly, big slow wingbeats, enormous beaks-- but really they only weigh maybe five to six pounds, they're so long and lean. This one was clearly not well, and was just folded up so small it fit easily in the lower part of a five-gallon bucket, its legs just limp under it, neck all folded down, eyes wide and very still and frightened, big yellow lizard eye unblinking and fixed but alert, watching us, waiting for us to leave it alone. But if it had been well, it could easily have burst out of the bucket and been away, it was clearly too exhausted to move. In the dog crate it lay with its neck in the water bowl and kept its head turning around and around, watching everything that came near, but it made no attempt to stand, to get its feet properly under it or move its wings at all.
My mother was there, babysitting Farmkid, though, and she volunteered to call around and find out who could really care for an injured heron.
And it was good she did; the bird sanctuary does not handle migratory birds, which the heron is. So she called the state Dep't of Environmental Conservation (DEC), and they said oh somebody will have to call you back, so she waited an hour and got no reply so she called a different number within the DEC and finally got given another line, and called them and they said "oh we can only help if there's an enforcement issue"-- i.e. the animal is loose and being destructive and needs to be captured. Since we had the thing well in hand and trapped carefully in a safe place, they were not able to help us.
But they did have the number for a wildlife rehabilitation place, so Mom tried them instead, and they were finally able to give her the number of a place that could take the heron.
It was about half an hour's drive away. But my dad had come over to work on the house a bit, so he was willing to take over babysitting for not only Farmkid but one of the Overqualified Moms who helps with the chickens had brought her daughters too for a playdate, and so the three girls were playing.
So Mom left them with Dad, and drove with this wild bird in a cage over to this vet's office.
They were all super pumped to help this bird, and were very familiar with herons. They were able to diagnose immediately that it's main problem was shock and dehydration, and that with just a bit of care it'd be fine.
This is the part that sort of surprised me, though-- when it's recovered, they're going to call us back and we're to come fetch it and put it back where we found it!!! Which, I mean, of course-- it's a regular, we've been seeing it here for years, it makes sense we should put it back into a place it knows-- it just seems really funny that we're to go pick it up and all.
I didn't get a photo but my sister did, it's on her Instagram.
We flew (ha) through the chicken processing anyway, even short-handed, and had finished by 10:30. One of the helpers really wanted us to just move on to doing the packaging, and so at her urging we just went ahead and kept going. Which was good; we got through the majority of it before lunch, and then at lunch the post office called, we had a box of chicks there even though they were supposed to arrive tomorrow, and so my sister went and had to clean out a brooder to prepare for that, so we didn't have her help packaging after lunch. Fortunately, we only had eight chickens left to do whole. There was a lot more cutting up to do, but I don't usually help with that. So instead I let everyone else go off and do other jobs, and I did all the cleanup, slowly, by myself, and so by the time I was done, they were done cutting up the rest of the chickens, and so I could keep going and get all the cleaning done and the room set back up for egg-washing, which is what it is the rest of the time.
I was pretty sore by the end of all that, but I got my sister to come back and do the heavy lifting parts of cleanup (I literally just mean lifting the heavy things that everyone but me can do alone and I can only do with help). And then it was done, and the other more qualified farm types had all gone on to do other important constructive things.
The veg manager's main important constructive thing (in my view anyway) was that he discovered that the melons are beginning to come ripe-- he brought in a canteloupe that's just reached the first blush of perfection and we devoured it for dinner. (along with the traditional chicken day pizza, of course.)
I should get off my ass and go pull more flax but I think I'll be in bed with the lights out before it's actually dark out. Sorry, flax. Maybe tomorrow.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-07 01:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-07 10:04 am (UTC)I feel like that's how Annie feels too, when I help with the flowers. I can almost keep up with her, now I've had some practice. (With transplanting I can keep up if she does all the laying out of the seedlings and most of the soil prep, lol.)
no subject
Date: 2019-08-07 02:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-07 10:02 am (UTC)I too am really excited that there's Actual Flax!
no subject
Date: 2019-08-07 04:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-07 10:01 am (UTC)This individual, we think, is one we've seen so often, for years now-- it (the wildlife people confirmed there's no sexual dimorphism in blue herons, not notably anyway, so it's impossible to know just by looking at this guy if it's male or female; my sister was using they/them pronouns for it but I've found that's confusing when you're talking about an animal, somehow) stalks frogs all along the hillside behind the house and up into the pastures, including where M found it. So it's kind of an old friend; sometimes it would come quite close to the house in its quest for froggy sustenance, and we'd gather around the kitchen window and peer at it until it finished its hunt and lumbered away on its enormous wings.
So we'd be awfully sad to lose it, either to mishap or to it being released somewhere else.
(I mean, obviously this individual guy's got a fairly big range, and probably goes to one or more of the area's lakes too; it surely didn't pick up a fishing hook up in the farm's little pond, which doesn't have any fish. If it were released elsewhere it could probably find its way back here; it likely migrates as far as North Carolina in the winters, so. But still!)
I'm a fan of frogs, but I can spare a few for this guy, especially given what a bumper year it is for frogs. I'm almost positive this heron's our regular, and we're glad for M's quick thinking in putting it into the bucket when it was too weak to fly away. There's all kinds of critters around here that would gladly do for an incapacitated large bird.