Waiting for Eggs

Ungrateful brats!

I feed them, I care for them, I spend countless hours providing shelter for them, and all I ask of them is that they lay an egg per day.

And still they make me wait!

The quail and chickens are delaying my marketing plans.

I have almost 100 quail, and five of them are laying right now. The other 90 have decided to take their time and enjoy the spring.

We have over one-hundred chickens, and only fourteen of them are laying.  The others are too young and won’t be laying for another few weeks.

Ingrates!

Don’t they know I have customers waiting for eggs?????

Hopefully a protector

I’m laughing while I write this, so don’t panic.  That’s just the way it goes with animals and birds.  They follow the beat of a drum I’ll never hear, and I have no say in the matter.  Kick back and chill, Bill, it will all happen when it happens.  In the meantime there are fifty other chores I can work on.

 

I was watching a next door neighbor go off to work the other day, to a job he does not like.  Me, I sipped on my mocha, smiled, and went to the office to write.  Around eleven I stopped writing, had lunch with my wife, and then worked with animals on the farm in the afternoon, all while our faithful puppy Maggie looked at me like I am the most important person on the planet.

Life has never been so good!

 

Spring finally arrived!  Seventies this week and thank the gods for it.

Which, of course, means more outdoor chores.

Life has never been so good!

Welcome to my life!

Bill

Chickens Are Hatching

The Silkies are coming!

Silkies are a particular breed of chicken which I find to be adorable.  If you’ve raised chickens before perhaps you know of them. They are tinier than normal chickens, and they lay tinier eggs, but they are funky-looking in a very cute way, and I just find them to be a very enjoyable chicken.

Anyway, I have twelve Silkie eggs in the incubator, and they are due to hatch tomorrow.  I’m excited about their arrival in a way only those with chickens could understand.

And then on the 16^th my Cream Legbars are due to hatch.  We are going to raise Cream Legbars because they lay the prettiest blue eggs you will ever see, and they demand a pretty good price since hardly anyone in our area raised them. They are in high demand and we should do pretty well with them. I have twelve more Cream Legbar eggs I need to put in the incubator today for a hatch twenty-one days from today.

Exciting times!

Of course that means I need to build a new coop, but that’s a labor of love and I enjoy doing those projects.

I just finished a quail tractor for the farm.  We’ll move that out to the farm tomorrow and introduce some quail to a new home.

And the farmers market opens next week, where we will sell quail eggs, chicken eggs, and the goat cheese from our son’s farm.

Ya gotta love spring, even though here spring is a bit damp and chilly.

We aren’t even close to planting our garden.  We have the strawberries planted, and potatoes and garlic, but I’m afraid we are a bit behind on the rest of the garden . . . maybe this weekend if I can get the taxes done quickly.

That’s about it from our little slice of heaven.

Bill

 

 

Building Community One Day At A Time

Farmers’ Markets and community . . .

One only has to look at the small town of Steilacoom in Western Washington to see the connection.

Every Tuesday during the spring and summer, the Steilacoom Farmers Market is open for business in this city by the bay of 6,000 residents.  A street is blocked off in the early morning, preparations are made, stalls are manned, product delivered, and for four hours in the afternoon, the city residents gather for the Market.  When the Market shuts down for the day there is a concert in the adjoining park.

A town of 6,000 . . . I worked a stall at that market two years ago, and I do not exaggerate when I say there are easily two-or-three thousand people who attend that farmers market each week.

Think about that . . . between a third and a half of the city’s residents attend a market, each week, in the middle of a workday.

Community!

During that summer I never once saw an argument.  I sure as hell never saw violence.  What I did see were people coming together in a spirit of friendship. What I saw was a community working together for the common good of all. I saw smiles, I saw conversation, I saw bonds being formed, and I saw commonalities explored.  There were no heated discussions about politics, no protesting, and no exclusion.

There was just community, something sorely missing in our society these days.

That’s what I hope to accomplish as the President of the Tumwater Town Center Farmers Market this year and in the years to come.  I want that market to be a central meeting place for Tumwater residents. I want it to be a safe place where, for four hours, the madness of the world is shut out and only community exists.

Support your local markets! Get out and meet your neighbors.  You all benefit when you do.