CHICKENS: hope springs…
Had a false-alarm scare this morning when I went out to feed the chickens and collect eggs… the older, mega-matron Maran was not out clamoring with the other girls at the feeder. I looked around the coop, cooing loudly *chook chook chook chook!*… hoping, oh, hoping that she was getting busy in the nest box and not dead somewhere (paranoid? probably, haha). I even banged on the side of the coop before I opened the door… and there she was, sitting on some eggs with her beak open, giving me a nasty look. Must have heard the soup pot rumors. Atta girl!
Their eggs used to be dark brown, but now are much lighter, with an even paler dappled bloom to them. Good to know… when we had fewer hens, it was easy to tell which ones were laying, but now other than the Ameraucana (haven’t had any green eggs in months, but they’re notoriously poor winter layers) and the Cali Leghorn (who lays as many white eggs as the rest of our slackers combined most weeks), it’s hard to know exactly whose buff-to-brown egg is whose, especially as the color can shift slightly as they age. Three eggs again today! Spring’s coming.
And guess what else came to our neighborhood? I half didn’t believe it when I got the leaflet in the mail a couple weeks ago, but they showed up on Tuesday, delivered in a blizzard (by a company from Minnesota? WTF? All this outside contracting is driving me batty, Mayor OneTerm. Chicagoans couldn’t do that? Did you ask?).
But I digress… Blue Carts! We now have alley-pickup recycling, instead of having to schlep everything 5 blocks away to the Center for Green Tech (or just throwing it away like most folks did before). Woohoo! That will eliminate at least 4 bins of crap, I mean recyclable treasure, from our back porch and hopefully help keep our alleys cleaner and encourage more of our neighbors to sort their trash. Huzzah!
I ordered a new camera yesterday, after doing my best to resurrect my point-and-shoot, and discovering that I can’t get the fella’s camera to upload files to my laptop, or to the cabin computer… his has pretty poor image quality compared to what I’m used to, and I need my own for work, etsy, and simple photo fun. New images coming soon! Also, my spring resolution is to do my best to track and document how much food we manage to produce this year at home… look for the new sidebar if you’re curious!