AngryOwl Farms

04/18/2022

Oh my goodness, the kitchen smelled SO GOOD while these were cooking up. Violet jelly tastes very similar to grape jelly, which really surprised me!

04/16/2022

Long time no post! Spring is here, though, so we're trying something new here at the Roost. I present to you, AngryOwl Farm's Ozarks Spring Jellies in their beginning stages!

The jar on the left is violet, center is lilac, and redbud on right. Not pictured, because I haven't separated the petals yet, is dandelion. But so far, I'm up to 24 half pints of redbud jelly, 16 half pints of lilac, and 8 half pints of violet jelly.

They'll sit and chill overnight and tomorrow, they'll be strained, divided, and processed!

I really didn't mean to do this much, y'all 😬

10/30/2021

There isn't much that makes me more emotional than putting a garden to bed for the season.

I talk to the plants, tell them, "Thank you for all you've given me, I appreciate you. I'll see you next year." And inevitably, my eyes well up with tears and I think to myself how silly I am to be so emotionally invested -- but am I?

Growing things keeps me grounded, rooted in both reality and my connection to other living things. It keeps me outdoors where I am surrounded by beauty and whimsy. It keeps me active and moving and ensures I get my vitamin D. It keeps me looking forward to tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.

I didn't put all of my plants in the compost pile this year. I kept back some peppers and basil and repotted them in hopes that they might flourish in my sunroom. I have a few peppers still flowering that I might just see if I can keep covered through next week's freeze. And I have some cool weather crops still going strong. I won't want for onions or kale, that's for sure.

The end of the growing season is something I put off as long as I can, until the plants tell me it's time. And I think it's because during growing season, I'm invested in nurturing life and growth outside of myself, from tending plants to feeding my family and friends.

But once the garden is put to bed, it's time for me to do the hard work of turning inward and nurturing myself. And that's something I both embrace and find extremely challenging.

As the short, dark days of winter approach, I lift my cider glass in toast and blessing: Here's to getting our hands dirty with the exhaustion and rewarding work of growing and caring for ourselves with as much vigor as we invest in our gardens and loved ones.

Happy Halloween, friends.

10/12/2021

- I cracked my first walnut today. With a nutcracker. Amazing how those things work. It was some doing to get the meat out, but I did it and now it's going in the marinara sauce I'm heating up for dinner.

- I don't remember seeing this many monarchs in past years. It's nice to have them flutter by. They're very friendly.

- We have a tree doing a slow fall in the backyard, which has necessitated the moving of coops and the chicken run, temporarily. Perfect timing, though, as it was time for the seasonal deep clean, anyway. I'm looking forward to the bonus firewood when the tree finally does give up.

- Back to the walnuts: 90 hulled nuts fills half of a gallon bag. I'd guess that amount weighs about 6-7 pounds (I should invest in a good scale), which should get me about 3 or so pounds of nut meat. That's from about five gallons of whole walnuts, hull and all. I still have another 15 gallons gathered and more still to fall.

09/18/2021

On this day last year, it all started with a parking lot rooster.

Happy Gotcha Day, Your Honor!

Happy First Gotcha Day to our parking lot roo, The Honorable Rooster Bader Clucksbirb!

08/27/2021

Good morning everybirdy! Breakfast is served!

08/25/2021

These still, late-summer mornings when the sun crests Summit hill and filters through dew-fog and glimmering spiderwebs, may well be my favorite.

I have just finished my morning chicken chores, which today involve giving a young rooster much loved scratches and filling a pan with cool water ahead of the day's sludgy Ozarks heat. I started filling the pan with water back in June, but as of two days ago only one hen has any clue what to do with it.

I went out back that day to put them up for the night, and despite the day's high temperature having long past peaked, two of my hens were dramatically insisting it was more than they could bear. The roosters were fine. The other hens were fine. But these girls had their wings out and I think if they had opposable thumbs, they would have been fanning themselves like I remember doing crowded in a stuffy gym with 300 other children for a school assembly when I was young.

Of the birds who were doing well, one in particular was Living Her Very Best Life: She had discovered the pan of water I set out for her to cool her feet in. She looked around nonchalantly as I approached, clearly thinking, "I don't know what these girls are on about, it's perfectly lovely out here."

So, of course, I must fill a fresh pan of water and put it in the run. Maybe the others will catch on.

Meanwhile, Persephone, my personal helper of the feline genre, prowls around the coops and runs looking for signs of trouble. She's a very good hunter and takes her chicken-protecting job very seriously. Having secured the perimeter, she perches on a rock several yards away, conveniently placed in a sunspot, and bathes herself with one eye always on us.

Wrapping up the chores, I notice a white flowering vine on my arbor vitae. "That's new," I think. "It's too late for Japanese honeysuckle, I better find out what it is."

Well, it turns out it's clematis, and not the native virgin's bower I had hoped for. It's autumn clematis, an invasive species that is apparently spreading aggressively. I make a note to mark down where I see it -- I now notice several of them -- so that when this heat breaks, I can deal with the invasion.

There is something about these late-summer transitional days, when the mornings are cool, the days oppressive, and the nights make me think of "A Time to Kill" and "Streetcar Named Desire," that yeets me back into childhood. It's hotter now, with climate change, than it was 40 years ago, but that doesn't stop me remembering 103-degree days in the ancient Sears kit house my great-uncle built.

We lived outdoors, pretty much, all summer long, permanent inhabitants of the kiddie pool on the front porch. One of those summers, I got my first stitches. Seven of them in my right temple. I had fallen while getting out and landed my forehead on the corner of a bench. A nurse friend of my mom's put a butterfly bandage on it to hold it until the doctors could stitch me back together again. I proudly bragged to anyone who would listen that I had butterflies in my head as a result.

How that didn't turn into a family joke, I'll never know.

Those hot summers were also prime time for "camping downstairs." As any child of a physics teacher can tell you by the time they're 5, heat rises and cool air sinks. That house did not have central air and it was about 3,000 square feet, if my memory serves, split between and upstairs and a downstairs and not counting the attic or basement. I can't imagine the cost of trying to cool that thing with a bunch of window units. So on those most stifling of summer nights, we would sleep in the playroom downstairs.

It's funny how such a small memory can take up so much space in one's heart.

The spiderwebs are everywhere. They're glistening, even as the dew-fog fades. The butterflies have begun their frolic. Was that a monarch I just saw?

Soon, the hummingbirds will stop by to dance in my pea vines. I hope they stay a while.

07/30/2021

Storytime! I shared this on BYC (BackYardChickens) but some of you aren't in that group (even though you SHOULD be because it's freakin' hilarious).

This poor quality photo (taken in Messenger camera, not my regular phone camera, and YES, it matters) is of one of the Weird Sisters, a trio of hens named for the characters in Shakespeare's Macbeth. They are normally inseparable and all look the same.

For most of the summer, I've had a broody little white hen. Her name is Lizzie. We finally broke her of it last week. As I've gone collecting eggs from the usual spots, I noticed there were hardly any. Some days, none at all. It's late summer here, so I chalked it up to molting and didn't think much of it.

Then yesterday, as I was cleaning, I found a nest. With 30 eggs. On top of a haybale on top of a covered kennel they use as a storm shelter or nesting box. The haybale, probably about 4, 4 1/2 feet off the ground, is just a place for them to perch and sometimes roost. I did not ever expect to see a nest there, much less one with 30 eggs! There are five hens total in that setup, and clearly they're all laying well 😂 I'm just wondering which hen managed to put all the eggs up there and how!

Anyway, while cleaning, I forgot the preventative lice treatment, so I went back in to spray their bedding and stuff, and got my answer to which hen. Thankful it wasn't Lizzy, I coaxed the cranky Weird Sister out of her spot so I could treat it.

She booked it. Her rooster, The Judge, immediately decided that was a perfect time to make a baby. She hollered at him and ran out into the yard with the other ladies.

I continued cleaning up and then came out to roll some logs to help the ladies find worms and tasty bug treats. Weird Sister was there, back in her coop, staring at me the whole time and fluffing her collar and BARKING AT ME!!!!

She BARKED. Nonstop. For AN HOUR. I've never heard anything like it!

Earlier today another hen, I don't know who, meowed at me.

I've heard lots of unusual noises from them, but today's sounds take the cake.

07/22/2021

Keeping backyard chickens is not for the faint of heart.

I knew this going in when we started with a single wayward parking lot rooster, and Aym and I made an agreement early on -- if had anything potentially remotely to do with death, I would be the one to handle it. Aym gets the hard work of building things and protecting the flock, and I'm the "doctor."

I've posted before about nursing hens back to health -- I'm a quick study and I generally have a good sense of when things are beyond my scope. I read up on common and uncommon ailments, what to watch for and how to treat them -- at least until they can get veterinary care, if it's called for.

Today was the first time I realized that, even if I acted fast, I might lose one of my girls before I could ever get her to the vet. Sometimes things happen lightning fast.

This photo is of Buttless, so named by the children who raised her before she joined our flock. She had no tail due to a mishap when she was younger, and possessed in its stead a delightfully quirky personality. The picture was taken in her first days with us, when she wasn't quite old enough to lay, and shows her contemplating nomming on an acorn squash hanging above her head.

Today, Buttless was eggbound. And despite all my reading on what to watch for, I missed it.

This is why it's good to have a safe community to turn to for advice and guidance, whether it be real people in your circle, or a Facebook group like Homesteading & Gardening, which is where I turned because I knew I could get fast answers.

I'm sharing Buttless' story here because I want others to know what it looks like -- it's not always just easy to pinpoint what's going on based on a few books and blogs you've read. Real life experience can help so much.

Buttless came for her breakfast and morning scritches yesterday, full of good cheer and energy as usual, but I noticed she had f***s matted around her vent -- the part of the anatomy where hens push out their eggs and their poo. But her coloring was good, she was energetic, she was happy and hungry, so I chalked it up to not using her roosting bar and resolved to fix it and keep a close eye on her.

I fixed the bar, which had a habit of falling, and made it more stable (I guess I do a little of the building and repairs, too, after all), and made sure she could get onto it easily. And I kept an eye on her. She continued acting normally, and I collected the normal number of eggs from that coop (right now, 2-4 eggs a day between 4 hens is normal for them).

When I checked on her this morning, I noticed she didn't come to breakfast with the others. She was standing, fine, and moving around a bit, but not at all enthusiastic for her favorite part of the day.

I prepped a three-tub bath for her: three tubs of warm water, the first with salt (for mite control) and Dawn dish soap, the second with vinegar (to neutralize the soap among other things) and the last with just water. I pulled her out of her pen and stuck her in the first tub, washing and scrubbing vigorously in the direction her feathers grow so as not to hurt her or break feathers, and paying special attention to her vent.

While moving her from tub to tub, I also took this opportunity to examine her even more closely, looking for other signs of illness. Her comb was pale and floppy, she was compliant with the bath (which told me she was tired and weak), her eyes were not staying open. She was skinnier than usual, but her crop felt mostly normal, if a little squishy. I checked her vent closely and couldn't see any obvious signs of obstruction. I did not think she was egg bound.

At the end of the bath, she was even more lethargic before, occasionally putting up a fight to escape me, and she'd begun having what looked to me like seizures: pitiful noises that sounded like expressions of pain, and her head would whip around in an uncomfortable looking way that she didn't seem to have any control over.

I knew I was running out of time. I was giving her water by syringe, which was the only thing I knew I could possibly do to give her a fighting chance, and held her in my lap as I turned to my trusty group for advice.

Y'all, they were so compassionate and kind, I'm so grateful to them. They helped me stay focused, and didn't hold back from real talk either -- including the possibility of euthanasia. They said she sounded egg bound and guided me with resources to help me confirm that suspicion, and lo and behold, they were right. Because she was so skinny, she was bony, which made it hard for me to feel her abdomen for an egg, but I did, after very patient and thorough feeling, find it.

By now, I knew a few things: She first started showing symptoms yesterday morning, and the rule of thumb I've heard is a hen can only be egg bound for a max of 48 hours before it's too late to save her; it had been about 30 hours; and she had already begun having seizures. I was up against the clock and her odds were not good.

I had *just* last week watched a video on treating an egg bound hen with an Epsom salt bath, and I decided I would try this one last ditch effort to save her. Essentially, you run a warm bath with Epsom salt and let her sit in it for 10-15 minutes until the egg releases.

Except that in the time it took me to get the materials together, get the sink ready and draw the bath, Buttless decided she'd had enough, and gave up the fight.

I tried, and I feel good about having tried. I'm sad -- we all are -- but we knew this day would come and I'm mostly proud of myself for being observant, resourceful and taking quick action as soon as I knew there was a problem. The silver lining to this is that now I know what to look for, and I know about other problems that sometimes can look similar, and I can act much faster next time.

Because there will be a next time, despite all of our best efforts. Backyard chickens are not for the faint of heart.

Sleep well, pretty Buttless girl. You were a treasure.

07/05/2021

07/05/2021

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