Blue Line Farm Welcome Guest | Login or Register

Lost another poult last night. Apparently, there’s more than one raccoon. I know where this one is getting into the coop. There’s a gap in the wire just below the ceiling/rafters near the coop door. This is what happens when you convert an old horse stall to a coop. Horse stalls are designed to keep large animals in, not small predators out.

In any case, I want this b*stard. He keeps eating my most expensive birds! The ones I was going to sell to boot! He’s like a 4 legged recession. Feh. This location will be harder to bait with poison though. If I put it up, then he might not drink it. If I put it down, outside the coop, then the cats might get it. If I put it inside the coop I’ve basically sacrificed yet another poult to this guy. After losing 4 birds in the last 3 days, I could do without losing one more.

I’ll probably put out the Pepsi of Death in multiple spots just to be sure. Cath asked me not to sacrifice anymore tupperware containers for the task, so I’ll be using plastic dishes from the store. I need more chicken wire too, eh? Looks like a trip to the Holy Trinity: Tractor Supply Co., Home Depot, and Meijers.

The game isn’t over yet, but we’re getting into the late innings. Hopefully, it won’t go into overtime.

Thanks to the miracle of Golden Malrin Fly Bait and Pepsi, I aced our poultricidal raccoon last night. He killed one more poult before he drank his hemlock, but I can’t figure out how he got into the main coop where I moved them from the brooder. I chicken wired all remaining openings that a 20 lb raccoon could get through or so I thought. The bright side, if there is one, is that he seems to have gotten the one I needed to cull for spraddle legs. Oh, that and I got to carry a giant dead raccoon to the trash can this morning before work. He’d made it all of 5 feet from the Pepsi of Death. Many thanks to my friends Sue and Phil who suggested the fly bait and pop. The things you learn that aren’t in the books!

Now I can get back to the world’s worst cattle fence, serious brush hogging, and fixing giant sections of electric fence. You know, all the easy stuff.

I went out to feed the chicks this morning and found 2 shredded turkey poult carcasses just outside the brooder. Since the brooder is in an old horse stall, which I have boarded up like Ft. Knox, it was a big surprise. It shouldn’t have been. I’ve seen a raccoon and a possum in the barn at night recently, but figured they were after the cat food. I was hoping to get some other things done this week, but it looks like shoring up the chicken protection just become my biggest priority. One of our other poults will have to be culled as well due to it’s being crippled, bringing my loss today to 3 birds. Not fun.
Another gruesome sight is the amount of spam posts I am deflecting. I’ll be turning off comments on old articles to preserve my sanity. If you have a sudden urge to comment on a six month old post, please do so immediately.

The good news is that the fence posts are in, as is the world’s ugliest 60 feet of fencing. I’ll install the world’s worst hung gate shortly. Note to those of you looking to make that urban to rural transition: I couldn’t find any good stuff on the web about installing and running cattle fence. It’s not in my Storey’s Guide either. You are on your own about installing fence. I figure I’ll redo the whole thing in a year or two once I’ve learned the hard way.

In the meantime, I need to get my Mom’s ducks to her after work, shut down my brooder and merge the 5-week olds with the main flock. This should be interesting, but its easier to put all my chickens in one basket and then wrap it in acres of chicken wire than trying to protect the coop and the brooder. At some point, I’ll get the possum. The raccoon may be tougher. With all the cats in the barn, I can only put out a live trap. Frankly, I think the coon and the possum may be too big to get into the live trap, but until I get a varmint gun and camp out in the garage all night, it’s my best hope of catching my nocturnal eater.

I played Manure Fairy all afternoon and evening on Saturday. During the winter, I had a round bale feed parked behind the barn and I’d toss my idiot squares into it every morning for our ruminant crew. After a few months of this, the cattle had left a giant circle of manure and hay around the feeder and we had a sizable mound of soiled and uneaten hay in the feeder as well. Since I’m trying to clean up behind the barn to put in a full fledged chicken yard/cattle pen, I finally moved this mass over to our old training arena. For those interested, moving 4 tons of wet, compacted, manure laden hay is very long and smelly exercise. Even with a tractor.

I still need to drag the field I dropped it in. And then disc it in, but the area behind the barn is looking good. I’ll have fence posts in sometime this decade!

Cath and I have a love-hate relationship when it comes to Cath’s attempts at cooking things other than pasta. Mostly, I hate them, actually, so its less of a love-hate than just a hate thing. I mean, she’s a great baker and a whiz with pasta, but I’m not a big fan of Vegetarian Lasagna in any scenario and making it with V8 juice just adds to the problem. She’s not like the Mom in “Better Off Dead” or anything, but I tend to do a lot of the cooking.

Still, the one thing I’ve been missing terribly since we moved from Chicago is chicken shawarma. There’s a place down in KZoo (”Shawarma King”) that has it, but its a long drive for really 3rd rate shwerma. Thus, I was pleasantly surprised when Cath took a recipe we downloaded and made some of the best chicken shawarma I’ve ever had. NOW, I have everything. Chickens in the yard and shawarma in the oven. Now, if only I can get her to talk like Zsa Zsa Gabor my Green Acres life will be complete.

For the record, I think that’s the first Green Acres reference on this site. Nearly a year. Wow.

In any case, we have chicken everywhere right now. Our broody hen hatched 3 chicks, 2 black ones and one gold/black one. Should be interesting to see how the Java/Chantecleur crossbreed thing turns out. That’s in the coop. In another converted horse stall we have ducklings and more chantecluer chicks peeping it up. And we have the turkey poults and cornish rock chicks in the brooder in the garage. Add green cardamoms. Wait 2 months.

Add to this the last week of baseball and a bull who managed to escape 3 times in two days on Sunday/Monday and its been a busy week. At some point, however, I’d like to replace that snowy image up top with a summer one. I got the PTO shaft onto the post hole auger though, so we’ll be doing some new fencing this weekend. Woot. I wonder if the Amish hire out post hole digging. I wouldn’t do this stuff by hand for all teh tea in China.