 The time change is here.....I find it very hard losing the daylight. But there is not much I can do about it. The Red Head chickens are finally starting to have new feathers growing. I was getting only 8-10 eggs a day from them and there are 15 of them. It should be closer to 12-14 eggs a day. The stripped girls are laying pullet/peewee eggs and will for a while. I still sell them but at a lower price.
So into the long nights we go!
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 My young layers which I call the Stripee girls are just starting to lay pullet eggs. the girls are a heritage breed called Dominique, they tend to mature slowly. I am getting 3-6 eggs a week right now. The eggs are so cute and I like making deviled eggs with them.
I am hoping the rain helps to relieve the moderate drought we are in!  It is still very dry, but not so hot. We have had some cool evenings and days in the 60's and some like yesterday in the 80's. I like this time of year because there are less annoying bugs that bite(other than ticks) and the fly population has slowed down. I think the rat population has slowed down as well due to the bobcat and a neighbors cat hunting on my property. This is fine with me, they come at night and all my chickens are secure and not at risk.
The youngest laying hens who I call the stripey girls have started to lay eggs every other day. Soon they will be producing the little pullet eggs regularly, which are so cute and make great deviled eggs! I picked all my red and green Bartlett pears, but have left the small and somewhat buggy Bosc pears to the bear. Now it is time to start thinking about pulling the plants from the garden and planting fall bulbs for the spring of 2026!  In 2018 on September 13th Brandon went into the hospital with angina. We started at Convenient Care as he was throwing up and having terrible chest pains and difficulty breathing. They hooked him up and realized it wasn't due to indigestion, he was having a cardiac event. In came the special ambulance to take him to Concord Hospital. I called work and told them why I wouldn't be there and followed the ambulance to the hospital. It was less than 20 minutes later he was in the cath lab having two stents put in. He had started to feel better, but he had pericarditis which caused him to be feverish and always cold. But early Sunday morning (the 4th day) he woke up in extreme pain. They got him back in the cath lab as his stents had failed. They added two more stents,but also cleaned out his arteries around the heart and put him on a groin pump and onto intensive care. He was there on the 6th day and had his groin pump removed and we were hoping he would be going back to cardiac rehab the next day. That evening he was going to be able to lie on his side to sleep and was happy despite the fact that the Red socks lost again to the NY Yankees. He said to his nurse and I quote" they may have lost tonight, but they are too good a team to lose the world series". Brandon was right, unfortunately he died a little after 1 am September 20th, when his left ventricle split and he no longer had a heart. I got to the room just as they were declaring him dead, but I suspect he was dead when the alarms went off.
The staff left me with him, while I said goodbye. The worst thing about shock is you get really cold, luckily the head nurse saw this and gave me a heated blanket and a cup of tea. I sat out in the ICU waiting area and realized it was 2:30 am and I really shouldn't call anyone, plus my flip phone was dead. So I sat and made a list of who to call and what I needed to do. Luckily the head nurse came in and told me there would be no need for an autopsy as they knew what had happened. This was good as I didn't know if my Mother in law would want to see him before he was buried. Brandon's nurse came out and talked to me about Brandon and what his last day was like. I had been there on and off everyday, but with the dog and farm I couldn't stay there all day or night. After the nurse left I was staring across the room at the seat that was against the wall and there was Brandon sitting with all our former dogs(all buried in our yard ) sitting around his chair. He got up and the rainbow bridge appeared behind him and he and the dogs went across the Rainbow bridge together. It was a godsend...knowing that his spirit was going with his beloved dogs. To explain this more was to make you understand how much the dogs meant to Brandon, he had said when he died, he wanted to be buried with his dogs. That would mean burying him in the yard on the other side of the driveway and I had told him NO...on that Idea. We had talked about this as both his mother and father had heart issues and both had had open heart surgery and he knew what their wishes were,but talked about what he wanted. He said he didn't want to have a formal funeral, as he didn't want anyone to talk about him(a eulogy). So I said, well, I want to be cremated and people can take little bags of me home with them if they want. Just leave enough of me to be buried next to you or leave room for you in our local cemetery. So , seeing him and the dogs go over the rainbow bridge together gave me peace of mind, even though now it still makes me cry. I did a sketch of what I saw the day he died but didn't do the watercolor painting till 2 years after his death and it sits over my desk. I remember him everyday and feel very lucky I was married to him as long as I was, I am very thankful for his love!  Tomatoes everywhere! I am thankful for the AGA roasting and baking ovens, I can have 4 trays of tomatoes roasting at a time! This time of year can be a bit overwhelming! I went through my records to figure out what products sold last year and what products didn't do well. I have a list reminding me of how much produce and fruit I still need to fulfill this year's canning quota.
My garden has not produced as many tomatoes as I need for passata so I have had to find another source for Juliet tomatoes. Although I do have enough herbs and sources for shallots and garlic, so I don't grow those. My poor cucumbers and squash were attacked early on by squash bugs and cucumber beetles and I didn't get more than 3 zucchini and 5 tiny curled pickling cukes. Next year I need to apply Spinosad and BT earlier on the squashes , plus picking off squash bugs and removing eggs from the squash leaves. It is quite a bit of work....but I love having fresh zucchini to eat and make Zucchini relish, Zucchini Bread and Butter pickles and occasionally Lemon Ginger Zucchini Marmalade! Unfortunately, the company in Vermont does not do Humane rat removal without rodenticides. So I guess I will have to stick to traps and rodent contraception.
I had my nieces son here last week helping to clean out the Redheads chicken house and I have blocked their doorway with a baby gate. That has discouraged the rats from eating their food. But I need to remove more of the natural cover around the buildings and chicken trailers to help discourage them from nesting there. We shall see ,who wins in the end...wish me luck! The month of August so far has been hot, humid and dry. Right now most of NH is abnormally dry. It means the garden is in need of water daily and the bugs and caterpillars are feasting on my squashes, cukes and tomatoes. Everyday I am killing at least a half dozen horn worms( I have tried feeding them to the chickens, but they won't eat them) and I have given up on the squash bugs. I will need to be more proactive next year to keep the population from exploding. I haven't had to mow my little bit of lawn, but I do need to weed wack around the garden and outside edges of the yard as the weeds are very happy! Zorra is still working on digging out the rats, but I have accepted that my problem is more than traps and disrupting the mating abilities of the rat population. So I have contacted a pest group out of Vermont who claim to do Humane Rodent Removal. I won't do poison as it kills not just the rats, but anything that eats them alive,dying or dead once the rats have ingested the poison. I need hawks, weasels, mink , cats and Bobcats to help with my pest control...so I don't want to kill the predators. I have been lucky not to lose and of my loose chickens this summer to predators, but I think that is simply because the rodent population is out of control, kind of like the year of squirrelmageddon we had a number of years ago. Now it is Ratageddon! Zorra was very tired the other day after she , my friend Heidi and myself had 7 of the 25 young layers escape from their chicken trailer. It was a comedy of errors on my part. I had my lambing/chicken net ready, Zorra would push the chicken out from under the other trailer and as I was trying to catch one layer, the rest would run behind me or through my legs. It was quite comical.....but we finally got all of them back in their trailer. Everyone had worked very hard....but not effectively or efficiently. The problem is that the young birds haven't laid an egg yet, they don't have that sense of where home is , so they hide close by, but won't go back up into the trailer. Unlike the older birds when they are out, they will go back to the safety of the trailer where they lay their eggs . It was pretty funny when we did catch one, we had to free it from the net and the young layers who were still loose would come up and watch us freeing that bird. It always took two of us to free them as these girls are immature and they could get their heads stuck in the netting. If they had been older and more mature they don't tend to stick their heads out where they can get hurt.  I have been trying to get farm stuff done, but the weather tends to defeat me sometimes. I need to clean out the chicken trailers, move the young layers and keep up with the donkey shedding, flies, sheep in need of shearing and MOWING MY VERY SMALL LAWN! This last problem would have been more manageable if I had expanded the garden and covered the area in ground cover cloth and mulch. But that will have to wait till next year. Right now the amount of garden I have is about all I can handle! Zorra doesn't like the heat and humidity....she tends to go down to the Addition basement and sleep in the farthest , coldest corner of the structure. She sleeps pretty soundly and when she comes back upstairs to find me she is a very CHILLY DOG! The wet weather has also helped the explosion of the rat population! Zorra is working hard every time she goes outside and looks for her prey....but many times that elude her and just laugh at her while she lies down and waits at a hole, hoping they will come back up. But I have noticed recently I have had two cats from the neighborhood hunting in my yard, but they wait till the loose chickens from the first barn are put away. It seems they scare the cat off while the cats are trying to hunt! I admit I have not resorted to poison, but will have to in the fall once the ground starts to harden up. Otherwise Zorra will hurt herself trying to dig out their burrows. So...on life goes! We had so much rain in May almost every Saturday was rainy last month. Last year we didn't notice since the Riverbend park was not ready for us to use for the Contoocook Farmers Market (boy,were we spoiled).
Hopefully my tent will not be wet every weekend in June....just when you think you can take it out of the car to let it dry.....it rains..... Luckily we hadn't had any extreme flooding till this last storm on the 31st of May. It rained so hard that many of the roads I drive regularly had gullies dug out next to the road where the shoulder used to be. So I am looking forward to a drier June....one can only hope! My three sexy girl chickens who were in hospice are now out and about in the yard but go into dog crates at night. Only 2 of their flock are still in the new chicken trailer. This will need to change soon, as the new batch of laying chicks will need their home once they get a bit bigger. So much overgrowth to deal with this week after all the rain....it takes a toll on my hip and legs. I don't remember having to do some much weed whacking in the past, but during the pandemic....I wasn't going anywhere and had all the time in the world too mow and weed. It also helped that at least 2 of the years after Brandon's death there had been a drought. So, onward and upward as my dad would say! Moving on into June and the summer months! April is almost gone and we are creeping up on May. The weather has been interesting to say the least. But at least we didn't have any loss of power ,even though we had some fierce wind gusts this month.
The lambs are growing in leaps and bounds and it is time to separate the boys from the girls....that should be FUN...Plus everyone needs to be wormed and I still am working to shear off some of the flocks winter coats to get ready for the warmer weather. |
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November 2025
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