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Things were going along fine.....then it snowed....I went out to check on the young sex link layers and there had been a massacre. 6 out of the 24 hens had been killed and 3 of those were decapitated. It was definitely a weasel.....I know they need to eat, but only three heads is not much of a meal and leaving everything else is a waste... But with this attack it means the young layers can't live in the barn coop as it isn't secure. That meant I needed to move the layers around to safer quarters, that meant moving the 7 old red layers from the chicken trailer. So I moved my oldest group of layers, the red girls who were in the chicken trailer to the first barn. Luckily today(Tuesday) they are now settled into the tractor bay and lambing barn with the sheep and the donkey. On Sunday after I cleaned up the carnage , I spent most of the day cleaning out the trailer and then in the afternoon I moved Henri Hen Pecked and his girls into the trailer. Between that and the snow...I was pretty tired. I never did get any snow shoveling done. It was too my great relief on Monday Morning and my heart felt thanks to my neighbor who had plowed out the front of my driveway and mailbox while I was still asleep on Monday morning....it made me cry... We are having heavy snow this evening that is supposed to turn to heavy rain later tonight. It is making all the snow on my metal roof crash to the ground and as I write Zorra is sleeping on my feet...she doesn't like when the snow comes off the roof! I am just hoping that the high winds that are predicted don't knock the power out. Hopefully the weather report is correct and by late tomorrow morning it should be sunny. I have to say we haven't gotten the worst of the weather that the rest of the east coast has been getting, tornadoes , flooding and high winds and blizzard conditions. As they say the climate is changing.....hold on to your hats!  I started off the new year by.......canning...of course! I hadn't canned anything since October of 2023.....even though I thought about it....I didn't do it. Most of my ingredients are in the freezer with the exception of the oranges that my sister sends me from a small family farm in Florida. Everyone else in the family eats the oranges she sends, but I make marmalade instead and then sell it to other people. I have many products that I have run low on...but don't have the ingredients to make them...which is sad, but that is what seasonal local canning is. The reality of all the produce and fruit in the fall can be overwhelming as you are processing as fast as you can. Either you are cooking it right then or getting it ready for the freezer to be used later. As my mother use to say"your eyes were bigger than your stomach". in this case it was my unrealistic view of how much I could can in a day was a bit flawed. Canning late into the night can lead to all sorts of disasters.....I try not to can late in the evening....but it sometimes happen. So the new year has started and I have one more batch of lower sugar marmalade to make and then thaw the ingredients for lower sugar Triple Berry Jam. That should be it for today.  |
Mary Will Sussman Archives
July 2025
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