Farm News 05-25-08

Sunday morning, after chores, 76° and muggy

Weight: 207, oops!

Barn News

There are ten baby chicks that Jesse hatched in his incubator now living in a brooder in the barn. I moved the ducklings out of the barn brooder and into the bigger brooder in the rabbitry.

Early Thursday morning we had 2.6” of rain, which we needed. I did some tilling in the garden on Wednesday, it was like trying to till up a parking lot, only dustier. Saturday morning we had an additional 0.9” of rain.

Drusilla, one of the bantam hens, has a nest in the same stall where Beth goose has her nest. When I went out to do chores Saturday evening Drusilla was walking around making disgusted, angry sounds. I looked in the stall and, sure enough, there was Beth sitting on Drusilla's nest instead of her own. Beth was possibly influenced by my having removed all her eggs from her nest and putting them in the incubator; I thought she had quit laying. Beth frequently returns to her nest when she is upset, which is a good deal of the time.

A few minutes after I arrived Beth came out of the stall and went back to following the goslings around, worrying like a Jewish mother. Drusilla went back to her nest, but continued to make unhappy sounds. Finally I went back in the stall and chased Drusilla off her nest to see if Beth had perhaps broken an egg.

No, Beth didn't break an egg, but she did leave a very large goose egg in the middle of the nest. When Drusilla tried to sit on the goose egg, she couldn't reach down far enough to cover her own eggs. I moved Beth's egg over to Beth's nest, Drusilla returned to her nest, and, after a few more expressions of disgust, settled down to incubating her eggs.

New FOOL Web Site

All readers are invited to visit www.OskaloosaFool.org, the web site of the Friends of the Oskaloosa Library. I have spent the past month or so creating the site, and then I completely crashed it last week and had to start all over. If you register on the site, you can use it to send messages to me. Also, everyone is welcome to add book reviews.

Books

My gosh! I only read one book last week. The June issue of Scientific American arrived, which took some time. Also, I'm started on a new non-fiction which I might finish this week.

The Big Pasture by Will Henry

A good enough western. And, it's in large print. At one point in the book he lists the different species of wildflowers blooming in a high Montana meadow. One he listed was a late summer bloomer and he had it blooming in the spring, but the rest were correct. He also knows that a moon just past full rises a while after sunset. I appreciate an author who knows what he is writing about.