Busy month! (hatching eggs, chicks, lard, garden, IPA, artichokes, and a new puppy)

It has been a super busy month for me. I have been travelling a lot for work since the beginning of the year and February has been no different.Only good thing was DD and I got to go to CA for one of those trips and see friends and family. While in CA we also picked up a new addition to our pet family. Meet Barley...

Isn't he adorable? He's still working on potty training of course but overall he's a fun little guy. He is getting along great with Basil now. It is so great watching them play and sleep together.

Egg hatching update: we didn't have any eggs hatch. :( We had a couple that stopped developing along the way and had 2 make it all the way. I think 1 was upside down in the shell and the other made it as far as pipping internally but then died over night. It was disappointing but not too surprising since it was our first hatch and shipped eggs.
Yesterday we picked up 27 eggs from local chicken keepers. We got 15 silkie eggs and a mixed dozen. We also picked up 9 chicks from a local feed store. Well, I don't know how local it was. It is over an hour away from us but the good part is it's in the same town as friends of ours so we got to stop and visit for a bit with them. They have bought 4 of our chickens and it's always nice to see them so happy in their new home. DD had a hard time with it though, wanting 2 of the chickens back.  I think she's over it now that she has 9 cheeping chicks in her room. We got 1 Easter Egger, 1 Silver Laced Wyandotte, 4 bantam frizzle cochins, 1 buff silkie, and 2 Belgian D'Anvers. We plan to keep 1 frizzle cochin and possibly a D'Anver, and if we don't get any of the silkie eggs to hatch we'll keep the buff silkie.
Next week we have 20 chicks from a rare breed assortment and 4 bantam easter eggers coming. Problem is now that we are using the Eco-Glow brooder we won't have enough room for them all in our brooder. So tomorrow my task is to make a smaller version of our current brooder (http://thefrugalfarmschool.blogspot.com/2013/12/brooder.html) and put the bantam chicks in there with the eco-glow and use a light bulb on the larger brooder, at least until we sell enough of the chicks to fit them in one.

IPA update:  We put the IPA in the fridge a week or two ago and cracked one open for dinner the other night. It was delicious! I'm so glad one of our beers finally turned out. I guess that new tubing and not doing a second fermentation helped. :)

Lard: My dear friend gave me a couple pounds of pork fat, perfect for making some lard. I found a couple how-to's previously online and found this one again tonight to refresh my memory.
http://www.myhumblekitchen.com/2011/02/how-render-lard-the-right-way-snow-white

Here is the fat that she gave me:

The two smaller packages on top were strips of fat and the two larger wrapped packages were fat already ground up and packed into neat packages. DH ground up the strips in the food processor, it came out like a disgusting frosting. We put it all in the crock pot and set it to low. The rest went just like the link said.

Shortly after putting it in the crock pot

Straining the crispies - I found my metal strainer over a cheesecloth lined colander worked best. If I put it directly in the cheesecloth it clogged too quickly, and if I only used the strainer it let too much little stuff through.

Some of the jars while they were still warm.

And here they are cool

The site I followed said you could save the crispies for toppings and that they taste yummy. But we opted to bottle them for dog treats.

Artichokes: We love artichokes in this house. We could eat them every night. Unfortunately they are pricey out here in CO so we don't have them very often. The other day they were on sale (2/$5) so I bought a couple as a treat. The one thing I don't like about artichokes is the cook time. I got to wondering if I could pressure cook them. A quick search revealed someone that raved about this cooking method. I thought I'd give it a try. Normally I don't do any prep work, just throw them in some water and boil them for ~45min. This time I cut the artichokes in half and scooped out the choke (top two are scooped out).

To do this you stick your knife in under the choke and all the way back to the end of it. I placed my finger on the front of the artichoke then pulled it out to show how far it went in. 

Placed them in my small pressure cooker

And cooked for 6 min.

Pulled them out and they were perfect! I can't believe it, artichokes in 6 min (well really it was about 15min with prep time). Very exciting. Now if only I could grow an artichoke plant here.



Garden: I finally bit the bullet and ordered dirt for our garden beds. Here it is delivered -

We have been filling our wheelbarrow for 2 days now and we have 6 of the 7 beds done and a ton of dirt left. I think either the calculations I found on line were off or the nursery delivered a lot more dirt than ordered. Either way I think we'll be finding a home for a lot of dirt! I went out today and marked my squares on 2 boxes. Making progress towards spring!

Hatching eggs

Since we built our incubator I have been itching to hatch some eggs. I was going to get some local eggs but all of their hens decided to take a break so I resorted to shipped eggs. I really didn't want to do shipped eggs since the shipping costs add a lot to the price of the egg and the hatch rate is so low. But I found a pretty good deal on a mixed dozen that had some interesting breeds so we took a chance.

We got the following eggs in the mail a few days later.

As you can see, she sent 6 extra. We were really excited about the small blue eggs since we would love to have a bantam easter egger. We are at day 16 now and after candling them today we are down to 4 developing eggs (blue circles) and 4 questionables (lime circles). 

I hope at least those 4 make it, and would be thrilled if the questionable ones did too. They are due to hatch on the 21st. I'll post an update later.

Pickled Eggs pt2

We had enough bantam eggs the other day to do another batch of pickled eggs. Wolf said he didn't want to repeat the last recipe I used (the one I posted). So I asked what he normally puts in his. He doesn't measure so I can't give an exact recipe but basically it's:
1 part water
1 part white vinegar
cover the bottom of the mason jar (quart size) with about 1/4" of sugar
a couple cloves of garlic
and then adds Laury's Seasoned Salt with Tobasco to flavor

He tried one yesterday and said they were much better.

Chicken expansion completed

I didn't realize I hadn't posted the finished pictures. We finished this a few weeks ago and I'm so glad we did. We had a few snow storms since then and the girls love all the extra room they have. It's not in the pics yet but we put a whole bale of straw on the floor for them. We throw their treats in there now and it gives them something to scratch around in.

Chicken attacked

Mona, our Partridge Rock, was attacked by something earlier in the week. We don't know what it was but suspect a hawk. This summer DD was in the backyard with the chickens when a hawk flew down and grabbed one of our younger chicks and tried to carry it off. Luckily the chick was sitting on some branches and it held on long enough for DD to run screaming at the hawk. I came out as it flew into the tree inside the chicken area. We chased it with a little air soft gun around all our trees and our neighbors. Finally it flew off.
This time DD was going out to give her left over apple to the chickens and was met with a yard full of feathers. She found Mona hiding between a pot and the fence. It possibly could've been one or both of our dogs but Basil was laying inside in the crate and Jasmine was relaxing on the deck. DD said she saw a big bird fly over our house as she carried Mona inside.
I'm not discounting that it was our dog(s), but it makes more sense to me that it's a hawk. I think the dogs see the commotion and run down there and scare the hawk off. I've watched (unknown by the dogs) the chickens steal food from the dogs. They'll be eating a treat I throw to them and the chickens just walk up and start eating it right out from under the dogs. Jasmine just sits back and watches and waits her turn for any left overs. Basil is a little more bold and sneaks in and out grabbing bites. If there were a time to attack the chickens that seems like the time. Also, if it was Jasmine, I would expect the chicken to be dead. She shakes all of her toys and playmates vigorously and would've certainly broken the chickens neck. The areas of wounds all leads me to hawks. A hawk will land on the chicken, hold it down, and start eating it from the neck/breast down. Mona and Amber (our chicken that was attacked this summer while we were all gone) both had puncture wounds under the wings, missing tail feathers, and the neck/breast area ripped off.
We thought for sure Amber would die she lost so much skin and muscle but with a lot of TLC she pulled through. It took her 6 months to start laying again but she is a good layer now.
While Mona's injuries seemed less severe at first she is actually more touch and go. The skin on top of her crop was ripped off and exposed the crop. This wasn't too bad until she scratched a hole in it so now all her food will leak out. Of course all this always happens when I'm out of town! DH tried superglueing the hole together but it didn't hold. Then he tried stitching it, those disappeared. When I got home we used thicker glue and stitches again. Again they disappeared. Then when we were going to try one more time, she struggled and put her claw into the hole in her crop and came out in a new hole. When I went to get her claw out she curled her foot and ripped the two holes into one. We flushed the crop out and stitched it back up, put super glue all over it, glued the little flap of skin that was left down, then wrapped her real good in self-stick bandage. So far that has held. I think she was preening the stitches out of the hole before.
We are feeding her every hour or two small bits of a mixture of egg yolk, yogurt, and honey. This morning you could tell she was dehydrated. She hadn't had gotten anything into her system in 2 days and her wattles were starting to shrink. One side was almost non existent this morning. But after 2 feedings they are back to normal so it is clear she is at least getting some nutrients into her system.
I leave again tomorrow so Wolf will be in charge of feeding her. Luckily he is home this week on workman's comp (not good that he hurt his back but good that he will be here for her).
Fingers crossed she heals enough to start eating again. She doesn't even seem to realize she is hurt and is active and alert. It would be really hard to put her down when she doesn't appear sick.