I’m so excited! I ordered some new chicks, they will be coming in the mail in 8 days. I’ll be getting 20 Brown Leghorns 20 White Jersey Giants and 5 white Plymouth Rocks.  The leghorn is a white egg layer, which will be nice to have and they’re a beautiful bird.  The Jerseys and Rocks are for making my new meat birds.

I also separated a breeding group of my Partridge Rocks to bring up the number of brown egg layers, I only have 5 hens, I’m going for more like 30!

In the chick shed, I have duck and turkey eggs in the incubator right now. I wasn’t getting a very good hatch rate with the turkeys and the ducks, they’re a little more fragile then the chickens, so I cleaned up the the incubator and I’m monitoring the temperature and humidity.  They will be hatching around the time my chicks come in the mail and then they all go in the brooder box.

My brooder box (in it’s previous life) was a light fixture in the neighbor’s kitchen, it works out great, I just need to fix up a better top for it so they stop escaping.

When they don’t need the heat lamp anymore, they go into a new pen to prepare them to go out.

This is out……….I built this little chicken tractor my self and I just pull it and its cousins around so the chicks can eat all the fresh greens they want, so I can eat all the fresh chicken I want!

This is were I keep track of all the peeps, cheeps, chirps and the ins, outs, ups, and downs of my poultry operation!  By next spring everything should be running at full speed.

EBet the Poultry Manager. 

Have I mentioned before Dear Reader, that tears, especially from my children make me nervous?  I got a good dose today.  Bet had to have an endoscopy and they send the patient out the door long before they’ve regained their senses, who knew you could walk before you could see or have short term memory? 

Anyway a few blocks on our way and she burst into uncontrollable tears, I know they were uncontrollable ‘cuz she said so.  Didn’t know why, she was just crying, wanted to throw up so she cried instead.

Reason for the endoscopy?  Dysphasia – difficulty swallowing.  Bet has had trouble off and on for a while now but it escalated recently to include feeling like she was choking while and after eating ice cream!

Today’s unconfirmed conclusion from the endoscopy, eosinophilic esophagitis.  We are waiting for biopsy results to confirm the fairly confident Doctor’s diagnosis.  Some different causes, most likely food allergy of some sort.  An inflammatory disease of the esophagus.  Some changes are in store for Vicktory Farm and Gardens most likely.  All for one and one for all ‘round here.

Miffed? You ask?  Eosinophilic esophagitis occurs in adulthood and its symptoms are dysphasia.  It also occurs in childhood as, drum roll please, stomachaches.

Years ago, perhaps fourteen – fifteen or so I took little Betti Spaghetti in to the pediatrician because she complained of stomach aches that mommy couldn’t seem to make better, even with nice soothing food and things like slippery elm, yes, I have hippy tendencies.

Those few years ago, the Pediatrician took some blood, chit chatted with me about how I had handled it food wise (tried eliminating things that might have caused it, nothing appeared to help or worsen),  After a couple of appointments to deal with the severe stomach aches he handed me a bottle of juvenile Maalox and told me to lighten up, the implication being that I must somehow be causing her stomach aches by being a wound up mommy.

I would like to hurt him right about now, not financially, I don’t need to win a malpractice suit, it’s physical pain I’d like to cause the little pusillanimous pin head, puke pot.  I’d like to rip him limb from limb and send his broken little body to someone who cares!  Okay, that is a bit much, how ‘bout at least a swift and decided blow to the shins with my well booted foot.  You know Dear Reader, like the treatment all plops of stuff get here on the farm.

Okay, I have to go back and finish my nap.  (See Bee, I can learn new tricks, or get back to old ones, I just need to have a rip snortin’ reason.) I stayed up late last night, past midnight, even though I knew the alarm was set for four-thirty am.  For me. 

Bet’s appointment was at seven o’clock, an hour’s drive away, and I needed to open the bottom of the poly tunnel and harvest lettuce before we left.  Yeah, I’m not too bright.  So it’s been a hard day, on very little sleep. Though Bet and I both agreed that getting up at four-thirty was rather fun and we both got a lot done in  little time with little light.  But I probably would get more sleep next time I try it.

So yes, I’m going to follow my abruptly ended afternoon nap (phone call about a dying friend) with a long slow evening nap, shoot me.  Thanks for listening Dear Reader, see you on the bright side tomorrow for a very silly header challenge!  This last week’s header was too appropriate for all the posts that followed, I hope next week follows tomorrow’s header of “That’s Silly”. 

Don’t blame me, SOAP was Imac’s idea of a theme for this week’s Header Challenge.  Every time he mentioned it he capitalized every letter.  Clearly he wanted us to address the theme with an acronym.

What I found for the meaning of SOAP was Simple Object Access Protocol.  I realize that it has to do with computing, but really when don’t we run into simple objects that need to be accessed?  And isn’t it nice to know how to best go about it?

Nothin’s simpler on the farm than a plop of manure.

Few objects compare to it’s worth, it has a Royal position around here.

And its incredible goodness needs to be accessed. 

But you may need to know how to operate around it, properly, just as a person would when around Royalty or a Head of State.  So I’m here to give you the protocol to access a plop’s incredible goodness and fame.

When you encounter a plop you ought to acknowledge its presence with a sincere tip of the head, and full swing of a booted foot.  This then sends the plop flying, enabling it to disperse its value to a wider area.  This is the general open air protocol for meeting with a plop in the field.  If met in an enclosed area the sincere tip of the head should be followed with a sprinkling of a clean source of carbon.  Here at Vicktory Farm and Gardens the carbon of choice is wood shavings or straw.

A third and very important set of behaviors during the time of the year when foliar feeding is a weekly occurrence, is to acknowledge the presence of a fresh plop with a nod and a swift scooping motion of the tossing fork.  Landing the fresh plop into a water-tight, open-topped vessel of your choice. I like poly garbage cans. After the initial greeting of many fresh plops, when you’ve managed to collect say a third of the vessel volume in plops, set the vessel in the proximity of where you will be foliar feeding crops.  Excuse yourself, go to a nearby water source, collect enough water to fill the vessel and allow the water to extract the goodness from the precious plops for about three days.  (You can see that the water level here is not to the top, that is because this “tea” has been being used for a few feedings already, it is nearly ready to be emptied and the process started all over again.)

When the three days or more are up and when you need to foliar feed, and well before eleven in the morning (the best time for things to be absorbed into the plant), swish the contents of the vessel well with a large long stick in your right hand…

and with the crook of your left elbow firmly placed over your nose and mouth.  Your nose for obvious reasons and your mouth… just in case.

At this moment and several others during the accessing of the goodness of plops, you may wish to think hard on your favorite fragrant flower.  It helps.  Step back, take a walk up and down the rows or paths of your crop area making sure every one is ready for the reception while things settle a bit.

This crop doesn’t need any more feeding, it looks great and will soon be harvested.

This recently planted out crop however is sort of yellow and sad,  in great need of a royal flush.

Return reverently to the vessel of assembled royal plops and water, grasp a clean five gallon bucket firmly in hand and lower the bucket into the vessel so as to fill the bucket by skimming action from the uppermost of the plop-briney liquid.  The size of sprayer you own determines the amount of plop-briney liquid to skim off.  When you have sufficient quantity in your catch bucket, lift it to the ground. 

Situate a doubled piece of aluminum window screen over a second five gallon bucket and slowly pour your collected plop-briney liquid into the second bucket through the doubled screen.  Open your sprayer.  Using another doubled section of window screen pour enough liquid to fill the sprayer to its appropriate fill line. 

Add Sea-90, one teaspoon per gallon, into the plop-briney liquid.  Cap, shake, pump, then spray directly on the leaves of your crops.  Depending on the size of your crops that you need to feed you may have to refill your sprayer several times.

Repeating this every seven to fourteen days will pay the correct due homage to the royal plops in your pasture, and will fulfill the SOAP requirements when encountering inevitable plops.  Not to mention it will go far in feeding your crops well.  There are other things you can add to the plop-briney liquid enhancing the nutritional potency of the foliar spray, more on that another time.  And some folks add a gentle liquid soap even to make it stick to the leaves better, of course you can also use regular ol’ white sugar as well.

Speaking of actual soap, you may desire, or at least your family and friends will desire that you use soap soap when you attend to this sort of SOAP.

A few by the waysto attend to:  Go see what the others on my side board who participate in this weekly challenge have photograped and placed in their header for SOAP. 

On a personal note, my reading material the last few days has been, “Everything I Want to do is Illegal” by Joel Salatin  and “Holy Shit!” by Gene Logsdon, both are fairly necessary reads if you’re a farmer type and both make for interesting reads even when you are not.  Make that, especially if you are not.  Both books are rather eye opening to a world that is far to long unconsidered in relation to food and its cultivation’s importance to everyone’s mere existence.