“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”

— Lewis Carroll

Tomorrow I will bid a gleeful farewell to Corn Flakes the rooster. While I had planned on bringing him up to the Agway yesterday, it turns out the Agway is closed on Sundays during the winter.

Lucky Corn Flakes.

Especially since my sister called this morning and has found a home for him! She’s going to come and pick him up tomorrow. He was singing goodbye to me all day long.


Yesterday we cleaned the chicken coop out. Earlier in the day I had been reminded of something I used to do to help entertain the chickens during the long, boring winters by my friend Melissa Caughey over at Tilly’s Nest, which is hanging up a cabbage by a string for the chickens to entertain themselves with by pecking at it; kind of like tetherball for chickens. I bought a lovely green cabbage at the grocery store, screwed a screw right through the core of it, and tied some heavy butcher’s twine to the end of the screw just before I screwed it in tight to the cabbage. Then I went out and screwed the other end of the string into a beam of the goat house porch and went to clean the chicken coop.


When I went out to see what I was certain would be dozens of happy chickens playing cabbage tetherball I saw this:


My stupid goats wouldn’t let the chickens anywhere near the cabbage.


But I fixed their wagons. Once the goat house was all cleaned and ready for occupancy again I tied it up inside the coop where the goats couldn’t get at it.

Well, just like the Who’s singing in Whoville, my rooster Corn Flakes started out his crowing with just a little morning crow inside the coop before I let them out in the morning. Then he started crowing when he was hungry, to now where he’s pretty much crowing constantly. Sunup to sundown that rooster is crowing his little lungs out.

Unfortunately for me, and for him too, that means on Sunday I’ll be carting him off to the Agway where they will take him in and sell him to anyone willing to buy a rooster. A beautiful rooster. A nice rooster. A near perfect example of the image you think of when you imagine a rooster. And I have to hope that he actually gets a home where he gets to live the life of a rooster, and not the life of the prize ingredient in a pot of coq au vin.

My neighborhood zoning regulations do not allow a crowing rooster, and I probably should have gotten rid of him last weekend, but I always tend to put these things off hoping for some crowing miracle to happen. It never does. Plus I have to be away all day tomorrow so he’s going to have to wait until Sunday. I hope a miracle happens tomorrow while I’m gone.

And continuing our pattern of ridiculously weird weather here in Connecticut, today we had torrential rain with temperatures over 50 degrees followed by fog, then clearing along with howling winds.

Most of the chickens I’ve had over the years don’t mind the rain too much, but this bunch I have now don’t seem to care for it. Today though for some reason – maybe they’re just sick of trying to avoid it — they were out in the rain quite a bit. There is nothing more pathetic looking than a wet, muddy chicken. Even Corn Flakes loses his luster when he’s wet.



The feathered feet chickens look particularly miserable when they are wet. Especially in this mud!



And speaking of mud, I’m thinking about renting out the farmyard for some mud wrestling events. It is disgusting out there!

Well we certainly have been having peculiar weather this winter here in Connecticut. Finally some snow on Saturday, and then lots of rain on Monday. The farm does not like rain, particularly in the winter. Wintertime is boring enough when there’s no grass growing or other yummy things to forage for, but when it rains there’s really nothing to do. They lay around and sleep a lot and stare out of their stall doors and coop windows. I found myself giving them lots of little snacks yesterday just to get them up and out a bit in between the raindrops. It really was a sea of mud by the end of the day.



Kiki tried hopping from rock to rock to keep her little hoofs clean.



And then today it got close to 50 degrees! It’s January — typically the second coldest month of the year here. The farm started to dry out today and the light was just beautiful when I was feeding them dinner.

Princess Kate enjoying dinner in the beautiful early evening light.

Melina may be the grumpiest goat I’ve ever met, but she’s not above helping out a friend in need. Actually, it surprises me how well the chickens and goats get along. The chickens may get an occasional head butt from a goat when they think it’s eating food that belongs to them, but other than that they co-habitate in the nicest way together.

This is a favorite farm photo of mine. That’s Cissy, Kiki & Grace’s mom, with one of my old silkies, Kiev, on her back. It was feeding time so they were all keeping an eye out for me, and Kiev wanted a better view.


The goat house has always been a favorite hangout for the chickens, and now that it’s winter some days there are so many chickens hanging out in the stalls that it’s a wonder there’s any room for the goats to go in there. The hay racks have always been a favorite laying spot for the chickens, and I find far more eggs in the rack or underneath it than I ever do in the nesting boxes. Because the goat house was so popular, I built a double nesting box to hang in the goat house in Melina and Princess Kate’s stall. I built it just as a flat, deep box, kind of like 2-compartment baking dish, rather than a typical enclosed box. I don’t know why I did this, and at first it was a complete failure and nobody would even go in it. Now, next to the hay racks, it’s the favorite laying spot for the chickens.

Yesterday I was so happy I had my camera around my neck when I went out to bring the goats some fresh water. I caught Melina giving my White Plymouth Rock hen a boost up into the nesting box.

The farm woke up Saturday morning to a snowstorm.

I have never had such a bunch of snow sissies as the crop of chickens goats I have right now. Last winter Melina and Cissy literally lived in a large doghouse from December until May and frolicked in the abundant snow we got all winter long. One snowstorm was so big that I was out there at 2 in the morning shoveling out the front of the doghouse for fear that they would get snowed in and die of suffocation. This year I guess they’re used to the comforts of their fancy schmancy goat house and seem loathe to even touch a hoof in the fluffy white stuff. Gracie seems to be the only slightly adventurous one. Kiki tries, but it’s usually just for a quick dash through it and then right back up to the porch. Poor Princess Kate was fainting all over the place today the snow had her so anxious.

And there has never seen so much traffic in and out of the chicken coop during the day. Normally they come out in the morning and, except to lay an occasional egg, don’t venture back in until bedtime.

Look how fluffy Grace is! She ventured out to watch Maia sled a bit. The other goats watched from the porch.

And the chickens watched from under the coop.

Kiki the fluffy butterball.

Pardon me while I shove copious amounts of hay in my mouth.

Bullet the mighty snow warrior.

Beyonce in the snow.

The farm looks pretty covered in snow.

Earlier in the week I was taking some pictures and decided I am officially obsessed with Corn Flakes, my rooster. He’s very photogenic.




I’m also mildly obsessed with two of my barred rock chickens that appear to actually be roosters. Every day their feathers get more beautiful, and thankfully not a peep out of them yet.

Look at all the different shapes and textures of feathers on this barred rock.

The weathervane on the chicken coop on a recent blue sky day.

Even though I have close to 60 chickens, mid-winter is a slow time for laying. My egg sales have been reduced to a few local friends and ardent egg fans. I enjoy the slowdown that wintertime brings to the farm. I still have some molting ladies, and the rooster is crowing a little too loudly lately, but come spring I’ll have some beautiful re-feathered girls eager to provide me with more eggs than I’ll know what to do with.


Sometimes you get a strange egg though. I find often that when a chicken is laying an egg for the first time it lays what we have come to call a “rubber egg”. This is an egg that has no hard shell, but just a rubbery outer layer that can be easily torn open with your fingers. This can also be a product of chickens not getting enough calcium and you’d need to increase her oyster shell intake, but this is rarely the case with free-ranging chickens. I have photos of some, but of course I can’t find them at the moment in my archives.

For the last few weeks though I’ve been getting some really tiny eggs. I don’t know who’s laying them, but I’m dying to figure it out. They are probably the smallest eggs I’ve ever had before, and that’s over 10 years and lots of bantam chickens. The really strange thing is that I don’t have a single bantam right now (a bantam is a miniature chicken breed).


Now compare this to one of my normal eggs, which is about the size of a grocery store’s large egg. The tiny egg is just a hair over 1-1/4″, and the normal egg is about 2-1/2″.


But below are the weirdest eggs by far I’ve ever had. Every once in a while I’ll get an egg with a “wrinkle” in it. I think when eggs are coming down the canal, there is still some elasticity in them to allow for that journey through the hen. Sometimes I’ll get an egg that has a wrinkle in it, like it had a particularly tight journey and just couldn’t completely straighten out before it hardened up, but these eggs below were just really odd. They were completely wrinkled. Again, I never figured out who was laying them, and all I got was these two and nothing more after that. I keep them in the fridge in a special box. One day I’ll crack them open and see if they’re normal inside.


And just to give you a bit of the color range in eggs, below is one of my white eggs, a blue egg and a brown egg. I do have some dark brown layers, but didn’t have any available when I was taking these pictures. They are a beautiful dark dark brown.

I snapped this photo through the window from my desk a week or so ago. Grace, Kiki & Princess Kate were all enjoying a nap in the winter sun, but I loved how Grace had stretched out on Kiki.

Also taken a few weeks ago, Kiki was hindering my progress in cleaning the goat stalls out by using the wheelbarrow as entertainment. Grace also hopped in a moment later.

While I was away in Wyoming my friend Cyrena, who is my official farm-sitter when I can’t be there, was kind enough to bring Kiki and Grace to be in the nativity pageant at my friend Cristy’s congregation. Unfortunately the pictures and video from the actual pageant did not turn out well, but here’s one of Cyrena in her shepherd’s costume with the goats. Apparently Grace, normally wanting to be the center of attention, was a bit frozen with stage fright. And of course they pooped on stage too. We anticipated that though and they’d laid down plastic and hay just in case.


Two new colonies of bees have been ordered for Spring. One for my old hive, and one for the new hive I built with the viewing window in it last winter. I’m very excited to get that colony going!

Winter is a lazy time on the farm. All the animals are bored. The goats are getting fat. Our wether has been very erratic this winter so far, and we’ve had extreme temperature ranges. This seems to be making Princess Kate, my Tennessee Fainting Goat, particularly stiff-legged, and she’s walking around like one one of the Queen’s Guard’s in the Royal British Army.

The chickens fly out of the fenced area to free-range, but discover there’s not much out there to eat either this time of year. So I find myself going out several times a day to throw them some cut up apples or kale or scratch grains just to keep them well fed and give them something to do. I’ve been scouring the bargain rack in the produce department at the grocery to find past-prime bargain produce to give them for treats. The bananas are a particular favorite, and the goats adore pears.



One of my beautiful Buff Chantecler is molting and looks rather miserable right now.


And while Corn Flakes the rooster is getting more lovely by the day, what started as a small garbled crowing in the coop in the morning is slowly, day by day, developing into a full-blown crow. He’s not crowing often at this point, so for now he can stick around.



It was Christmas time last year that Melina and Cissy went away to be bred. While I thought about breeding Melina again, and possibly breeding Princess Kate to a more traditional dairy goat for a meat/dairy cross, I guess I still haven’t recovered from the loss at birth of my Cissy and the strain of bottle-feeding Kiki and Grace from birth. I still have time to breed them should I change my mind.

Lest you think I’m sitting around here doing nothing, I spent a considerable amount of time putting together a video of my farm in their best Christmas finery to the tune of Madonna’s song “Vogue”. Alas, I once again got hit with copyright somthingorother, so when I published it, it wouldn’t allow anybody to view the darned thing. I guess I will just have to show you the pictures instead.

I was having a pretty shitty couple of days last week, and one night as I dragged myself up to bed in the wee hours of the morning, it occurred to me that what I needed to do was buy the farm some Christmas outfits. Somehow I knew just seeing them all wearing Santa hats would make me feel better. A trip to my local Petsmart provided a plethora of Christmas outfits to choose from. I asked myself “Who buys all this stuff for their pets?”, but quickly re-thought that statement as I stood there picking things out for my goats and chickens to wear.

The highlight of the Farm’s week by far was Grace and Kiki starring in the Christmas nativity pageant at a local church. Unfortunately we had already left for vacation, so Cyrena graciously volunteered to be a shepherd and chaperoned them onto the stage. I wish I could have been there.

For these photos though, Melina really was the star of the show. I believe she must have been a runway model in a former life. She was literally posing for the camera.







Kiki also displayed some superstar qualities, and looked quite adorable in that plaid collar and hat.





Princess Kate didn’t quite know what to think, and always seemed on the verge of fainting with that pom-pom dangling in her face.





Grace was probably the least comfortable in her holiday attire, and showed a bit of uncharacteristic shyness.

Grace gives a tentative smile for the camera.

And everyone was admiring everyone else’s holiday garb, and some kissing, bell nibbling and affectionate head-butting going on.

Grace and Melina give each other a holiday smooch.

Melina clearly thinks she looks better in her hat than Kate looks in hers.

Melina and Kiki have a holiday head-butt.

But perhaps most entertaining was putting a chicken in a Santa suit. The poor thing didn’t know what the heck was going on, but it certainly was good for some laughs.





And that’s what I did for kicks last week on the Farm.

Beyonce has made her way from Texas to the porch of my goat house in Connecticut!

It’s nice to be home with my animals again. I know they missed me, and I’m sure they are glad things are back to their usual schedule.

As I suspected, my roosters are getting more manly looking every day.


And my Barred Rock rooster is getting his lovely long tail feathers.





So far there hasn’t been a peep (or crow) out of either of them, so I’m very happy about that.

While I was away, Ash, the hen that has been broody in the goat house for like 3 months, finally gave up trying and got off of her eggs. I feel so bad that she didn’t have any fertile eggs to hatch. She would be such a good mamma! Maybe in the spring…

Although it’s cold here, everyone was out enjoying the sunshine today.

We had to stop and say hi to this buck. He was in a chain-link fenced-area in the middle of an industrial area. Why he was there and who owned him wasn't clear. He didn't have any friends, but as soon as we stpped him out of the car we could see why….he stunk to high heaven! Bucks (un-neutered male goats) have the most awful smell. But he was friendly and so excited to have visitors that we ended up feeding him half of the fresh pineapple we'd just bought. Taking photos through a chain-link fence was challenging as well. He had magnificent horns and a beautiful long beard. Unfortunately his hooves hadn't been trimmed in years though.


Texas was full of vultures; turkey and black, but we haven’t seen nearly as many as we’ve moved further north and east.


This adorable pack of dogs appeared to be running free and wild, and they were extremely skittish and camera-shy.


These happy dogs were playing out in a field with their Basset Hound friend. They were so cute!



Apparently cows don’t mind sharing their field with vultures.


We’ve seen a fair amount of snowy egrets and great blue herons, although so far the heron’s have avoided being photographed.


These adorable goats were clearly somebody’s pets. They looked more like African Pygmy than Nigerian Dwarf’s, but they were adorable.


We’ve seen a lot more horses since we left Texas, and the largest population to-date has been in Mississippi. Half the houses seem to have a horse or two in their front yard.


Driving through the flat farmland of Arkansas yesterday we saw tons of hawks. This guy was hunting for his lunch on a telephone pole roadside.