Day of Firsts

Today was quite a day here on our little place...

Started out with the first real harvest. I have picked a few items here and there over the past several days, but this was the first *haul*.

Then upon returning from town, picking up the children, we found that Maybelline has hatched her first baby!

Finally, I made the first batch of canned goods of the season this evening. It has been 2 years since I canned anything. Jalapeno jelly!!! It was pretty much a "have to do today" or the jalapenos would have ruined. I had a few I had picked the other day and added them to the ones today to have enough to make a batch of jelly. We love Jalapeno jelly!

So it's been a very busy day here at Eason Acres; just the way I like it!

With teamwork

We're going to give it a shot.

Even though I posted a couple of weeks ago about re-homing all of the chickens and the goats. About not really being a farmer....

It seems that really is my calling. But it takes teamwork. I cannot do this alone.

I am not a "farmer". I am a mother and wife providing for her family.

Last weekend, I pulled out the seeds from last summer that never got planted because I broke my hand, and decided, since the place where the old house sat won't grow grass and turns into a mud puddle when it rains, that I would give it a shot at being a "front yard" garden.

I was skeptical. I planted a few live plants (peppers, okra, pickling cucumbers and zucchini), and some seeds (2 types of corn, 3 types of beans, yellow squash). I left the tomatoes and lots more seeds un-planted. I decided to stop where I was and see what happened. I was prepared for the worst, for nothing to happen.

Well, to my surprise yesterday, I found lots of baby seedlings that had broken through the ground!!

Here they are this morning!

So today, Felicity and I will plant the tomato plants and the rest of the seeds I have to plant.

Last weekend, the friend that bought the Seramas (trio and all the babies) said it wasn't working out. He said Seramas are too sensitive. Of course, this is after he lost all but 2 babies. Makes me so, so sad, but nothing I can do.

Yesterday, my precious babies came home! Boudreaux, Penelope and Maybelline will stay permanently. I missed them so much more than I thought I would. I love them so much!

The first thing David told me after the laying flock was picked up a few weeks ago is "I'm going to miss those chickens". I knew I would miss them, but wouldn't miss having to take care of them by myself. David pretty much takes care of them when he is home on R&R, that does give me a break.

Well, I do miss them, too!

By hatching so many all within such a short period of time as I did....that was my downfall! Lesson learned, though.

My babies are home. Later in the summer, after vacation, I will either hatch some eggs or order some pullets and we will begin again with a new laying flock.

No goats, now, though. We need to do some modifying on fencing before we get goats again. I do think, though, that I would enjoy breeding the Pygmy goats. So when the time is right, I will buy only registered babies and begin our breeding program. In time.

The children are learning to help me more around the place. Imagine that....taking away all electronics then finally getting help!

With help and teamwork, we can make Eason Acres work :-)

Meet Maybelline

Those readers that have been reading my blog or on Facebook with me know that I adore the Serama breed of chicken. Love, love, love! Seramas are the worlds smallest breed of chicken. Yes, a bantam, but not like any other bantam (or large breed) of chicken you will ever encounter.

I have had several on different occasions, either had to re-home them in the past or they have crossed that Rainbow Bridge.

On September 29, the most precious, loving and all around special little Serama pullet hatched at my house.

Maybelline - 4 days old

Maybelline is from the Castle Delight Seramas line. I have waited a long time to have some eggs from my friend, Laura, and finally I have a little pullet!

Maybelline - 5 days old

She arrived on this earth with a special sweetness about her. An immediate attachment to me. I have adored all of the Seramas I have hatched, but Maybelline found a place in  my heart that no other chickens have.

Maybelline - 12 days old

When she hatched and was brown. I thought maybe, just maybe, I would finally have a chocolate colored chicken.

Maybelline - 34 days old

She didn't stay brown, but I love her all the same. One day I will have some chocolate chickens! Until then, Maybelline lives in the house, in a very large cage. She was living with a pair of Seramas I had hatched from other lines, but they weren't nice to her at all, and now live elsewhere. David and I both decided they had to go, Maybelline is too sweet and special to have to live with bullies.

Maybelline - 2 months old

The photo above was when Felicity was home from school after she had her tonsils removed. Maybelline acts like one of the dogs. I let her out of her cage at least once a day and she wanders around the family room, but mostly wants in someone's lap to hang out.


This video isn't great, but you can hear how she responds to me. All of the other chickens I have had never have done this. She does it all the time.

Maybelline - 3 months old

She is really learning to pose for the camera, eh?

Maybelline - 3 months old - Jan 3, 2012

She's an awfully special little girl.

Now, to just get more eggs and hatch Maybelline some cage mates :-)

A happy day!

I wish I could say the pins are out of my hand, not until Wednesday. BUT....

We have a brand new baby chich that hatched last night!!! It is a Serama (who would have guessed, eh?) from hatching eggs I got from my friend, Laura, of Castle Delight Seramas. I have waited so long to hatch some babies from her eggs!  This hatch was awful. Because of my hand injury and not feeling so great, I would forget to turn them on schedule and several times, the humidity got way too low before I caught it.  Next time...we will have a much better success rate, I am sure.

So "Tidbit" is an awfully lucky and strong little baby with a huge will to live. This is the tiniest little baby chick I have seen, much less ever hatched myself. From head to tail, it is only 1.75 inches long....that includes it's beak!

I'm calling it "Tidbit" for now...once we can tell the gender, it will get a *real* name.

Pip!!!!! 9pm 7/20/2012

under the heat lamp

The ash trays that I use for biddies food and water (with the glass marbles to prevent accidental drowning) is 4.5 inches across. You can see just how tiny Tidbit is.

Finally...something I am able to do with my injured hand <3

Have a great weekend!

New Serama addition and a friend

Sadly after Roosevelt and Victoria returned home last week, the following day Victoria was killed by one of the dogs we had at the time. The dog already had some issues and I had planned to re-home him or take him to the humane society if I couldn't get him re-homed. It just happened sooner than later, the day after my Seramas returned home to us.

Roosevelt had never been alone in his 27 months of life and he was so lonesome. I found a pretty little girl on a new auction site and was able to buy her and she arrived today. We have named her "Dolly" because she has crazy "blonde" hair, much like Dolly Parton.

Enjoy this video I shot today after we arrived home with Dolly from the post office.

My sweet babies are home!

Some may remember back during the winter, when everything started with my separation/divorce, that I re-homed all of my chickens. I missed my Seramas so.darn.badly. Remember this from last summer?






They were given a new home by a friend that lives only 45 minutes away. Once I decided I wanted chickens again a couple of weeks ago, she told me that I could bring my babies back home. We went today and picked up Roosevelt and Victoria!!!!

I am so glad to have them home!!!

New little girl has started laying!

Victoria is the only girl Serama we have left after Mike's dogs declared a massacre on my flock. Victoria is a Silkied Serama that arrived here in Texas early in October from New York state. When she arrived, there was a total of three girls and four boys. Now there is she and two boys. Yes, massacre :-(

This is Victoria and her fella, Crockett.

Victoria protecting her eggs.

Here is her first two eggs! She layed the first one Thursday and the second Saturday. I am going to let her sit when she is ready. Hope they hatch! (She now has three!)

Sorry for the poor photo quality, I am trying to learn to use my new iPhone.

Progress - Day 8

I wish I had better news on the hatching front.

The 14 eggs that turned into 17 eggs in the incubator the following day. I let the Seramas out last Friday for fresh air, and lost another girl. I had 3 of her eggs saved up to sell, so I just added them to the incubator.

I candled night before last. Awful, awful progress.

If you look toward the upper left side of this egg, you can see the veining of this little baby!!!

So, here's the stats in a nutshell. Only 1 egg from any of the girls I had even began starting to develop, but stopped and has a blood ring. Of the 8 eggs I got from my friend (whose flock was from my original three), there is now only 3 developing. A couple had broken air-sacks from the shipping, others ended as blood rings.

I am so disappointed. I had such high hopes for this hatch. I have watched the incubator like a Momma bird. Not opening it, temps and humidity have been amazingly perfect. It's impossible to hatch eggs that were never fertile to begin with, though.

I have more eggs coming from my friend Laura, of Castle Delight Seramas at the end of the month, so I am hoping for a better success.

My now only 4 Seramas are all living in the house right now. We will be building accommodations for them outside eventually, so they can get plenty of exercise, fresh air and be totally safe.

Special eggs in the incubator

Thursday I built a new homemade incubator. I will post a complete tutorial later today, but wanted to post about day 1.

Fair warning, this is a long post.

I have 14 Serama eggs in the incubator, due to hatch on Thanksgiving Day. The eggs in this hatch are very special. I will tell you why.

In late 2008, I had 2 eggs included as freebies in a batch of eggs I purchased to hatch. I never really was interested in Seramas, but didn't anticipate that they hatch anyway, as Serama eggs don't do well when shipped. Both hatched and I had a pair. Teddy and Nonnie. They quickly won the hearts of all of our family, but had to re-homed (as did all the chickens I had at that time) when we met with some unforeseen circumstances.

Teddy and Nonnie:

Roosevelt, Eleanor and Lily hatched in 1/2010. They were my sweet little trio that started me off on this journey (and obsession) with these amazing little chickens.

We were absolutely smitten with these little chickens. Gregory was so taken with them, that they eventually helped him start to talk. I have posted videos with all of them together previously and along this 21 days to hatch, I will share more.

In October 2010, I had a little girl hatch from this trio, her name was Darla. Then in December 2010, my adorable little fella Travis was hatched from the trio.

Darla:

Travis:

I started 2011 off with 5 Seramas. They lived in our family room in large rabbit cages and I let them outside in our fenced backyard most days for scratching around and fresh air. We came home from running errands in March and someone had opened our gate and my birds were gone. We found Roosevelt and Eleanor on the driveway, Travis was in the front yard. Darla and Lily were nowhere in sight. We spent hours looking for them. We were living in the city limits at the time and asked all the neighbors, but no one had seen them. The next morning, Darla showed up in the backyard, but Lily was gone forever :-(

We moved to our little farm in April of this year. The four of them were at home immediately. They loved being outdoors and having more freedom. In June, Eleanor hatched two eggs. One of the babies was extremely tiny and didn't make it. The other, Austin, was precious. Unfortunately he met with the hand of our first foster son and I was left with none of Eleanor's babies. Two weeks later, Eleanor disappeared.  I was down to three Seramas then. Roosevelt, Darla and Travis. They were inseparable.

This is one of the last photos I have of Eleanor. She is with her baby, Austin, in June.

Travis and Roosevelt are very tame and friendly little guys. Here is a video of them coming when I call them by name.



Darla was a little on the um, diva, side of the personality range, but she was still sweet for the most part.

In early October, a fellow BYC'er gave us seven silkied Seramas for the cost of shipping. We were so excited! Two weeks previous, we adopted two new older puppies for Mike. So do you see where this is going?

Stopping the long story here, one of the new roosters passed away from what seemed like a heart attack. He died in my arms, uninjured from any other animal, knowing he was cared for. Through the course of two weeks, we lost: Darla from the original group and from the new silkied Seramas lost two in addition to the one that passed away.

Now we are down to just five. Roosevelt from my originals and Crockett, Walker, Lady and Victoria from the seven silkied Seramas that we got last month.

So! Back to the eggs in the incubator.

There are three, possibly four that came from Alice before she was killed. Alice was a teeny tiny brown/black silkied Serama. There is one egg from Darla. There are two eggs from Lady. I got eight eggs from a fellow BYC'er that has a quad from Eleanor/Lily/Roosevelt. So these eight will be Roosevelt's grandchildren.

Here's the awaiting grandfather:

Now you know why these eggs are so special and I am hoping each day to get an amazing hatch from them.

Day 1 was yesterday, November 4. Temps are perfect. Humidity is perfect. I check the incubator what seems a million times an hour just to keep tabs on what is going on, which at this time, is nothing of course.

More updates along the way.

So much has happened

I won't go into the details right now, but our foster sons are no longer with us. There were many things that contributed to our decision, and it was such a hard decision to make.

The day after the boys left, I slept nearly all day and part of the next day. As of right now, Mike has slept 13 hours straight! To say we were exhausted is obviously putting it mildly. We didn't realize how drained we had become.

Will we continue on our foster parenting journey? That remains to be seen. If we do, we will be much more selective as to what children we agree to accept.

When we moved into this little house, we wanted our foster children to have as much space as possible, and were hoping to get our allowed number of 3 kiddos, so Mike and I took the smallest bedroom and put children in the master bedroom.  After realizing that we wouldn't be getting a 3rd child any time soon, at least until we had adopted the boys, Mike and I could stand it no longer ( we were in a bedroom that is 7.5' x 11') and decided to move the boys into a secondary bedroom and we would move to the master bedroom. We had the move planned for this weekend (even before we made the decision about the boys), and despite our tiredness, we switched rooms on Friday night. The house is still in shambles and I hope to get everything straight and put back away today.

Felicity and Gregory are much happier, now that they have Momma and Daddy back to themselves.

Two weeks ago we added two new dogs to our menagerie. They are Mike's dogs. He needed a "man's dog" to hang out with, and since all 3 of our other dogs are little dogs, he never felt like they were "his". We adopted brother puppies. They are Blue Heeler mix, we think with Bloodhound. They are great and we all love them.

We also added 7 new Seramas to our flock. They came from New York state and arrived on Thursday. They are silkied Seramas and I had never seen them before, but I LOVE them!  We plan to grow a decent size flock of Seramas, not just for pets, but for breeding and showing. The photo below is one that the previous owner sent to me showing me the birds. We have named this gorgeous fellow "Denton".

The name I have given our Serama flock is "Yellow Rose Seramas". I have started the flock blog, too. Be sure to head over there and "like" them. The plan is that all of our Seramas will be named after Texas cities, counties or well known people from Texas.


I will share photos of the new dogs and Seramas as soon as I can find my camera cable to transfer the photos to my computer.

Have a wonderful Sunday!

We are not farmers after all

I have the best family; but we are not farmers.

Mike and Felicity have only supported the goats and my little venture into turning our family into a farming, self-sufficient family because it was what I wanted. I knew that Mike helped out as much as he could to help me, but Felicity finally "fessed up" that she has never really liked dealing with so much work with the goats and chickens but wouldn't say so because she didn't want to hurt my feelings.

So, after a long couple of weeks, we have come to the conclusion that we are not farmers.

Thank you to everyone that left suggestions for names for our farm, but we will not be needing them after all.

After this weekend, we will no longer have any goats and the chickens will be very few.

We decided that with bringing in new children and all the activities that lie ahead of us once the school year starts, farming is just too much for us.

Our dogs and cats will be thrilled to be the center of our pet universe again. We are also keeping my beloved Seramas. As far as I'm concerned, I will have Seramas indefinitely. The whole family enjoys them and their sweet, unique personalities too much to be without them.

Chickens come a'running

My serama chickens lived their entire life (about 15 months total) indoors at our old house. They lived in large rabbit cages in our family room. They are incredibly spoiled.

Now that we have moved to our farm and are outside the city limits, they live in the barn and free range on our acre + of land.

During the day, most any time I go out the back door, either Roosevelt or Travis (or both) come running across the yard to see me. They hope I will finally let them live indoors again. LOL

Enjoy this video I took yesterday of my fellows.

Fresh eggs and chickens

I managed to find a cord so I could download photos from my camera, finally.

This morning, I washed up our first dozen fresh eggs from the hens! What a wonderful thing to be supplying some of our own food now.

I have many things to catch up here on my blog, but wanted to share some photos of our sweet chickens. Of course, our Seramas are our favorites. Seramas have such wonderful personalities and make fantastic pets!

This is Roosevelt. He's the most amazing fella!

This is Eleanor. She and Roosevelt are our original pair of Serama that we hatched January 2, 2010.

Now I have to tell you about this next little man. His name is Travis. Eleanor hatched him on Dec. 29 and he was the only egg to hatch, so he got LOTS of handling and attention. He is rotten to the core. He thinks he is a house pet. When someone opens the back door, he starts running from the barn toward the house. He ALWAYS wants to be sitting in my lap. I just love this little man to death.

Darla has been sitting on one egg for nearly three weeks, so I am expecting a new baby Serama any day. So excited!

 When we moved in, the seller left his two hens for us. We named them Agnes and Hazel. We think they are around 5 years old, but just not sure. The day we moved in, the neighbors' dog got them and traumatized them. We didn't get any eggs until this past week. Now they are laying eggs like crazy. Here's a photo; Agnes on the left and Hazel on the right. Not too easy to see them, but they are getting more tame every day.

This is a Black Crested White Polish baby chick. It is 5 weeks old. Isn't it cute? Right now I call it *Mohawk* but we will come up with something more appropriate. We have two more of these chicks, they are 3 weeks old.

Gotta run for now, just wanted to put up a quick post. Have a great weekend!