Life On The Farm, and On The Mend

Well, after my last post I had to have a hysterectomy and repair surgery. I was told that recovery would take 6-8 weeks but I'm not really sure what I heard when they said that because I really thought it would be a couple of weeks of recovery with a couple of weeks of taking it easy and then BAM, I'd be back to my old self, only better! Well, I could not have been more wrong. When they said 6-8 weeks, they meant 6-8 weeks! I realize now that I didn't take the surgery seriously enough, and if I could do it over again, which I hope not to ever have to do, I would take it much easier than I did. I would take advantage of laying down more and I would insist on much better pain management. A lot happened with this surgery, and I don't really feel up to going into that now, but I may later so that anyone who reads it may avoid the nightmare that I went through with pain management issues. The good news is they left my ovaries, the bad news is that I seem to have been thrown into menopause anyway! Major hot flashes since the surgery. But enough about that for now.


Because of that I have not been able to unpack or decorate our new farmhouse at all and it gets more irritating every day that goes by. We have added assorted rabbits, two more roosters and a baby chick to our menagerie. I know, two more roosters? Why? Well, it wasn't exactly on purpose.

Daniel and Charlie during their morning routine.

First came "Charlie" the rooster. He came from a neighbors flock that practically lives here, his mother attacked and tried to kill him. He escaped and came running to our son, Daniel who happened to be sitting in the backyard at the time. Daniel gave him some grass and he adopted Daniel as his Dad. He would follow him everywhere he went and when Daniel came inside he would run around the sliding glass doors and cry and peck at the window. We got him a cage and would bring him in at night and put him back out during the day. Because of what happened he is an outcast to all the neighboring flocks so he lived on his own in the front half of our backyard. Our kids are very protective of him and chased away any of the other chickens that tried to come into that area so they stay away from that part now. It was so much fun to watch him develop his routine. The way he followed us around whenever we went outside. The way that he would come to the door at bedtime to let us know it was time to put him inside. At first we thought he was a chick, but as time went by we realized we had another rooster. Oh well.


Then we found two baby chicks at the feed store so we bought a Rhode Island Red and a Plymouth Barred Rock. Unfortunately the Red died after a few weeks, but the Barred Rock is thriving and growing and is very close to Charlie. In the beginning Charlie was not very happy and felt more than a little displaced by the new arrivals, but with the death of the Red, he began to grow closer to the other chick. They even got to the point of sharing a cage.


A few weeks ago a friend called and asked if we could take in their rooster. It seems that they bought a bunch of baby chicks and one turned out to be a rooster, which they are not allowed to have and a neighbor was complaining and they were desperate to find a new home, so we brought home Topol. He's a Russian Spangled Orloff, and we are musical lovers, hence the name. We watched them closely and he and Charlie seem to be living peacefully enough together. It is very funny now to watch the three of them follow each other around the yard.


The only one not very pleased with the situation is Elvis, our cockatiel who lives on the back porch and who's cage has become their favorite roosting place. At first she, yes she, I'll explain in a minute, at first she put up quite a fuss, but now she has resigned herself to the fact that the three of them jump on her cage at night and settle in for a good night's rest.


We had a cockatiel named Clyde that we got from a friend when his mother attacked him and tried to kill him. He was hand raised and had a huge bald spot in the back of his head from where his mother had attacked him. Clyde loved my husband more than any of us and loved to snuggle up on the back of Kevin's neck and play in his hair. Well one morning the kids came running into our bedroom waking us up with a chorus of, "Clyde laid an egg, Clyde laid an egg!" My husband and I looked at each other through bleary eyes and asked, what could be in the cage that looks like an egg? Kevin got up and went into the other room to investigate while I stayed in bed wondering what in the world could have gotten into the cage that looked like and egg! What could have gotten in the cage at all? Could the kids have maybe put something in the cage? When my husband returned to fall back into bed I asked him, "Well, what is in the cage that looks like an egg?" He said, "An egg." hmmm, okay so Clyde became Cleo and went on to lay many eggs in her time. My mother loved Cleo so much that for her birthday the next year we bought her a cockatiel of her own whom she promptly named Elvis since she loved Elvis Presley so much. He lived with her for 5 years until she passed away, then he came to live with us. We were hoping for some baby cockatiels with Elvis and Cleo. Cleo was in the process of laying so we had high hopes for some babies! Soon we were being deluged with eggs! Tons of them! More than we had ever had before, surely there would be babies soon! But then we began to suspect that perhaps Cleo wasn't the only bird in that cage laying eggs. Well, actually the kids suspected, I was still sure that Elvis was a male since he had lived with my mom for 4 years without laying a single egg. Surely he wasn't laying now. Surprise! One day we found Elvis with an egg stuck to him, err her. Sometimes when birds lay too many eggs they lose calcium and can become egg bound. Luckily for us we had gone through this with Cleo before and luckily in both cases the eggs became attached outside the bird. If they become bound inside, the bird usually dies from it. The only thing I could figure was that Elvis moved in with Cleo, saw her lay an egg and said, "Oh is that all there is to it? I can do that!" And then she did. lol I tried to change Elvis' name to Priscilla but Elvis just stuck and so Elvis she remains. Cleo passed last year after 9 years with us.

We have yet to name our flock of 4 Rhode Island Red hens and 1 Rhode Island Red rooster who have to be kept secluded because their beaks have been cropped so they have to be kept in their own area away from the other chickens. I expect that we will always have to keep them separated for their own safety. It seems that now we will have to have at least 3 different coop areas for the 3 roosters. Although we also hope to get some arachonas so that means perhaps 4 different coop areas. I guess we'll see how well Charlie and Topol get along as Charlie grows.

The goats, who remain unamed also, continue to neglect the weeds in the backyard in favor of the various fruit trees which they are destroying! I am about to fire them! We had been watering the back area to make the weeds more desirable to them but the only part of the weeds they would actually eat was the dead part. And they only eat the weeds if we pull them out of the ground and feed it to them!! I don't need finicky goats! At that point they're just a disposal system. When the weeds got almost waist high I made them stop watering! My hope was that the rabbits would take care of the weeds but I have been unable to build a run for them so for now they live in the front area with the chicken and two roosters and are pampered. This whole farm thing is just not starting out the way I thought. lol


One frustration of this long recovery has been that I have been unable to build my chicken coop that I have been dreaming of, and that my garden never got planted. So many plans, so little achieved.


Well, that's it for now. Hopefully I will be up to writing more frequently, but the recovery continues to be a roller coaster ride so time will tell.


Be blessed!