Dropstone Farms » death

On the disappearance of critters

Lauren — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 01:57:14 +0000

One morning a few weeks ago, on a day with Garth was in class so I was covering morning chores, I rolled out of the house on my way to milk the goat, and I noticed a pile of white feathers on the dewy ground … no wait, make that several piles, strewn about the yard. Hmmm. As I was milking I realized I wasn’t seeing Little Red Hen anywhere, and I couldn’t recall having seen her in a few days at least. Similarly, the white chicken who had decided to roost in a tree — I had a picture, can’t find it now; it may be on Garth’s phone — was gone, and I suspected those were her white feathers all about the yard.

So, some critter or another figured out this is a great place to get a meal at night, apparently.

Saddest, though, is the fact that no one comes in to eat cat food anymore. There is a cat door into the laundry room, and a dish of cat food in there, and it hasn’t been touched in weeks now. Little H.P. Lovecat has had a tumultuous relationship with us: she started out pretty wild, then got used to us, then got used to the dogs, then became almost a housecat, then decided she belonged to Ruby dog. Then a dog we were sitting chased her up a tree. The next morning she came in her kitty door and tried to come into the house (from the laundry room) to rub about my ankles as usual, and I closed the door and showed her through the glass that the visiting dog was inside. H.P. looked at me, and looked at the visiting dog (who had chased her up a tree), and went out the cat door, and I never saw her in the house again. (I still feel guilty about that.) She was around for a while, and would come hang out with me while I milked, but eventually she stopped speaking to me completely. I think it was when Fry, the new kid, moved in; he barked at her. I am afraid that Ruby forgot that she loved H.P., and that she also barked at her. In any case, she was still coming in to eat, even though she wasn’t speaking to us or really letting herself be seen much.

H.P. and Ruby, before they were BFFs.

But now she’s not. I’m leaving the kibble just in case. My brain is simultaneously containing two true stories: one, she’s obviously dead, because that’s what happens to cats on Bainbridge Island, and what we always expected to happen to her; two, she’s obviously given up on us and moved in with another kind family down the street, and is living it up. They are both true. (Not originally intended as a Schrödinger’s cat reference, but hey, it works, I guess.)

Turkey update: there are none.

Lauren — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:41:34 +0000

This email already went out to our list subscribers (sign up here) and our Facebook friends and Twitter followers may have seen it too, so apologies for duplicates …

We are really sad to have to tell you that we will not have any turkeys available for sale this year. We had significant predator losses in the last six weeks or so, and when we finally got a head count of who was left, and then looked at the list of turkeys we’d already committed in trade or to friends and family, we realized we had pretty much assigned all of them already.

At this time I know of only one other Bainbridge Island source for turkey: Heyday Farm. They have just a few left available, so contact them soon. There may be sources in Poulsbo, and it is almost certain that some of the Seattle farmers’ markets still have turkey. I’ll post here on the blog as I find new sources, in case you are still looking.

So this is the end of the season for us, anticlimactic and discouraging (emotionally and financially) though it may be. We greatly appreciate everyone’s support this year. When we started farming, we decided to give it three years and then regroup and decide if we want to keep going, and that three years is up, so we’ll be spending some time thinking hard this winter. We’ll keep you informed, whatever we end up doing.

In the meantime, however, we have lots of fresh chicken and duck eggs that you can pick up on the farm. Please get in touch if you’re interested.

Thanks again. Hope everyone’s snugly in place for autumn.

So, yeah. That’s this year. The end.

Oscar

Lauren — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 03:51:49 +0000

We’ve been quiet for a while because we’ve been busy (as usual, I know) with lots of things.

Many of our blog readers have probably met Garth’s good old dog Oscar, who trotted around happily and healthily until he suddenly didn’t, and couldn’t, because he’d stopped eating. After several visits to the vet, it was established that he had both pneumonia and lung cancer, and we decided we’d treat the former, for quality of life, but not the latter. For a while his appetite picked back up and he was eating the delicious homegrown-lamb-and-carrot-stew that we cooked for him in the crockpot, plus the fresh king salmon from Pike Place Market, and homegrown chicken, etc. But eventually he stopped eating again. We made an appointment to take him in for his last vet visit on a Monday a few weeks ago, but the Sunday before, he decided he didn’t want to wait. We were with him when he died.

We haven’t posted because it’s been hard to talk about. We miss him a lot. He was a really good dog. The best dog.

Frustrating/sad news, plus update on turkey sales

Lauren — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 01:23:38 +0000

It’s our third year with poultry, and the raccoons have finally found us.

We are down to one laying duck (from four) — they took one on Sunday, one on Monday, and one on Tuesday. So the hens and remaining survivor duck are all staying inside the coop until we can figure out another solution. It’s a bummer; I like seeing them free-ranging around the yard and I definitely like the tasty rich orange yolks they lay because of eating so much grass and weeds.
Also, while the hens slow down their laying in the winter, the ducks are champs and keep laying an egg a day each, pretty much all winter. So we’re looking for some more Khaki Campbell ducks on Craigslist and such. Let us know if you know of any that are available.

Then on Monday night, the dogs woke us up at about 1:30 and we ran out to see a couple big raccoons around the brooders that hold the turkeys (4 weeks old), batch 2 of our broilers (also 4 weeks old), and batch 3 of the broilers (like 5 days old).
We think there should have been 23 turkeys; there are 15 left. There should have been about 58 broilers from batch 2; there are 45 now (though to be fair, we couldn’t count them before and they escaped a lot when they were small, and we might’ve lost some before). The small broilers seem to have been undisturbed.

Raccoon carnage is particularly icky to clean up after, as they often don’t eat the whole bird or carry it away, and in fact if they can reach through the chicken wire and grab a bird, they’ll just gnaw on it through the wire and leave the rest of the body inside the brooder for you to find in the morning.

We have put up electric fence around the brooders and the greenhouse too, where the 30 turkey poults that arrived today are brooding.

Tuesday night we were woken up at about the same time, and the dogs barked a bit then quieted down and seemed confused. The brooders were untouched. I hopefully infer that the dogs were barking at the sound of raccoons learning about electric fence, and subsequently taking off in the other direction.

This affects our turkey availability, obviously, though I’m not quite sure yet how we’ll work it out. Due to some procrastination on our part combined with a really bad experience with Privett Hatchery, we are taking a gamble that the poults that arrived today will be big enough in time for Thanksgiving. We may have only smallish (8-10 pounds) turkeys. If they are really small, we may only sell the fifteen that are left from the first batch for Thanksgiving — they will be a month older — and do today’s 30 for Christmas. Or I guess we could do whoever’s big at Thanksgiving, and give the rest another month to keep growing.

In any case, I’m not sure yet how to take orders for turkeys. I know people will want to secure their turkeys early, so I hope we don’t have to wait too late; I’d be sad if folks waited for us and didn’t order from others, and then we couldn’t deliver and they had to use a storebought bird.

To that end, please put your name and email address if you want to be on the non-binding list of interested people: http://tinyurl.com/turkeyinterestlist. We’ll go down the list first-come first-served, and contact folks as we have birds, and if you have found another source, we’ll just move on to the next person.

Sad day

Lauren — Thu, 14 May 2009 06:43:23 +0000

An inevitable day, especially with six dogs total across our lot and our two neighbors’, but a sad one all the same. This weekend the neighbor Lab pup learned she could jump the fence, and yesterday she also learned how to kill chickens. Garth was home getting ready to come meet me in Seattle to go see Star Trek, and when he got out of the shower he found our dogs, who were inside, all agitated, and looked outside to see the neighbor pup in the coop. The flock was scattered — he found poor Stripes’ body somewhere outside the pen, and Sick Chicken was lying up in the woods. Stripes had always been always a loner, the straggler and social outcast of the flock, so I wasn’t surprised about that, and Sick Chicken, though all better and happily reintegrated with the others, was still slower, and had a paler comb than she used to have. So I was sad, but not surprised to get Garth’s frantic phone call telling me it was these two that he had definitely found. We canceled movie plans and I hurried home as fast as is possible when one is dependent on a ferry schedule. Along the way I heard that all the others — Black Chicken, Other Black Chicken, Other Red Chicken (aka Miz Bitch), and Wilhemina — were definitely alive, as well as the two ducks and the four Wyandotte youngsters who live in the coop.

This flock was our first, and as such straddled a difficult line between pets and livestock, but leaning towards livestock. We are sad at the reduction of the flock, of course, but in this case we are also saddened by the loss of these two chickens in particular. Next time it won’t be so bad — this was our farm’s first loss of animal life — and even so, it didn’t mess me up as much as I expected (though Garth says he is “more tweaked than [he] thought [he] would be”).

So thanks, little chickens. We hope you only had one bad day in your lives. Despite your vocal protestations about how horrible it was to be left all day, or even until 7 o’clock in the morning, in your 8×14′ coop, we hope the former was true. We’ll miss you.

Stripes (with Necky in the background), originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Stripes (Drill chicken), originally uploaded by laurenipsum.

Stripes perches on the grape arbor to do her impression of Drill Cat.

Sick chicken is still angry but is happier outside than not, originally uploaded by laurenipsum.