Wild Cucumber

We have a pretty vine that started growing under and all around one of our oak trees as well as part of our fence.

We weren't sure what it was, but it was pretty, so we let it grow, wondering if it would produce any fruit or anything. Yesterday, we found this crazy spiky, green fruit on it, and decided that we had to know what it was. 

Turns out it is a wild cucumber. According to SF Gate it doesn't strangle the trees it grows on, so I guess we don't have to kill it, but perhaps we don't want to let it grow everywhere it wants to go. 

Our First Egg

We got our first egg! We think it was an Easter egger because it has a greenish/blueish tint.  You can see that it is much smaller than a "large" egg from the grocery store from the second picture. We don't know if they will get bigger as the chickens get older or not. They chickens are just under five months old.

Our first egg!

Our egg on the left, a "large" egg from the grocery store

Loving 4H

The girls need to have Western wear for some of the 4H horse events so we bought them some new hats. We will be going to our first horse event, a gymkhana that our club is putting on. The girls aren't going to be riding yet, but it will be fun to see all the events and watch their friends compete.

Aaron had his first event, Area Presentation Day. He will go to the County Presentation Day in April. Depending on how well he does there, he could move on to state which competes during the 4H Field Day, which sounds like it would be fun to go to regardless of whether he is competing.

Our Chicken Coop

I realized that I never put pictures of our coop up. The indoor picture is from November, so the chickens are MUCH bigger now.

Ron designed it all by himself, no plans were used. He did a lot of reading about coops, and we looked at a whole lot of plans together to get a feel of what we liked, and then he went designed it on his own. 

We have a few more things to do. It still needs steps to the door so the kids and I can more easily get inside. And we need to add access doors to get to the nesting boxes from outside. But it is fully functional! 

Wild Life on the Farm

A few of the animals we have found on the land.

California Toad

Gopher Snake

Tarantula

Island Fence Lizard (I think)

We also have rabbits, squirrels and gophers, but I really like the non-cute and fuzzy ones the best!

Fruits and Veggies

It's not all chickens on the Potter Farm, we've also been working on the garden. And when I say "we" I really mean "Ron."

Last weekend he put in some fruit trees and table grapes.

The girls planted a row of strawberries and Ron put in a soaker hose

We also have some beans growing that we planted a few weeks ago,

Hopefully we will have some nice fruits and veggies this summer. As long as the gophers don't eat them first.  

We'll see what we get up to this weekend. I still have to add pictures of some of the creatures we've found as we've been working in the garden.

We did it!

We said good-bye to two of our chickens today, one hen and one rooster. We didn't do it over the weekend because I had a horrible cold. Today I felt well enough to go to work, and when I got home we decided not to put it off any longer. So, we have two chickens in our fridge.

One of our hens, we called her Crooked Beak because, well, she had a crooked beak, was having a hard time eating.We knew that the humane thing to do was to end her life. We also knew that since she was an Easter-egger, we weren't going to get much meat off of her. We decided to butcher her first knowing that if we ended up doing something wrong there was less meat to waste. We used the video from another blog, Weed 'em and Reap as a guide. Ron was more comfortable with the slaughtering part and I was more comfortable with the cleaning part, so we worked well as a team.

I still think that slaughtering is the hardest part. Making sure that you cut deep enough in one cut to make it humane feels like a lot of pressure, but Ron did it.

The kids did most of the defeathering with a little help from me to get them started. I was afraid that it would be hard to pluck out the feathers, but the hot water bath really did make it easy. The kids were just fine with the whole process. We have been talking about it for so long, I think they were well prepared. We hadn't named any of the brahmas which probably helped. There are a couple Easter-eggers that the girls have named and they did say that they don't want to kill those chickens, which we will respect and will let those chickens live a long full life with us.

As for cleaning out the guts, I was very worried about cutting the intestines or gall bladder by mistake, which would contaminate the chicken, so it took a lot longer than it should have, but I wasn't grossed out at all. It was actually pretty cool, like dissecting the cats in high school anatomy. The brahma was definitely easier since it was bigger. Everything took a while being my first time, but I think I did OK.

We still have two more roosters to butcher, but we need to wait until the weekend because it takes way too long to do after work and I am not doing that again. By the end, it was getting pretty dark and we had to clean up in the dark - not fun!

While I was sick over the weekend, Ron and the kids were very busy planting and finding snakes. I will write all about their adventures next time!