(nearly) Wordless Wednesday

I forgot today was Wednesday!

I have a picture to share.  Lucky you!

This weekend we winterized the coop so everyone was out & about chasing bugs.

Blerg!

(source)

I have a severe case of the dreaded BLERG's.

I have, I kid you not, no less than 4 blog posts half finished.  Nice.

God willin' and the crick don't rise I'll get at least one of those buggers done and unleash it on the world.

Now for work to quit getting in my way!

(nearly) Wordless Wednesday: I Need These in My Life

Ribbon Barrettes.
'Cause my hair's getting to the length where
 I need to pull it back, out of my eyes.
And because Xanadu.
You can't go wrong with an endorsement like that.

On Goodness and Mercy

Alternate title: Hatchery dude - "We have a 90% success rate!" {snort}

For the longest time while all the chicks were in the brooder I tried denying that I had ANY roos.  In fact there's a video floating around wherein I proclaim "and there's Mercy.  She's the one who has already gotten her comb and wattles!" {eye roll} and "that one is Goodness who is a biiiiig girl, I wonder if she's older than the others?" {huff}.  Oh, then there's a video of them when they were only a few weeks old and both Goodness and Mercy were already squaring off.

Riiiiight.  As you have already surmised we ended up with two roo's.

So we decided to change their names to Goodman and Mercer.  Which frequently came out as "Goodness" and "Mercy". Whatevs, they didn't notice.

After everyone was moved out to the coop the boys started fighting more and more.  Goodness mostly kicking Mercy's behind.  Which sent me to frantically searching the internet for ideas on what to do.  Much hemming and hawing later my Beloved and I decided that one of the boys needed to be re-homed.

Goodness on the left and Mercy on the right - before all their sickle feathers came in

My Mommabean was currently without a rooster since Stinkeye had lost a battle with a hungry critter.

Stinkeye, whose name I believe was Socrates originally
but being a mean & nasty rooster was renamed accordingly

It was decided that Goodness who was the louder, more crowy of the two would go live with Mommabean. She lives further out the boonies on more land so he'd annoy less people with. his. incessant. crowing.  And she had more hens for him to slake his lust on.

Goodness

Goodness is the chicken who had the eye problems.

Just look at those feathers!

Shake it off big guy

I think he was part pheasant

So! Mommabean, my sister & brother-in-law, my Beloved and I headed out to the run to catch him.  Have you ever tried to catch a chicken? Ooph.  We locked all the other chickens in the coop then spent the next 15 minutes chasing him around.

It would've made a seriously fantastic video - five adults trying to catch one chicken.  Many half curses (little ears were standing on the other side of the chain link fence) were flying, faces turned red and we were all out of breath by the end.

Wonder why I've been referring to Goodness in the past tense? Yes?

Well, Mommabean decided after one mean rooster that she wasn't going to put up with another.  I hear tell that for the first month or so he was kosher and acted like a gentleman.  But at one point he knocked my nephew down while he was feeding them and chased my sisters mother-in-law.  He currently resides in their freezer.

Poor Goodness.

And Mercy (or Mercer), he's mostly good.  Every once in a while he gets to where he feels the need to challenge me. He'll fluff himself up or stomp after me at which point I stop, turn around and whisper menacingly "I am the big rooster around here dude and I will end you." Followed closely by screechily shouting "Ooohhh! Pretty rooster, I want to touch the rooster! Here rooster, rooster, rooster" while chasing him.  It works for us.

He gets mad when I tell him his legs look like #2 pencils

Master tidbitter, First Class

The only one missing from this photo of his harem is Lola

Cold, wet and windy - Merc don't care

Shared on Homestead Barn Hop

Sunflowers

We planted a lot of sunflowers this year along the south side of the pole barn.  We bought two packets of seeds but the majority of them were freebies

Some of them were absolutely beautiful

Others were your average (still pretty) type sunflower

Theeeeeeeeeeen there were the mammoth ones

Oh my gosh.  So huge.

I could've sworn I got some pictures of them before they got so top heavy but I can't locate them right now. Anyway, my problem now is this:

Holy. Mackerel.  I have zombie sunflowers.  

And yeah, what exactly do you do with them now? They look sad and more than a little horrific.  

So, you know what I did? I actually Googled "Sunflower Anatomy" earlier today.  Because, well, where are the seeds? Do you know what comes up? Fo'realsy charts of a sunflowers anatomy, naming every receptacle scale, phyllaries, ray flower and disc flower.  Huh.  Well.  Okay then!

After a third cup of coffee allowed more brain synapses to fire I Googled "harvesting sunflower seeds".  Much more helpful.

My plan now is to keep half of the heads for the chickens and leave the other half for the birds that over winter here.

Any other suggestions?

(nearly) Wordless Wednesday

Bugs? Of course.
Sparrows? Yep.
Crows? No problem.
Sandhill Cranes? I got this.
-Ghost Rider out.

Keeping our airspace safe since 2014