Sickness is not very Homesteadery.....(followed by chickens)

Well....the not shopping for six weeks thing is going pretty good, but other homesteader pursuits have been put on the back burner.  My family, sans me (Praise the Lord!!!), has had a really bad cough since just after Christmas.  Last week I took my daughter to the doctor because I noticed she wasn't hearing me and since then we've spent our time in doctor's offices getting hearing tests, chest x-rays and nose swab cultures and sitting in the pharmacy getting inhalers and antibiotics and little plastic face masks with tubes on them that cost $48 (I think if I would have had time, I could have made one myself and it would have been a great homesteader project).  Anywho...she's getting better and my mind is back on my homesteader pursuits.

Back during the first week of February, I started selling eggs and delivering them to people I know who wanted to be put on an egg route.  I am happy to say that my demand now is greater than what our chickens are producing and it is time for me to start shopping for some baby chicks.  When we first decided to get chickens, we inherited some from my husband's cousin who had lived in the country and was moving back to the city and also some from the older man who lives in front of us who was tired of taking care of his chickens.  They all were fairly old, but we were getting a fair amount of eggs from them.  After butchering some of the non-layers (I found a great method for making chicken stock and getting meat from the chickens at the same time and canning everything!!!  I'll share it another time) and having a few get eaten by chicken hawks and a dog (nothin' yer can do wit a chicken eat'n dog sep shoot um'---or keep them in your barn until you find someone who'll take him), we were down to 10 or so chickens and decided to buy chicks.  We learned alot from raising the chicks and out of 25, only 13 survived.  Turns out that dogs, weasels and hawks really like chicken.

As of right now, we have about seven of the origional chickens and thirteen new ones.  We have one old rooster (his name is Cletus) and one new rooster (his name is Firebird).  The old ones were mixed breed, but mostly brown layers and the new ones are all araucanas, the kind that lay the colored eggs.  

Since my egg demand now outweighs the supply and it is time to buy new chickens, I've been looking at the chicken catalogues trying to find what breed I want to buy.  Honestly, I would love a mix.  That is one thing I like about the araucanas, they all look different.  The problem is they are cheaper to buy in quantity and the smallest quantity is usually around 25.  My husband doesn't want to get arucanas again and thinks he wants a good laying breed.  I like the colored eggs, but if we aren't getting araucanas, then I want to get brown layers.  I know...they don't taste any different from white eggs, but I do like the aesthetics of brown and colored eggs and I just enjoy cooking with them more.  I associate white eggs with those thin, watery, tasteless eggs that are on sale for 89 cents every week at the grocery. It's weird, but when I see all those white perfectly shaped eggs that come in the carton from the grocery, I forget that they came from something living.  It is almost like they come from an egg factory somewhere.  I guess they would kind of have to in order to get that many perfectly uniform eggs.  I'm really not one of those animal right's hippies, but the whole chicken farming thing is a little creepy--and I don't think the results are culinarily worth it.  I don't know why more people don't have a few chickens in their yard and get their eggs that way.  As long as the zoning doesn't prohibit it, it is pretty easy.  But I digress....

So my husband is looking at buying red star sex linked chicks.  I would prefer Rhode Island Reds.  My husband also is entertaining the idea of getting some meat birds, like Jumbo Cornish X Rocks.  Those chickens creep me out a little because they have been genetically bread to have the huge breasts (okay...any guys reading my blog can quit giggling now...) and they look like mutants.  You have to butcher them at 10 weeks or else they get so big their legs can't support them anymore!

By the way, I realized that I can upload pictures to my blog.  For those of you who read it on a regular basis...you are the coolest people in the whole world...but you might want to check back on previous blogs in the future to see if I uploaded pictures for them.  It may take me a week or so with our super slow satellite internet!!!!!

Sickness...

We're all sick.  There has been this cold going around my husband's family for almost a month and everyone has it and no one can seem to shake it.  It kind of comes in waves, first was the wave of chest coughing, then the wave of runny noses, then the waves of sinus pressure and ear pain.  Right now, and for the past couple of days, I've just been tired.  

I was telling myself, wow, you are really tired, don't worry about the homesteading blog, but then one of my writer friends, Rudi, reminded me last night of all the great home remedies that one can try.  I thought to myself...well, golly, what kind of homesteader are you not trying out all those home remedies yourself!!!

My favorite home remedy is peppermint tea with honey.  It cures an upset stomach and also soothes sore throats.  Something about hot liquids causes you to cough up all kinds of mucous.  I grew tons of peppermint in the garden last year and dried it in the basement.  I have it crumbled in a tin canister in the cupboard, but I don't want to use it because I want to save it for something...I just can't seem to figure out what.  That is one of the hard things about making your own stuff...you want to save it for something special, which never comes.

A really good home remedy to encourage you to cough up mucous...but that I will never do again...is to gargle with apple cider vinegar.  I have always had a problem with congestion and when I was studying voice in college, my voice teacher, who was probably getting close to seventy, swore by it.  One shot glass (every college student has a shot glass, right?) of apple cider vinegar, gargled as long as you can stand, which if I ever made it past 10 seconds, I was doing good, and you will cough up mucous for 30 minutes or more.

My husband wants me to plan out what herbs I want to plant this year in the garden.  I think I'm going to try to have my own herb garden plat, separate from the regular garden.  I wish I would have done that last year before I planted all that peppermint.  I also planted a St. John's Wort plant last year and a chamomile plant.  I never got enough blooms on either to do anything with them.  I've had tea with both St. John's Wort and chamomile in them and those two seem to work, too.  I never had success with St. John's Wort in pill form, but my husband and FIL have (they may not have admitted it worked, but everyone around them did!).  

I may go through some of my herb books I've collected and see if there are any herbal remedies to try and I'll report back here about the results.  I have one by Deepak Chopra that is kind of off the wall.  I still need to list my recommended homesteader books, don't I?  Maybe I'll do that today during kiddo nap time.

I'm also going to try a no-kneed bread recipe I found on Mother Earth News.  I love fresh bread and if I could stop buying it from Krogers, I would.  I'll let you know how that goes also.