Fabulous Fall

October is a very busy month for us.  It's football season, and this girl loves her some football.  I am especially fond of my Chippewas of CMU, although they have surprised me this year (not always good surprises).  EG is becoming quite the little football fan herself, which I am delighted about.  She declared at the last game we went to that it was the "BEST DAY EVER!"  That's my girl.

We have also been participating in other normal fall activities, cider and donuts, pumpkin patch parties, making applesauce, preparing for Halloween (more on that later) and raking leaves.  So.  Many.  Leaves.

I have learned a few things while raking leaves this year.

1.  It doesn't matter how many lawn and leaf bags you think will be plenty, you will always have more leaves than bags.  You can always use just one (or two) more bag(s).  In the country, you just blow the leaves into the field, or the woods, but in the city, you always run out of bags.



(the leaves left after the first time raking the yard and after bagging 6 bags of leaves, it took 10 more bags)

2.  The trees will mock you while you are raking by dropping leaves on your head or dropping them where you just raked with a loud thud.

3.  The wind will mock you by destroying your neat piles of leaves before you can bag them.  See also: helpful small children.

4.  If you want to show off that you actually got outside and raked leaves during the day while your husband was at work, the only evidence of such raking left when he arrives home will be the leaf bags by the side of the road.  Another example of the trees and wind (but probably not helpful small children) mocking you.

5.  One good frosty morning, followed by a windy day can completely cover your freshly raked ground with enough leaves to fill 12 more bags, but you will only have 11.

(the second pile of leaves after the frosty/windy day)

6.  Chickens are very intrigued by leaf piles (and what's underneath them), but not people raking.  They will sneak up behind you but if you turn toward them, they will run away and hide.

 

7.  Even if I have to rake leaves, fall is still the best time of year.

 

Which came first?

Well in our case, the chicken came first, the chick to be exact.  But one of our chickens has finally laid an egg.  We have only had one so far, but it was so exciting to find an egg!  AND it was in the laying bins where it was supposed to be! (Update: Gennie has been consistently laying an egg every other day).

After researching the 2 types of chickens we have, I have determined that the Silver Sebright (the one that acts like a rooster and I was starting to wonder about) laid the egg.  The Welsummer should lay dark brown eggs with or without brown spots.

It looks so tiny next to our eggs from the farmers market. Hopefully soon they will both be laying eggs and these tiny little guys will add up to something!



Here is what they look like inside. Two eggs is essentially the equivalent of one full sized double yolk egg.

 

Other fun tales in the world of urban chicken raising.  We've started letting our chickens wander the yard on a daily basis, and for a while they stayed in our yard with no trouble.  Our Welsummer only has one wing, so she is flightless, but our Silver Sebright was sticking to the yard pretty well.  One day I did find her on top of the chicken run, looking in the window of the coop, and we wondered if she would try to be a little more adventurous.  And then it happened.

One evening, our neighbor knocked on our front door and told us Gennie was in his back yard.  They noticed her when they let their dogs outside and they stopped in their tracks because they'd never been able to get that close to our chickens before.  EOP went over and caught her and brought her back over.  They had to be locked up until we figured out a solution.

After searching the web and polling our chicken raising friends, we clipped one of her wings.  They only had to stay confined in their chicken run for 2 days before we clipped her, but they were so excited to get back out in the yard!  So far, we haven't had any other problems.