Fresh air, a dead chicken and a little ranting.

The geese are so BIG already! But these are so easy to handle, it's a wonder why people don't just adore them. They only go after folks if backed into the corner or provoked. These were 'hand raised' and are just wonderful to work with.
Here, they're trying to eat Mike's shoelaces.


Last night I was in the barn looking after Seventeen, who's got a nice cyst on her jaw. I wanted to pick up the eggs in her stall that the errant chickens laid (they refuse to stay in their own enclosed area behind the barn) and smelled this awful odor. Could it be a rotten egg? We really haven't had many of those, but when we do (like, for instance, when we occasionally have to collect them from the top of the tack room), we throw them far out into the forested area so the smell doesn't carry. Or we bag them and trash them.

But this smell was horrendous and one egg couldn't have produced something this vile.

I looked around and behind the milking stand that's also in Seventeen's stall, I saw a BUNCH of tail feathers of a chicken. Then I did the only natural thing I should do -- I ran into the house and got Mike.

He grabbed the shovel and I retrieved a small white trash bag. We've done this before... finding little dead bodies after the raccoons have had their way with them, or when an attack has been spoiled, but a few seconds too late. It's one thing to kill the chickens for our own edification, but it's really something disgusting when another creature kills one - and leaves the body to rot in the barn.

I fear for the peahen and for her eggs. She is on the other side of the barn in an open stall, laying on four eggs. All day, all night. (at least this time they're not chicken eggs). We've lost one peacock to a raccoon attack and don't want to lose her. She's one of few left that were here when we bought the farm in September, '04.

But I am suspicious. If it WAS a raccoon that attacked the chicken in Seventeen's stall, why didn't it come back and finish the meal? Could it be that this chicken, when I was rounding up the others, also died like the one that had a heart attack in the small coop the first day we started processing? It was possible.

Nonetheless, poor Seventeen was having to live in the stall with a decaying chicken. It should be better today and the "fresh" country air should come back -- at least without the chicken.. the smell of the barn is something else entirely.

On a totally unrelated topic, I stopped at a local Mexican grocery store yesterday on the way home and bought five quarts of strawberries and two bunches of grapes. Both were on sale. Both have wine potential.

It's funny to me how easy the strawberry wine was and how tasty it was. This world has pushed everything to the nth degree where you feel you're doing something wrong if you're not part of some expert group (like a wine club or a wine-growing forum). But really, this isn't how all this started. The lesson of the growing of grapes and smashing them for wine.. or the experiments that made strawberries or plums into wine -- these are things that we all can still do, especially since the Internet can bring us the most basic recipes (and the most snobby complicated ones that require special yeasts and particular types of fruit).

What happened to just plain ol' food and plain ol' living? Making one's own wine was out of necessity and poverty, not out of some desire to best the neighbor or to perfect long traditions of smashing grapes with feet or just simply letting fruit ferment to get a drinkable solution.

Okay. Enough ranting for today. Maybe.