It's October and Achilles Must Die

I’ve been so busy with work and travel and spending a good bit of time on the West Coast, but I am very happy that my calendar will ease up a bit over the next two weeks. While my family and I really don’t mind the travel of my work as I have a really great work/life balance, October is my absolute favorite time of the year. The sun is warm, the air is crisp and as the month progresses the colors of the trees will amaze. I can’t think of any place I would rather be this time of year then at the farm with my family!

Needless to say, we look for every excuse to be out on the grounds and we don’t have to look very hard. There is a lot of work to be done at the farm preparing for the Winter months. 

This year we have a few little projects going on in addition to just preparing the grounds for Winter. We have a chestnut tree and two black walnut trees – one that is just…majestic. I’ve written about it before. One of the sounds that characterizes this time of year for us is the tiny thud of dropping chestnuts and walnuts hitting the ground. This year we are going to make a point of harvesting our chestnuts and our black walnuts. The chestnuts are relatively easy to harvest – as Finn demonstrates here (did he find this chestnut or did it find him? ;)…

Harvesting black walnuts is a bit trickier because of the hull. We’ve be reading up on it a bit and I plan to harvest them and turn them into some fantastic Christmas goodies. So stay tuned for more on that project.

This weekend we also added some nesting boxes to our chicken house. Our flock has been growing and we have some new little layers (you can tell because when young hens first start laying their eggs are teeny tiny). We read that you want the nesting boxes to be up off the ground and that you can encourage your hens to lay by placing wooden eggs or even golf balls in the nests. As you can see, it’s working (chickens are easily fooled ;).

In other “Flock News”, our young rooster, “Achilles”, isn’t working out. He’s too aggressive with the hens. He’s going after them and pecking their backs raw (something Joe Never did). Our older rooster, Joe, does try to protect the hens, but he just doesn’t seem aggressive enough to take Achilles on. Since we consider Joe’s lack of aggression to be one of his more charming characteristics, we’ve concluded that Achilles must go. We will try to find a home for Achilles, but I doubt we will be able to (everyone seems to be trying to give a rooster away these days). 

So stay tuned for that Lachenman Gothic adventure since all we really know about killing a rooster we learned on Google. Not sure how this will all turn out, but as my husband (who is a PhD in Ancient Philosophy) proclaimed…”Achilles must die.”