Cold and Frost

Lately it's been cold. Cold enough that my car window has frost on the inside, as does my house and many other places that have breathing beings inside creating moisture on very cold windows. Frost seems to form in many patterns. Here is the feathery type as seen below on my bedroom window in the morning.
There is also a swirly type as seen on this chicken coop door. It's not my chicken coop door, but I wish it were, because I think it is a beautiful door with character. As always click on the photos if you want to enlarge them.

Nicholas

Nicholas, one day old

I'm now a grandmother. My daughter and son-in-law are now parents and my mother is now a great-grandmother. Meet Nicholas, born December 19th, 8 pounds 14 ounces, a health baby boy

Nicholas, home with Mom by the Christmas tree

hatching chicks

About three weeks ago I got a new incubator. I'm planning on doing some hatching in the spring. The incubator, a hova-bator 1588, holds 42 eggs, but I thought I'd give it a little test run with 8 eggs. Because I have no rooster there would be no point in using eggs from my hens, so I headed over to Codman farm where I volunteer, and collected the 8 eggs you see below. They are all shapes, sizes and colors and I think they are a photogenic bunch of eggs. I discovered that one was cracked a bit at the pointy end. All of them went into the incubator anyway.
Three weeks later 6 of them hatched, including the cracked one. Below you can see a chick emerging from an egg. This is actually the egg that was cracked. I really didn't think it would make it, because early on it appeared that the egg leaked a very tiny bit. I can only assume that the leak got plugged very soon and things progressed. I had heard of repairing cracked eggs with wax or clear nail polish, but I decided to just let it be and see what happened.
Below you can see the 6 chicks that hatched. The yellow one in the back corner is the one from the cracked egg. The other egg that I wondered about was the very small egg. It did hatch a small chick. I think it may be a bantam and is kind of cute with feathered legs.
Below is a close-up of the cracked egg after I took it out to candle. It was then that I discovered that it was developing so back in it went. After the hatch was over,I checked the two eggs that didn't hatch. One was not fertile and one had stopped developing after about 8 days. I'm quite happy with the new incubator and look forward to hatching more in the spring.

First Snow

It's a damp raw slushy day out, just right to stay home and bake for Thanksgiving

Today is the first snow of the season. It's the slushy kind. not the nice fluffy stuff and won't add up to much. It's predicted to be in the 50s for the next couple of days so I guess it won't even last the week. Here it is not really unusual for it to snow on November 20th. What is unusual this year, is that the leaves just don't seem to want to fall off the trees. You can see a Norway maple, and on the far left some mulberry leaves still hanging on. There are also crab apple and beech leaves still on trees in my yard. The tree in the background, an ash, always drops its leaves early and is the only one bare now. It looks like I'll be raking leaves in December when it will probably a colder than I would prefer for this task.

A Blue Egg

The type of chickens that lay blue eggs are called Easter Eggers. They are Araucana mixes and can lay blue, green, brown or white or a blend of those colors depending on the genetics. The gene for blue eggs is actually dominant. It is a seperate gene from the ones that control white or brown egg color. So the egg can have both blue and brown color. That can make them look greenish or kakhi.

I was wondering if this hen was ever going to start laying. She finally did start at 7 months and I'm really happy with the color of her eggs. The photo shows it next to a brown egg my Plymouth Barred rock layed for comparison.

Dust Bathing Chickens and Dog?

Chickens like to take dust baths such as here , but last week one of my dogs Kahlil decided to join some of the broiler chickens in a dust bath. Luckily I had my camera, because it was an odd thing to see a dog rolling around with chickens.

dahlias with bees

This year someone gave me some of their extra dahlia tubers. I ended up with showy dinner plate sized yellow ones, spiky burgundy ones and my favorite one, a salmon with petals that curl. I'm now hooked on dahlias and will save and replant the tubers next year. I took these photos a couple of weeks ago before the frost turned the plants black.

I am happy to see that the honey bees like dahlias too. After taking this photo and seeing it on the computer, I noticed that the bee on the left has ragged wings. I'm guessing it's an older bee. It seemed a little sad. I doubt it will survive the winter. To see the wings more clearly, click on the photo.

click on photo to enlarge