I am sitting here on the sofa taking a few moments break and watching my newest tv hero- Paula Deen @ Paula’s Home Cooking. (She comes on the food network at 1pm and 4pm weekdays) I am very new to the food network and I just love her cooking, her attitude and her passion for Elvis. Who doesn’t love Elvis?! She is making chocolate chip cookies, chocolate fudge pie and chocolate suflee. Gayle, doesn’t that just make you want to swoon!!?? 
Anyway, time for the homestead. We have had a hard loss this week on our little farmlette. Our male mallard duck (Studly Duck) is gone. He was there on Tuesday. We locked the chickens and ducks up that night. When Short Man (8) let them out Wed. morning Studly Duck was not there. I don’t know if he just didn’t make it into the chicken house the previous night or what. He was my only male duck. We still have Daisy and Webigail but no more Studly Duck. I have 3 eggs in the incubator right now. They are about 2 weeks away from hatching. I had 4 but one went kaput on me and I chunked it last night. Chances are pretty good that there is a male in there. We shall see.
We have had 18 chickens now survive to teenagerhood. I have identified several as roosters but we appear to have a good number of hens. They will start laying in about 2 months. This spring I will gather and incubate about 45-50 eggs. Once those have hatched I am going to collect the duck eggs as well and incubate however many I can get.
Chickens are not bright. Mr. Muscles (dh) made a great nesting box for me. It came out better than I imagined. Here it is. 
See the bottom right box? Somehow 8 chickens keep piling in there. I went down the other night to close them up and decided to check on them. I noticed they were all on the nesting box and not on the roosts. I started pulling chickens out of that one box. At first I thought there was just 2 or 3 in there but the more I pulled out the more surprised I was. In all there were 8!! There are 4 roosts and 7 other boxes in that chicken house. Sheesh!
I am off for now. It has been a hugely productive day and I want to keep that streak alive. :) The tomato plants are absolutely covered and they need to be picked. I have to save the seeds out of the 2 upper garden ones. One of them is an heirloom from Germany. I am really excited about saving that one. Until later.
