The Call Again Farm Journal

It's been snowing a for the past two or three weeks.  A few inches will accumulate, then it will melt a couple of days later, then snow the next day, and the cycle repeats again and again and again.  Currently, their is a thin layer of ice covering everything, with an inch of snow on top and a little more drifting down as I write.

 It's the perfect conditions for slipping, as I have a tendency to do every time I go outside.  I just was out at the chicken coop.  The chicken coop is only three or four feet tall, and I access by climbing in.  It is surrounded by stacked-up hay bales, which I have to climb over every time I want get into the chicken coop.  Well, today I decided to weigh one of my laying hens, because they're smaller than they should be and I was hoping that they'd started to put on some weight.  I caught a chicken, and was holding her by the feet.  The hale bales, like everything else, are covered in ice and snow.  I was climbing out and put my foot down on a hay bale, slipped, fell over the side of the chicken coop and hale bales, and landed on my back side, still holding the (unharmed) chicken high in the air!  I was a little sore at first, but feel fine now.

It may be too cold for the chickens to go outside (as I've written about previously), too slippery for me, but the turkeys are happy.  Every morning, they run outside as soon as I open the doors.  They don't roam around as much of the yard as they used to in warmer weather, instead staying close the barn (and the feeders).  They spilled a lot of their food yesterday, but as soon as they went outside today they immediately started pecking at it.  What good birds I have!