Portage River Farm

I'm finally home and the rain that was predicted for the weekend managed to finish up on Saturday night. Sunday morning, the sun rose in a windy sky while I stood in our dining room hoping that it would dry the grass and ground out quickly. I had been anticipating this day for the entire week in Mexico and had built up way too many expectations for myself of all of the things I would accomplish.

Speaking of grass, I'll digress for a moment to mention that it has begun to grow with vigor. I believe it is foretelling problems to come as its rate of growth will outstrip my ability to find time to push our little lawn mower all over this huge yard. We haven't managed to find the time nor the cash to purchase a riding mower and I fear that it may turn into a green version of my snow-shoveling torments of last winter before we do.

Today turned out to be beautiful, if a bit windy. As the sun did its work on the damp ground, we celebrated our daughter Freya's victory at yesterday's Michigan History Day competition by having a big breakfast with pancakes and bacon. We even cracked open our first bottle of homemade maple syrup! Freya's winning of the state competition means that she will now go on to compete in the National competition to be held in Washington, D.C. in June and her project will be put on display in the Smithsonian. We are very proud of her!

I decided that my first priority would be the prepping of the garden soil for planting. As you may have seen from the picture on the website, the garden area is overgrown with weeds and small trees. As well, the previous owner of our farm had dumped piles of bricks, dirt and trash in one area that would have to be cleaned and leveled before plowing could begin.

The first job that I wanted to perform was the removal of the trees. I reasoned that it would be better to pull them out of the ground instead of simply cutting them off with a chainsaw and leaving the stumps and roots in place. The tree removal seemed a good first task for the tractor so I searched on the Internet for the best way to do it. Right away I found all sorts of accounts of people killing themselves doing the very task I had in mind!

It seems that it is very dangerous to attach something very heavy or stationary to the back of a tractor. If the load is sufficiently large and the traction under the back tires is good enough, the tractor can rear up and flip over backwards in less than a second. The articles claimed that this can occur far too quickly for the operator to drop the power, disengage the clutch or jump clear of the tons of iron rearing back to crush them. The websites drove home the point with scary photos of inverted tractors atop dead farmers.

After reading all of the safety precautions, I learned that it was safest to hitch the load to the swinging drawbar. It is positioned well below the axle to minimize the risk of rollover. With an appropriate level of caution and a sturdy chain, I was able to complete the job in a couple of hours. Two of the trees proved to be too large. They have a date with my chainsaw as soon as I get it back from the repair shop. I suppose we'll have to work around the stumps for several years until they soften enough for me to dare dragging the plow over them.

Once the trees were out of the way, I attacked the dirt piles with the front-end loader. I had imagined that I would simply scoop them up and dump the dirt somewhere else. That proved to be difficult for this novice driver so I simply tipped the bucket vertical and dragged the piles down flat. After we removed the last of the trash and hauled a bucket-load of bricks away, it began to look much more likely that we would be able to grow our vegetables there.

As the shadows of late afternoon slid across the field, I backed the tractor up to the brush hog. Locking the brakes, I jumped down and wrestled with the three-point hitch and attached the mower shaft to the power takeoff. This was my first attempt to hitch anything to the tractor and I hopped on and off of the tractor again and again before I had it lined up just right.

Once I was convinced that I had hooked it all up correctly, I raised the mower, put the tractor in gear and started for the field. After driving only a few yards my attention was drawn to my spectators as Janet and Aidan tried to alert me to the fact that the brush-hog had dropped back down and was dragging two deep furrows across the lawn! I raised it back up again and finally made it into the field to begin cutting the brush.

I would love to report that it went smoothly and that I knew just what I was doing. Nothing would be further from the truth. Luckily my audience became bored of watching me struggle to get the mower at the correct height and left me to continue the fight unobserved. The tractor seems to be bogged down as if the mower were dug into the ground and preventing forward progress. A couple of times I found myself digging a hole with one of the back tires and I wondered how the brush hog could change the way that the tractor drove so much that I could no longer produce enough power to move over the slightest bump!

I jumped off of the tractor twice and scratched my head at the puzzle. There was absolutely nothing that should be impeding forward motion, yet there I was digging a big hole on one side as if I were attached to an anchor. Finally, I noticed the cause of the whole struggle. I had failed to disengage the brakes! I had been practically dragging the left rear wheel the entire time! What a dope!

I disengaged the brake as I shook my head and chuckled. As if a great weight had been lifted, the tractor sprang forward and began mowing with ease. Shortly thereafter I learned to stop fiddling with the height of the mower as the tractor's hydraulics miraculously began adjusting the height to match the terrain. In my defence, I should mention that the operator's manual that I ordered has not arrived yet! After those revelations, the job became a snap to complete. I parked the tractor and headed in to tuck Aidan into bed but not before I had coaxed everyone to the window to see that I had finally managed to figure out what I was doing as evidenced by a nicely mown field.

Through my engineering career, I have traveled and worked in a number of countries around the globe. This week, I am staying and working in Queretaro, in central Mexico. In the mean time, all of my farm projects are on hold awaiting my return.

This is my first trip to Mexico and it has been eye-opening and very pleasant. I have found my hosts to be very friendly, capable and hard-working. I have learned a great deal on the trip and have established new working relationships with the staff here that will help me in my work in the future.

Janet is doing her best to keep up with everything at home single-handedly. She is managing the children and watching after our garden seedlings. A few days before leaving, I made arrangements to have my brother-in-law take care of our young chickens after we set them up in temporary quarters at a nearby farm.

I am excited to head home at the end of the week. I miss my family and look forward to getting started again on the garden and chicken coop. Additionally, the tractor and implements that we bought have been delivered and are now parked in our side yard. I am excited to give them a try!

As soon as we had approval from the authorities to build our coop, I was ready to roll up my sleeves and get started. I was itching to start on the building itself, but I knew that I needed to run water and power out to the building site first. I called up a local equipment rental place and reserved a Ditch Witch for Saturday.

As Saturday approached, I was struggling to figure out just where to tap into the house water lines. The original owner and builder of our house must have had a connection to a cement company because the area around the house has an over-abundance of concrete. Every side of the house is surrounded by wide sidewalks and stairs that would make the task of running a pipe into the basement very difficult.

I spent several days polling the opinions of my family experts (my father and father-in-law) and the guys in the plumbing aisles of Lowes and The Home Depot for the best solution to the problem. The resulting consensus was that I should avoid the concrete altogether by tapping into the water line between the wellhead and the house. After confirming that the well water line was plastic and thus easy to splice into and that the water pressure check valve was located at the bottom of the well thus insuring that the line was pressurized at all times, I decided that we were going for the well connection plan.

If I was going to go through all of this trouble, I wanted the water to be available at the coop year-round. I called up the local building code department and found out that the average depth of frost required water lines to be buried at least 42" deep. Since the trencher had a 48" cutting blade this didn't seem to be a problem. Since the coop was not going to be heated I planned to bring the water up into the building using a yard hydrant that would shut off the supply four feet below ground level to prevent bursting pipes in the winter.

I borrowed a truck with a trailer hitch and brought the trencher to the farm. The boys and I excitedly fired it up and I positioned it at the coop site to begin the first trench. Within minutes, the first signs of trouble showed up as the water-soaked soil came up out of the trench with the consistency of pudding and the machine dug itself to the axles in mud. With some creative maneuvering, the application of some bricks and boards for traction and a liberal sprinkling of curses, I managed to complete the trench at the coop site.

The trenching in the yard went much more smoothly as the soil as much drier. I was becoming increasingly aware that my rental turn-in time of 5pm was creeping up on me so I increased the pace of operation to insure we could return the machine and avoid paying for an extra day. Everything was going smoothly except for the fact that we kept running into bread-loaf sized rocks that had to be extracted from the trench-bottom by hand before we could resume.

As I was nearing completion of the job, Fred, a family friend, stopped by on his bike to check on our progress. Fred is a tree-trimmer, chimney sweep and beekeeper who is knowledgeable about a great many things. Upon surveying our trench at the coop site he pointed to a fatal flaw in my great scheme. The groundwater had filled the trench to a depth just 18 inches from the surface which meant that my yard hydrant would never drain and would burst in the first hard winter freeze.

Fred's observation raised a very serious concern for me. Since I was tapping into the line at the wellhead, there was no way to turn the water off in case of a burst pipe at the coop other than cutting off the power to the well and completely losing all water for the house! Fred and I tossed around a few ideas to deal with the high water table including burying a 55 gallon barrel full of gravel to create a drainage area for the hydrant and a sump pump to remove the water.

Having finally completed the trenching, we hosed off the machine, loaded it up and headed back to Howell to return it. We managed to get there just at 5pm but not without incident. Just as we were approaching the last curve going into town, I was paying a little too much attention to my conversation with Aidan and Sean and not enough on my driving. I took that last curve a little fast and the three of us experienced a white-knuckle slow-motion moment of terror as the trencher and trailer bounced, tipped and careened back and forth in the rear-view mirror.

I was fully convinced that the machine was either going to fall off or the trailer was going to come unhitched from the truck and swerve into oncoming traffic. In the end my application of the brakes was enough to settle it back into line and I breathed a huge, shaky sigh of relief. I was so happy to unhook that thing from the truck and hear the guy at the rental place say that everything looked fine with the machine.

After several more days of agonizing over a solution to my ground water problem, a practical solution came to light. My brother-in-law Tom, Sean and I were placing the water line in the trench and we discovered that my haste to complete the trenching job had caused the trench to be shallow from backfill to a depth of three feet instead of four. The prospect of having to dig that bottom foot back out by hand would have added a couple of days of difficult digging to the task and we were suffering repeated cave-ins due to the wet soil.

Tom made the wise suggestion that it would greatly simplify things to back away from the goal of using the water line in winter, bury it more shallowly and plan to blow it out each fall. Sean made the wise suggestion that I move the hydrant to the well end of the pipe to provide a safety cutoff below ground to prevent a potential disaster of losing all of our access to the well. That plan also required much less expensive hardware. All of that finally settled, we are now ready to begin building the coop!

A portion of the last two days has been spent filling out paperwork and setting things up so that our farm can officially be declared a business. As of today, Portage River Farm is registered with the State of Michigan and the IRS as a member directed Limited Liability Corporation. Janet and I are now owners and officers of that corporation and she generously allowed me to be the President! Gee, I feel so important!

My first official act from my high seat of power was to open up a business checking account for the farm and get a credit card for purchasing our materials and supplies. This will greatly simplify our bookkeeping since up to now it has all been mixed in with our personal finances and I've had to separate it out onto a ledger each month.

On behalf of the farm, I also applied for a business loan for the tractor and implements we are interested in buying. We should have the answer tomorrow. I'm not very confident that we will get approved because the business itself hasn't established any credit with the bank but the banker seemed to think it would be ok. It was a little odd to answer questions on the application such as filling in the farm's projected net profit for the year of $0.00! I'm sure that will get the underwriters excited...not!

You might recall that during a recent beekeeping conference I decided to sign up for a beekeeping class to bring myself up to date with the latest techniques. That class is being taught by Ed, an elderly gentleman who has about 50 hives in his suburban backyard. We had our first get together in late March and it was an interesting experience.

I arrived to find his driveway choked with cars and the class gathered in a cluttered little classroom that he has built onto his detached garage. There were about eight students including myself. As with the beekeeping conference, I was again surprised to see that roughly half of the class were women. Somehow I had always thought of this as a nerdy male hobby and I'm glad to see that isn't the case anymore.

My snow shoveling misery of last winter made the purchase of a tractor one of our major goals for this summer. Now that the weather is warming and things need to be planted in our garden, that need is rising even higher on the list of priorities. Not knowing much of anything about tractors, I set myself to the task of studying up on them and doing an exhaustive search for the perfect machine for our uses and budget.

The first step in the process was to think about the particular uses that we had for a tractor. The three things that came to mind instantly were plowing, mowing and snow removal. Secondary things that would be useful if we could afford them are shoveling loose material such as dirt, gravel and manure, post hole digging and road grading. We also have a fairly tight budget target for the whole project which helps to keep things in perspective.

Tractors come in a wide range of sizes in terms of horsepower (hp). There are two different important horsepower ratings depending upon what uses you have in mind. The first power rating is "drawbar horsepower". That is an expression of the tractors ability to pull something behind it. Our greatest demand for drawbar power is for plowing the fields which with my preferred three-bottom (three cutting blades) plow in our loamy sand soil will require at least 45 hp at the drawbar.

The second power rating is "power take-off" or PTO horsepower. The tractors have a spinning shaft at the back end that can be used to power implements called the "PTO". Our greatest demand for PTO torque would be for a brush hog mower. A six foot wide brush hog will require at least 50 hp to operate well without overtaxing the engine.

The final requirement that eventually moved from the "would like to have" to the "must have" column was a front-end load bucket. This implement will allow us to scoop and move dirt and gravel around as needed. The hydraulic lift on the arms that hold the bucket can even be used to pull brush and small stumps out of the ground.

Given all of those requirements, I began an Internet search throughout Michigan and Northern Ohio for the perfect tractor. Right away it was obvious that an older model tractor would fit the bill and still be reasonably priced. There are many large tractors from the 60's, 70's and 80's that still have many years of useful life in them and are far more affordable than newer models. However, not so many of them come equipped with front-end loaders which helped greatly to narrow the field of possibilities.

In the end I located a couple of strong possibilities at a used tractor dealer in Fenton, Michigan. I have visited them twice this week and am starting to get very seriously interested in the 1976 Massey Ferguson 255 that is shown in the pictures. After talking to the dealer about adding in a wide assortment of implements, I am now armed with a final price tag and just have to figure out how to pay for it!

I keep telling myself that this is a year for building and that it won't always be this crazy. I suppose it doesn't help that my enthusiasm is driving me to do absolutely everything that I can this year rather than taking things on at a more gradual and reasonable pace. For that reason I am finding myself perpetually behind. It's a good thing that I'm having such a great time!

The vegetable garden project is an excellent example. My ambitious plans led me to order a very large selection of vegetable seeds (see what I picked here). Each day the mailbox has been stuffed with little packages from seed companies who are more than happy to take my order and indulge my lunacy. The seed packets are now stacked up around me and impatiently waiting for me to get them started.

If there is a meticulous way to go about something, that is what I favor. The problem of figuring out of when to do what for the garden led me to the idea of making a calendar (see it here). I bought a gardening book for Michigan and combined that with information from the Internet to pull the plan together and get it organized.

Of course, as soon as the task was done I could see that I was massively behind in getting my seeds started indoors. For some things such as onions it was obvious that the boat had sailed so long ago that I will have to give up on those for this year. I decided to tackle all of the seed starting for March in the last few days of the month and hope for the best.

The pictures show the contraption that I built to encourage the seeds to do their thing. I bought four fluorescent two-tube light fixtures and rigged them from the basement ceiling so that I can adjust the height as the plants grow. I also bought seed starting trays and organic seed starting soil mix and rolled up my sleeves.

The lights must be working because it has only been three days and all of the trays now have little seedlings in them. Now that they are on the way I need to do something about the varieties that are listed in the calendar that are supposed to be in the ground outside already such as peas, shallots and turnips. Since I have nothing to prepare the soil for planting other than a hoe and a shovel, I am now turning my attention to getting some better tools!

When we were in the process of buying our farm I had the opportunity to meet the former owners and get a little tour. I recall that they mentioned that the frogs in the pond next to the house could be very loud. They told me that we would have to keep the windows closed if we wanted to get any sleep. I remember thinking to myself, "Yeah right, you obviously aren't nature lovers like we are!"

Now that we are living here I may have to recant. The weather hasn't gotten quite warm enough yet to tempt us to leave the windows open at night, but I have to admit that the peepers are extremely loud! It is so noisy out there that you can tell when anybody opens a door from anywhere in the house.

I made a little video here to demonstrate. Take note of the sound level in the house before I open the door.

As you can see, our chicks have not wasted any time. At less than two weeks of age, they are already feathering out, growing their combs and putting away an impressive amount of feed.

The most impressive thing to watch has been the development of their wings. Less than a week ago their wings were little fuzzy flaps no bigger than a postage stamp each.

With each day we have seen long feathers appearing out of nowhere and now they all sport impressive wings that probably span eight or ten inches. They excitedly try the wings out and are able to fly a foot or so with ease even in the confines of the brood box.

Speaking of confining brood boxes. I realized a few days ago that the crowding was getting to an unhealthy level. The birds have gotten large enough that all twenty-six of them are not able to get their heads in the feed tray at the same time. At feeding time the usual quiet pecking degenerated into a chaotic mosh pit as the three or four chicks that were crowded away from the food used their little wings to launch themselves on top of their broodmates.


I remedied that situation two nights ago by staying up and constructing a second brood box. I divided the flock into two groups of thirteen by the unscientific method of selecting the ones that were easiest to catch.

I would have liked to have separated them in a way to get an even distribution of pullets and cockerels but I haven't had the time to try to figure out how to tell them apart yet. I'm sure it involves a careful inspection under the tail but there have been too many other matters of higher priority.

The second photo shows conditions after they had been separated and given much more room to grow.

I received a mysterious call at work today. My cell phone indicated that the call was from Janet's cell phone but the only sound I could hear when I took the call was wind whistling across the phone's microphone. The sound went on for a moment or two while I attempted to get her to answer and then the line went dead.

I tried to call her back right away but she was apparently making another call. Thinking about the likely course of events, I decided that she was outside of our house trying to call me to tell me that her car was in the pond. My mind jumped to this odd conclusion because that same morning I had walked out and noticed that her car was missing from its normal parking spot. Looking around, I found that it was sitting out in the field having rolled there during the night after being left without the parking brake engaged.

Shortly thereafter, she called again and uttered a phrase that erased any remaining thoughts about errant cars. She said, "I just got off of the phone with the County Sheriff". I listened intently to the rest of her tale with a pit in my stomach.

Shortly before, Janet had glanced out of the front window of our house and noticed a strange light blue pickup truck parked about a third of the way up our driveway. She saw that two men were sitting in the truck looking at our house. In case you don't think this sounds odd, we live way out in the country and people just don't drive up private driveways without having some business there. As well, anyone who was legitimately visiting our home would have driven up to the house instead of lurking on the rise overlooking the front yard.

Assuming that they were up to no good, she balled up her courage and headed right out to confront them. As she crossed the porch and headed up the driveway, she dialed my cell phone number in case she needed me for backup. That is when I came into the story as a tiny voice saying "Hello, Janet?" into the breeze as she walked rapidly toward the truck.

The men in the truck saw her coming and clearly didn't want to talk. They quickly backed out of the driveway and sped away. She hung up the phone and called the Sheriff to report the odd behavior. Soon thereafter, she had to leave the house to go to work.

I talked to the 911 dispatcher later in the afternoon and asked if they would send a car by the house to make sure that nobody had returned in our absence. They agreed and suggested that if there was ever another similar occurrence, we should remain in the house and call them so they could try to pull into the drive behind the intruders before they could get away.

We have many problems with break-ins in our area because so many houses are left isolated and unprotected. Our home even shows signs of such an event in the past with a metal back door that still carries the scars left by vandals who pried it open long before we had bought it. I had been meaning to get a monitored home security system installed for some time and today's incident seemed the perfect motivation to get it done. We are now scheduled for installation over the next few days and we will be able to set that worry aside.

Late Sunday evening I became aware that the temperature in the house was yet again drifting below the accustomed setting. I checked the furnace and discovered it futilely running with no flame, blowing increasingly cold air throughout the house. I headed to our gas range, all the while fearing a repeat of our recent experience of running completely out of LP gas. Unlike a few weeks ago, the stove responded with a reassuring hiss and "whomp" as the miniature blue explosion indicated that all was well with the fuel tank.

I returned to the furnace, removed the grill and peered into the interior with little confidence that my limited knowledge of its operation would result in the house becoming cozy once again. Every time that I have experienced a furnace failure, I am amazed at the sense of desperation that it brings on. Neither the loss of electricity nor water pressure ever conjures images of equivalent disasters to pipes freezing, children huddling in the car for warmth, house plants and chicks dying as I stand impotently shivering in the ruins.

By powering the furnace down and back on again, I was able to observe what was happening. The pilot jet was properly igniting but the sparker continued to tick away as if it had failed to light. Thinking that the flame sensor (no longer a thermocouple, I later found) was dirty, I began tapping and scratching at the sensor rod.

By trial and error I realized that my fiddling was causing the sensor to momentarily recognize that the pilot was indeed lit, as indicated by the clicking of a relay. Before long, I had learned how to continue the charade long enough to convince the furnace electronics that it was safe to open the main burner valve and spin up the blower. Once lit, the furnace dutifully brought the house back up to a comfortable temperature before winking out yet again.

I kept this up throughout the night, waking every two hours to tickle the furnace into operating once more. In the morning, I contacted our furnace repair guy who happens to live about a mile away from us. Right away he diagnosed the problem as stemming from a clogged pilot orifice that was preventing the flame from being large and hot enough to be detected by the sensor.

For good measure, he replaced both the pilot assembly and the sensor. Unlike before, each time the furnace kicks on it now lights the pilot quickly and without fail. I can safely return to taking the warmth in the house for granted at least until the next time the thing breaks down and threatens to end our civilized existence.

By far, the largest bird to return to the farm this spring has been the Sandhill Cranes. They are common in this area for some reason. I remember the first time I came upon one after moving to Michigan and being awestruck by their sheer size and prehistoric sounding calls. They are four foot tall and have a seven foot wingspan.

They are a common sight at this time of year in our front yard and fields around the house. They stalk along on their stilt legs looking like Jim Henson creations. Much to the irritation of the nesting geese, they also wade around in the pond looking for fish.

I made this video in an attempt to show how large they are and how amazing they sound. They don't seem to have much fear of us and generally go about their business as long as we keep a respectful distance. I deliberately annoyed them by walking slowly in their direction so they would move and fly away. Please excuse the shaky camera work!

You had to know that sooner or later we would get down to the more earthy aspects of farming. Well, today's topic will certainly take us there. The topic is a little problem that I am having with our newly hatched chicks called "pasting".

This problem is apparently common during the first few weeks of life for chickens. The problem is that their poop sticks in their feathers around their "vents" and begins to build up. Unless addressed it eventually builds up into a little mass that dries like concrete and seals off their vents so they can no longer use the bathroom at all. Left in that constipated state, they stop eating and drinking and will soon die.

To address the problem, I am having to wipe their little butts with a wet paper towel. They enjoy it even less than I do and squawk loudly until I finish and put them down. Because the material is so hard it often takes way more time than either of us would like but unless I do it, we will lose some of the chicks.

This problem is supposed to go away once they begin feathering out in the next few weeks. I certainly hope so! This is like having to change a bunch of tiny little baby diapers each day.

I'll spare you the pictures this time!

I have deliberately not mentioned matters of personal finance on this blog. I feel that it is mostly outside of the scope of what I want this website and blog to be about. At the same time, our finances obviously have a big impact on our ability to pursue our farming aspirations.

As you may have gathered from the website (http://www.portageriverfarm.com/), our income is primarily dependant on my job as an engineer in the automotive industry. Unless you have been living in a cave you are probably aware that the auto companies have been in a horrible state. Thus far, I have survived many layoffs and my company is now a fraction of the size that it was a year ago. On top of the anxiety of constantly worrying about job security, I have also lost many friends among my coworkers who have been let go.

As I'm sure you already know, the earliest phase of the current economic downturn was a collapse in housing values. That drop in prices back in July of 2008 put this property and the accompanying farming dreams within our reach. We decided to take the calculated risk of going ahead with the purchase when we still had not sold our old house. Little did we know that the economic tailspin had barely begun!

We have had little luck in attracting interest in purchasing our old home. The tightening of credit by the banks combined with the overall uncertainty that everyone has been feeling has left us in these frightening times trying our best to cover mortgages for both properties. We have been managing pretty well but there was always the specter that a job loss on my part would pull the rug out from under the entire thing.

I also had some trepidation about selling the old house when the market was so low. It is true that we would be in a far better cash flow state to have our burden down to one mortgage. At the same time, we would have had to give away all of the equity in the house to bargain hunters in this buyer's market. We decided that we would prefer to rent the house until conditions improve.

My wonderfully good news is that Friday evening we finally signed a couple and their grown son to rent our old house. They began moving in yesterday morning following a marathon cleaning session on my part that lasted until 3:30am. It is such a relief to have that finally taken care of and to have somebody staying in that house so I don't have to constantly worry about it being broken into. Let's just hope that the people will turn out to be good tenants too!

On Wednesday morning I received a call from the post office. Even before the woman on the other end of the line had spoken, the sounds of tiny birds cheeping in the background gave away the purpose of the call. She enquired as to the best time for them to deliver our box of day-old chicks and we coordinated our schedules.

The appointed hour arrived to find me pacing the living room and watching the driveway. When the delivery was finally made, I thanked the driver and rushed downstairs in order to open the package in the laundry room where we have set up the brood box and heat lamp. As I cut the bands and bent back the lid I was at once sorry that the children weren't home to see them and also kind of glad that they weren't since I wasn't sure if the chicks had all come through their shipping ordeal alive.

Upon removing the lid I found twenty seven perfectly healthy and perfectly terrorized little chicks all crammed together in a small bunch in one corner of the box. As you can see from the picture, they are adorable as can be! I picked them up one by one and placed them into the brood box.

For the first couple of hours they just stood around cheeping very loudly. I could hear them all of the way to the front door as I rushed around the house taking care of some chores. With each pass through the living room our dog Finn would come up to me with a comically puzzled look on his face. He would look at me and then glance around the room while cocking his ears and working his expressive eyebrows. When he returned his gaze to me, the canine message was perfectly clear: "Don't you hear that? What the heck is going on! Why are you acting so excited? Wag, wag, wag!"

After a little while the chicks began to quiet down and began exploring their new home. One by one, I placed them at the feed and watering troughs. Immediately they began eating and drinking with gusto. After a few more hours of voracious feeding they settled down for a group nap in the warmth of the heat lamp.

Of all of the events of that day, the one that stands out for me as the best was getting to watch the children's faces as they saw the chicks for the first time. In turn they lit up with beaming grins and their eyes showed the emotions of coming upon the most adorable sight that they had ever seen. It was as if they had entered a room to discover that all of their beloved stuffed animals had come to life!