Have Your Seen a Calf Being Birthed?

by | Dec 8, 2022 | Garden/Yard, Mammals, Nature, Travel/Columns

Fair Oaks Farm

A couple of times a year we drive to and from New Jersey to visit relatives. It’s a long thousand-mile slog each way, but we recently discovered an amazing driving break……watching a calf being birthed.

Our fastest route is following Interstate 80, but that involves running a traffic gauntlet in northeast Indiana and paying tolls and boredom along the Ohio and Indiana Turnpikes. On a recent trip, we took a more southern route, mostly following secondary roads to avoid tolls and traffic. Never would we have imagined that, on a driving break, we’d watch a birth!

Cow Adventure

Yup. A birth. We’d been following smallish roads across the Hoosier State and had vaguely heard of Fair Oaks Farm. As our car cleared a rise by an enormous farm field we spotted their colorful water tower and stopped in. It’s really not a farm…but then again it is. Mostly it’s a fascinating living museum of American agriculture, focused on dairy, pork, and crops combined with a hotel, restaurant, and gas station.

calf and mother cow

Wobbly legs

After checking in we entered the birthing barn to take in an amazing sight. Two Holstein dairy cows were giving birth, with a human attendant attentively watching to help as needed. As we sat with other families in the darkened seating area, two hooves emerged from each cow. One gave birth quickly. The other struggled until the attending woman helped by gently pulling the calf from her. We, and many others watching, were riveted by the real-time arrival of new living animals. This event brought to mind Marion’s experience growing up on a Maine dairy farm watching a calf being birthed.

From there we enjoyed exhibits telling the story of how crops are grown, dairy cows are cared for, and pork is produced. We walked from building to building enjoying interactive exhibits telling the story of food production. The Farm calls the exhibit areas Crop, Dairy, and Pig Adventures – and they truly are adventurous.

Ninja Warriors in Training

Boy on ropes course with guide

Kids on ropes course

At Pig Adventure we encountered a couple with two small children. “We were on a long drive from Indianapolis to Chicago. The kids were restless in the back seat. So, we stopped. Look at them now,” declared their mom. A young boy and girl were testing their balance on a large complex obstacle course sort of like we see on TV’s American Ninja Warrior. They were harnessed in and guided by employees. Thrills and exercise, yes.  Danger, no.

As a seasoned museum professional Rich was impressed at how exhibits were accessible for walking-challenged folks with plenty of places to sit and rest. Yet they gave kids a chance to burn off energy as they moved from exhibit to exhibit. For example, kids could climb small “hills” and slide down the other side to see new displays. One boy operated a hand crank to move large constructed kernels of corn up a vertical elevator to drop into a “silo” and back down for kids to repeat the process. Great learning combined with physical activity. It was, for the family, an educational and exciting way to burn off energy.

Take Time to Experience

We are far from being kids but we gave the crank some turns, also. Then we took a tour break and enjoyed lunch at the site’s eatery, called the Farmhouse Restaurant.  As we dined, we watched cheese being made behind a huge glass wall.

We could have boarded a shuttle bus to see actual dairy and pork operations nearby or walk to the orchard and pumpkin patch but time was pressing. We needed to hit the road. So, we will be back.

Visionary Beginnings

Pork building and old truck

Pig Adventure Starts here!

Fair Oaks Farm was the dream of Mike and Sue McCloskey who began creating it in 1999. It opened a few years later and new exhibits – actually agricultural adventures – are regularly added. Today about 275 staff host thousands of people every year. Jobs for local teens, parents, and grandparents as they warmly welcome visitors.

It’s not all pigs and cows. Many people visit the orchard in the fall to pick apples or the pumpkin patch to stock up on the orange globes for Halloween. Later in the season, there’s ice skating, a forest of lights, and even igloos to enjoy.

The Farm is just off Interstate 94, which links Chicago and Indianapolis. Anyone driving East/West might consider taking smaller roads that parallel Interstate 80 for a less stressful drive that leads past the Farm. For information check out fofarm.com.

 

Be Less Tidy in Your Yard! Welcome Wild Fruits

by | Nov 24, 2022 | (Sub)Urban Homesteading, Birds, Bugs, Flowers/Grasses, Foraging, Garden/Yard, Nature

We think of fall as migration time when all the birds leave. And there is a great birdcast website to see in live time the flights. But an autumn walk through a park with wild edges reveals shrubs, bushes, and grasses alive with bird activity. Visit an orchard on a cold winter day and the odds are good for spotting robins pecking on frozen dropped apples, but wild fruits are more common, all just beyond suburbia.

Let’s step back to spring. When Rich worked at the Indian Creek Nature Center his phone would often ring during those first warm days. With excitement callers would announce that the robins had returned. Spring’s here!

Seeing a robin on a spring lawn gives the illusion that they’ve just made a long journey from a faraway wintering ground down south. Robins, bluebirds, and other birds usually just shift where they live and forage as seasons change.

Ecological Survivors

A robin sits in a tree

A robin surveys the area

Robins, in particular, are ecological survivors. They’re adapted to living on lawns and around people during the warm months, where they nest on porch eaves and forage for worms and bugs in mowed grass. The coming of fall’s cold marks the disappearance of robins from suburbia. They don’t go far and make an amazing dietary switcheroo to wild fruits.

Robins and bluebirds shun their summer buggy and wormy diet and shift to fruits and some seeds come winter.

On an October walk, we spotted several wild fruits – berries perhaps – that birds feast on during the cold months. the native plants are great – even the poison ivy – the exotics are problematic.

Here are some common winter weedy and seedy plants:

  • Gray Dogwood. This small native dogwood often forms thickets along trails, parks, woods, and even yards and holds plenty of berries into cold months.
  • Wild grapes. People rarely eat sour and seedy wild grapes, and sometimes birds also leave them alone during summer, but come winter the raison-like grapes make nutritious avian fare.
  • Poke Weed. In late fall this tall purple-stemmed and fruited plant is hard to miss. Birds eat the frozen berries. Note: Poke berries are toxic to people and many mammals but not birds.
  • Poison ivy. Gulp. This bane of allergic people is a beneficial wildlife plant. Deer and rabbits browse on the woody sprouts and birds feast on the berries.
  • Asian Honeysuckle, Japanese Barberry, and Oriental bittersweet are “dirty bird plants.” Actually, birds love the berries and carry them far and wide to poop out the seeds. All three exotic plants are highly invasive and crowd out more desirable native plants. Birds have helped them conquer woodlands and field edges to the detriment of healthy bio-diversity.

Winter Fare Is More Than Fruits

Winter bird fare isn’t just fruit. Many birds glean frozen spiders and insects from crevices in tree bark and dozens of species continue to eat grass and “weed” seeds. That’s a problem with mowed lawns. They produce no seeds, so few birds visit them during the colder months. Taller growing grasses, flowers, and shrubs often hold their seeds into the winter and are bird magnets.

Want to have birds in the yard all winter?  Keeping feeders stocked helps, but better results come when homeowners encourage buffers of native shrubs, vines, and grasses that produce natural winter bird food and habitat. Most people love their tidy lawn, but edging the lawn, usually along a property line, or creating “pocket prairies” with native or desirable tall grasses, wildflowers, and shrubs adds summer color and year-round wildlife appeal. So, we encourage readers to create and leave wilder spaces for the birds!

Messy Yard – Look From a Different Perspective

by | Nov 17, 2022 | (Sub)Urban Homesteading, Flowers/Grasses, Garden/Yard, Garden/Yard

Colorful yard

Prairie flowers dance on a knoll.

Motorists passing our yard must think we have a messy yard. Instead of the clipped and sprayed yards of neighbors, ours is a dancing field of tall wildflowers and native grasses. Many consider them “weeds”. Our yard is unconventional, healthy, and beautiful. It attracts desirable wildlife and is dynamic. Visitors, especially children, love walking through six-foot-tall grasses on our labyrinth pathway. To us, pollinators and birds, it’s heaven, not a mess. It is a naturally landscaped yard.

Sugar Grove Farm Paves the Way

chicken among crops

The space between crops is productive in a different way.

Last summer Rich toured Rodale Institute’s plantings at Sugar Grove Farm near Cedar Rapids. Researcher Linda Sturm led him and farmers to plots of vegetables and fields of corn and soybeans before stopping by a long row of what looked like weeds with wildflowers mixed in.

“This is an unproductive area, wasted ground, that could have been planted to corn,” a farmer remarked. Linda countered that it is likely the most productive land on the farm. “It’s the home base for pollinators and birds. They forage in nearby crops to collect nectar and eat insect pests,” she said.

Natural Yards Can Reduce Pests

Same thing at Winding Pathways. Our vegetable garden is amazingly productive despite never using insecticides and only mowing sparingly. Butterflies visit squash, cucumbers, okra and other crops, spreading pollen while wrens constantly forage for insects to feed their hungry young.

A clipped and sprayed lawn is only slightly more attractive to wildlife than pavement.   There’s no place for tiny beneficial creatures to live.

Create Pollinator Patches

Homeowners with small yards can help pollinators and birds by creating islands or strips of welcoming habitat, perhaps in the backyard or along the property line. Linda Strum created habitats within farm fields, and suburban homeowners can enjoy the same benefits. Worry about the neighbor’s reaction? Just create a habitat in the backyard out of sight of passersby.

Adding birdhouses adds to wildlife fun. We love watching house wrens hunt insects and bring their catch to their babies nestled in a wooden birdhouse dangling down from our porch ceiling.

Given a bit of imagination and fun work even the smallest yard can appear tidy, be aesthetically diverse, and provide homes for butterflies and wondrous spaces for kids and adults.

 

The Continuing Saga of the Ninja Chicken

by | Nov 3, 2022 | (Sub)Urban Homesteading, Chickens

Well, our Ninja Hen is at it again.  A neighbor, watching the hens for us, entered the barn one morning to find the California White strutting around inside the barn but out of the coop! Looking around, our neighbor also found a small white egg in a depression in the sand in a tucked-away corner of the barn.

After some coaxing, Ninja Chicken hopped back into the coop through the door our neighbor had opened.

Reinforcing Didn’t Work

You may remember an earlier blog where we explained that Rich had blocked off all the areas he could see where she might be able to fly up to and escape into the barn.  All was well for several weeks.

Meanwhile, Houdini Hen (aka Ninja Chicken) was figuring out how to “fly the coop” so to speak.

And she did. One morning, we too, found her again proudly prancing around the barn. She looked at us and seemed to say, “Haha.  You can’t keep me in!” But, she could not quite figure out how to get back into the coop.

How in the world did she escape?

We looked around and found over in a far corner another gap between the chicken wire and the ceiling. The wire was bent down so we speculate that she worked at bending it when she landed on the wire and eventually had enough space to squeeze through and roam the barn at will laying eggs in that cozy little corner. The wire is straightened and the space is now plugged with plywood. Will she figure out another way to escape? We’ll know in the next few days.

Lesson

Our Ninja Chicken

This hen continues to teach us something. Chickens are not dumb clucks. This girl used intelligence to find an exit and demonstrated amazing athletic ability getting to and through a relatively small hole up high near the ceiling. And she is first in line for snacks, too.

American Ninja Chicken!

by | Oct 20, 2022 | (Sub)Urban Homesteading, Chickens, Garden/Yard

One of our 14 chickens is a true American Ninja Chicken. Most of us know the TV program American Ninja Warriors where athletes navigate extreme obstacles to beat the buzzer. Well, this gal, a California White, is right up there with the most athletic of them all.

First Ninja Warrior Hen Egg

Our American Ninja Warrior Chicken begin to lay eggs at about 20 weeks.

Like most hens, when she reached about 20 weeks old, she laid her first egg in our coop. Then another a couple of days later. Then, none. And, none the next day. That’s unusual. When a hen starts laying, she’ll usually continue.

One evening, Rich counted the hens. There were 13. Hmmmm.  Where’s the 14th?   Had she met her fate?  After recounting three times, checking the run, and scratching his head over this mystery, came a cluck from the attic of the barn. Could she have made the tortuous way up through the rafters into the barn’s attic?  Naw. No chicken could do that. Then we remembered that another California White hen had laid eggs in the barn attic.  So, Rich got the stepladder and checked anyway.

There she was up in the barn attic above the coop our second American Ninja Chicken proudly looking at her freshly laid egg.

Are Ninja Chickens Dumb Clucks? Not Really

A chicken myth is that they are dumb. Everyone “knows” that. Nope. Not true. To get into the attic our hen had to be both smart and athletic. Brains figured out a pathway through rafters, plywood, spools of wire, and stored items. Athleticism got her there.  She negotiated an obstacle course like what we watch on TV’s American Ninja Warrior.

Once she reached the barn attic, she found the darkness and privacy hens appreciate when nesting. Unlike human ninjas,

View to Barn Attic

The American Ninja Warrior Chicken wormed her way to the barn attic.

there wasn’t a buzzer to ring when she got up there, but her clucks gave away her presence.

We admire her athleticism and smarts, but laying eggs up there won’t work. We need to easily collect them. So, we spent a morning plugging up any possible route to the attic.

We may have succeeded. Today’s egg was in the coop, but we’re certain she’s trying to figure out how to again reach the attic.  She might outwit us.

When do Chickens Start Laying Eggs?

Female baby chicks usually start laying when they are 16 to 24 weeks old. Of the many breeds of chickens those that lay white eggs are relatively small, agile, and intelligent.  They can worm their way into inaccessible places and fly like a pheasant.  In contrast, most brown egg layers are heavy and cumbersome, and struggle just trying to get airborne.

Our American Ninja hen is a California White, a Leghorn hybrid.  She’s small, fast, agile, and determined and lays white eggs – in the attic of the barn.

Installing a Low Maintenance Polyaspartic Garage Floor

by | Oct 13, 2022 | (Sub)Urban Homesteading

Home Upkeep!

From time to time, we post a blog about home care on Winding Pathways.  Ways to upgrade appliances and refinish the structure. Although removed from our normal nature tips, home care is both important and interesting. One TV ad caught our attention about a low-maintenance polyaspartic garage floor. We checked it out and decided to pursue it.

Our realtor friends tell us that investing 3% to 5% of a home’s value annually for maintenance, modernization, and freshening helps the structure keep its market value. It also makes the house pleasant, safe, and efficient.

This year our improvements included replacing a 26-year-old furnace and a nearly as old air conditioner. Both were working but their age indicated possible failure, and we didn’t want the furnace to conk out on a 20 below Iowa night.

New Polyaspartic Garage Floor

Our garage needed attention. We noticed staining on the baseboards and the floor was, well, shabby. Likely installed in 1947 when the house was built the floor was old, pitted concrete. It was dusty and hard to sweep. Come winter the car brings in salt brine picked up on roads. It penetrates into the old concrete and is nearly impossible to remove.

This summer we hired the Hello Garage Company to install a floor of Polyaspartic. Before the workers came, we promised to remove the baseboards so they could apply the surface right up to the wall. While pulling off the baseboards we found a distressing problem.

Years of seeping moisture had caused the bottom sill to rot. Nothing was holding up part of the wall.  Fortunately, the rest of the wall was in good condition but the rotted area needed attention before the Polyaspartic could be applied. It became a DIY project.

Preparing for the New Garage Floor

  • Removed baseboards and trimmed the wallboard higher to expose vertical 2X4s.
  • Removed all rotted wood, which actually looked like topsoil.
  • Cut off the rotted bottoms of the vertical 2X4s.
  • Replaced the rotted sill with pressure-treated lumber, using shims beneath the verticals to give the wall solid strength.
  • Screwed strips of ½” plywood onto the new sill to enable attaching the baseboard.
  • Painted the baseboards but left them in storage for a while.
  • Repainted the entire garage and installed sideboards to protect the walls from car doors banging against them.
  • Washed shelves and containers before putting them back.

Hello Garage workers then ground down the old concrete floor, removing many of the potholes and unevenness. They then applied the Polyaspartic. We let it cure for more than two full days before bringing in the car or walking on it.

The final part of the job was screwing in the old refurbished baseboards and re-setting the garage with the cleaned-off shelves and containers. The garage looks great. Here are the before and after photos.