100 Pound Sacks

If I buy my egg layer and cracked corn from the Louis Gale Feed Mill in Waterville it is almost half the price of the local feed stores.  Guess where Maggie goes to buy her feed.  The hundred pound sacks are not easy to handle.  Luckily Matt is here to help me.  It had been taking me quite a while to do end over end up the steps and lifting them up on pallets where I open them and scoop out what I need.   I try to calculate how much I can give to make one trip last two weeks, but sometimes I don't make it.  I am the Italian/Jewish mother of the animal world, so everybody is fat and happy.  I ran out Thursday night and had to be clever about feeding everyone on Friday to hold them over to today's trip.  My chickens, finally, are laying eggs like they should.  This early spring-like weather triggered the laying mechanism in my hens.  I have been feeding them like queens all along with only two or three eggs a day.  Yesterday I got two dozen.  I made pancakes for my students and aides yesterday to celebrate.  Not wanting to disrupt this sudden spike in production, and being out of feed, I had to figure out what to do.  I had put a quarter of sheep high on a piece of furniture for the tractor shed kitties to munch on at their leisure.  The high heat last week hatched some flies, and they laid some eggs in the mutton.   Not a pretty sight, and the kitties were not amused.  I pulled down the leg and a few wiggly maggots fell on the ground.  Some free range chickens gobbled up the creepy crawlies like they were candy.  I decided to drag the leg and rib section up to the barn and into the chicken room.  I was followed by the chickens who were very enthused by the surprise meal.  I plopped the grizzly carcass in a feed pan and the hens were instantly attracted to their substitute meal.    Hurray!   I was reminded of the nasty scene from one of my favorite novels, Cold Mountain, where Hinman chased the Yankee marauders who stole the pig and chickens from a poor widow and her baby.  He shot the thieves and the chickens started feeding on the corpses.  I thought, well, if chickens relish eating corpses why not a maggoty sheep quarter?  Life on the farm goes on...