Ain't got no blues, got chickens in my back yard

OK, so it's a crappy picture. The chickens got huffy and left before I could take another one. 8 or 9 chickens and Jeff's Guineas have been scratching around the front yard a lot lately. These four decided to hop up on the woodpile and peer in the window at me so I retaliated by taking their picture and am now humiliating them by posting it for the world to see.

So far they are taking the cold weather in stride, still laying although not as many eggs as earlier. I've been pampering them a bit, giving them meat scraps from on old buck deer that my nephew gave me last fall (he's butchered and frozen, lest someone fear that they are eating him alive). Also soaking some grain and feeding it to them warm first thing in the mornings. As the old folks say, take care of your barred rocks and they will take care of you.

Shuckin' the Corn (apologies to Earl Scruggs)

Here is my corn shucking rig, not as cool as a team of mules and a spring wagon, but it works. I planted about a half acre of Reid's yellow dent corn last spring and just finished shucking it today. The planter didn't work very well, so got a poor stand, the deer ate about a third of it, but still I got about 30 bushels. If any of you hippies want some open pollenated organic ear corn for your organic, open pollenated squirrels, get in touch.

As I have sometimes mentioned, my dad tended to primitive agriculture, so we raised and shucked 10 or 15 acres of corn every fall. Generally miserable work, hot sweaty and itchy early in the fall, cold, wet, and muddy late. I was always ashamed to admit to the other dudes in FFA that we didn't own a corn picker. Childhood trauma down on the farm. In retrospect, I am glad for the experience now that I don't actualy have to do it any more.

The early mechanical corn pickers pulled arms off a lot of farmers anyway, so perhaps I should be thankful also for my reasonably intact body. The pickers had a set of serrated rollers, called snapping rolls. The were designed to pull corn stalks througn and were set close enough together to pop the ears off. They tended to plug up, people would try to pull the stalks back out, the plug would break loose, and the stalks would feed in so fast that there was no time to turn loose. The un-plugger then lost an arm, or maybe got completely mashed and was killed. Every fall in Vo Ag, we would have to sit through a safety film that recreated corn picker accidents. Wish I could find one for the tickfest film fest.