Bananas planted

Woke up this morning at six and went out and planted the bananas. Weekend before last I had dug up my sweet potato bin and had decided to try a different way of planting sweet potatoes (still haven't gotten that far btw). Which left the bin available for, you guessed it, bananas. So I planted three of the four bananas Alan gave me into that bin. I think they'll do pretty good there. The fourth banana plant I planted in a container, kind of keeping my options open with that one.

Going Bananas...

I forgot to mention, I gave my friend Alan four chicks, he gave me four banana trees. The smallest is about two feet tall, the tallest is about four feet tall. Right now they're sitting with their roots in a plastic bag, but I'm planning to plant them tomorrow morning. I'm pretty stoked about it. Alan's backyard is pretty much filled with banana trees, which he built up from a single tree.

I have three boys, all love bananas, so this should be a good thing for us.

Chicks arrived yesterday!

The chicks we ordered from Murray McMurray Hatchery (http://www.mcmurrayhatchery.com) arrived yesterday (May 29th). We ordered 25 Rhode Island Reds, ended up receiving 26 (I'm guessing they throw in an extra in case one of them doesn't, uh, work out, so to say) plus a "mystery chick" (which the Shin named "Star," and Ryu named "Thomas," and we are all now bound to call the bird "Star Thomas" or "Thomas Star.").

The post office called us up at 6:15 am to let us know that the chicks were in. I quickly assembled the brooder, and we went down to pick them up at about 8:15 am. They all came together in one tiny 1 ft by 1 ft box. Pretty amazing. We got them home, turned on the brooder lamp to heat the brooder up (chicks need to be kept at 90-95 F for the first week, then have the temp cooled down by 5 F every week).

With our order we'd also bought some of McMurray's "QuikChik" powder, you mix it with water and end up with "chicken gatorade," so we mixed some up, added some sugar, and hooked the water container up to the brooder. We then dipped each chicks beak in the water, then put the chick in the brooder. They were pretty excited for a while, but eventually settled down.

I ran down to Dell's, the livestock supply place here in town, and bought ten pounds of chicken starter feed and a feeder. By the time I got home they had all figured out how to drink from the water bin. Pretty much as soon as I put the food in they started eating. So no worries there.

And that was pretty much day one of the chicken thing.


Day two was pretty uneventful. Came home and fed the birds (they eat a LOT). In the evening I gave four of them away to my friend Alan. Then finally changed out the newspaper (now covered with chicken manure, it ended up in the compost pile) and replaced the water. Birds seem pretty healthy and happy. I'm glad I borrowed the brooder from Doug.