The chick count stands at 19, most of them black or yellow, but one cute chipmunk-striped one in the bunch, too. Yesterday Tom carefully removed from the incubator all of the eggs that didn't hatch, the remainder of the chicken eggs and all of our friend's wild turkey eggs. Far, far from the house and yard, we conducted a post-mortem and found that while some of the chicken eggs had partly developed chicks inside, none of the turkey eggs seemed to have been fertilized, which was a good lesson for the kids, both about biology and the old saying about not counting your chicks...
Afterwards, we headed to a neighbor's farm to pick up our annual summer allotment of kittens. Four this time, one each for the kids and one for me, since I may as well have a little someone to follow me around adoringly, as long as he doesn't turn my raised beds into a litter box. Laura's kitten is black and named Shadow, Daniel's is a calico named Top Cat (too much Hanna-Barbera on Boomerang while visiting my parents back in January, it seems), Davy's is orange and named Felix, so of course I named my little gray one Oscar. The kids got busy with some cardboard boxes and duct tape and fashioned a kitten palace for the latest farm residents.
In other farm news, I've been busy harvesting spinach and rhubarb to freeze, thinning the carrots, and Tom got all but the last six or so hay bales made before the latest thunderstorm. Not quite as fierce as Friday's storm, which had some very loud and close-sounding lightning cracks, which the kids and I discovered later in the day had turned one of our power poles into shredded toothpicks.
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