chick – Nancy Tart: Writing for Life

Cousin Visits!

Cousin visits to our “mini-farm” aka place to get messy, play with animals, discover eggs hidden outside, and enjoy togetherness!

January 18, 2019

Cousin Visits!

My sister, brother, and their three little ones (Sister-Cousin and Brother-Cousins!) have moved back from Kansas!

They came out to our mini-farm (muddy spot with a pond, outside tank with tadpoles, indoor goldfish, foraging chickens, playful Guinea Pigs, cute fluffy bunny, and jumpy adult dogs who think they are 4 months old) over the weekend and the kids were totally excited!

This time, we had very few photographers snapping pictures because they were too busy playing with their cousins!

Lucas was so excited to share his green car (motorized car his Grandma Joanne bought him for his 2^nd birthday) but the battery ran out too quickly – so he shared his Christmas bicycle and his train tracks. For him, those items are his dearest things in the world; train tracks, cars, his bicycle, and his green car.

“Baby JJ” – who isn’t a baby anymore! – and Lucas played train tracks for a bit. JJ liked the bicycle too. Outside JJ and Mandy wanted to see all the fluffy animals.

Anastasia helped show off Minuit, Kimberly’s little black Dwarf Holland Lop Bunny.

Little Minuit loves to eat carrot bits!

Mandy found Jaquline’s “hidden spot” in her bunkbed! (With big paper on the “wall.”)

Taylor and TobyMac did their popcorn jumps after the girls loaded them with Spanish Needles greens (chickens, bunnies, and Guinea Pigs love them before they turn to seed aka the needle part).

Above is the wildflower called Spanish Needle, a favorite food of many small animals.

Jillian showed off her Uncle Buddy knowledge by telling them that people can eat the wildflowers and leaves too. (Yes, but they are bitter unless cooked, and I hoped her younger cousins were distracted by the cuteness of the piggies and missed the “you can eat this weed” tidbit.)

We love cousin visits! It is always fun with family shares their time with each other.

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

Fresh New Year

Who else is excited for 2019? Who else looks at the new year like a child on Christmas morning looks at presents around the tree?

December 31, 2018

Fresh New Year

“It’s still 2018, right?” asks Kimberly, working on her History.

“Yes, it’s the last day of 2018,” I respond. Christina pipes in with, “and our Aunt’s birthday!” (One of their aunts is born on December 31!)

This makes me think: (uh-oh, I just heard two kids say “Mom’s writing another blog in her head.”) Yes, my children know me!

Tomorrow starts a fresh new year. We are given a new beginning each day as the dawn warms our skies and the sun rises to dry the dew.

In the service industry, all days blend together and all the New Year has meant for me in the past 8 years was a barrage of people calling to order reservations at 1am on New Year’s Day from the Bayfront downtown or 11pm from the Saint Augustine Beach peir (two locations at the times we can never promise) so then it turns into irritated people who don’t understand the simple line, “I can’t guarantee that time at that location, you can try to call us at the time to see where our cabs are.”

I’m so glad today does not involve dispatching! I’m only answering questions from the school table – awesome!

In 2018:

I started working at WGV Gymnastics as a coach (LOVE this job).
We closed our taxi company in December. It feels awesome to be able to shut off my phone and not worry about missing a reservation call!
I’ve finished, polished, and published four new children’s books: A Foundling Furball, Alena’s Baby, The Tightrope Dare, and Fibbing Fishermen!
I’ve rejoiced with the addition of my best friend’s 10^th baby!
I’ve rejoiced with my sister who is due about the same time I am! (They will be close cousins!)
I’ve mourned and rejoiced with my family after my Daddy passed.
I celebrated the first Christmas ever without him – that was his favorite holiday.
Christina achieved CAP rank of C/CMSgt, become Red Cross certified, started officially babysitting, started working as needed at what she calls “my somewhat part time job,” and completed her third college semester.
Becky completed her second college semester, bred and raised a few dozen chicks up to “independence” for clients, raised her batches of “babies” (aka Guinea Piglets), joined gymnastics classes (finally finding something to encourage her fitness!), and has taught most of her siblings the Latin terms for every body part since she’s been dissecting animals in her biology labs!
Kimberly joined gymnastics classes with her gung-ho attitude and is expecting great things from herself, was gifted a bunny (she’s been saving to adopt one for almost a year but her awesome big sisters beat her to it) and Minuit has never left her side.
Jaquline discovered the amazing world of Geometry and everything is now interpreted in shapes or gymnastics skills!
Jillian started losing teeth, is studying sketching (she’s getting rather good actually!) and digital art along with Becky, and getting herself lost in the world of reading!
Lucas started trying to write his name!

We are all expecting amazing things to come in 2019. God has paths lined up for us that we may not even be able to see yet – if you’d told me at the start of 2018 that I’d be teaching gymnastics for an awesome Christian boss, be pregnant again, and have no taxi company, I would have laughed.

But (positive!) God knows the desires of our hearts! He knows I love children, love teaching, and that gymnastics has always been a dream. (Dream job come true? YES!) He knows Lucas loves babies and is super excited about getting to “take MY BABY home from church.” (All the other babies he’s been around are those of church family, so he can’t take them home.) He knows that rebuilding hybrid batteries is something else I love – tinkering with electronics as Daddy taught me & a niche few offer around here so maybe that will be our main income soon!

I’m about to polish and release a few more children’s books (maybe an entire new series working around my budding illustrators’ work!) and my goal for this year is 12 releases.

Who else is excited for 2019? Who else looks at the new year like a child on Christmas morning looks at presents around the tree? I see each day as a gift from God to be opened at each dawn. I see gifts we can’t even dream of yet sitting there, waiting God’s perfect timing for us to unwrap and enjoy. I’m praying that certain things are there – which day holds the gift of my child’s birth? Does a gift in that pile include a property or home of our own? Is there a gift of being able to read my books before a class, teach a grammar workshop, or tutor another child? Only God knows what each gift holds. My Daddy loved seeing the smiles and squeals of excitement on Christmas morning as his children opened presents – I love this part of Christmas morning as a parent too. I can only imagine God smiling as we open each gift and yelp with excitement!

Enjoy your daily gifts in 2019! Happy, blessed New Year!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

The King’s View

A very short story about the hawk that lives near our tiny farm. Enjoy!

October 8, 2018

The King’s View

(Today, enjoy a view of my “farm” from the eyes of “The King” – a large, beautiful hawk who lives in a nest in one of the pine trees in a neighbor’s property.)

Soaring over his domain, The King doesn’t think to look up; nothing flies higher than he. The calls from his chicks in the nest remind him that this trip’s fare needs to be a feast. The chicks are growing larger, hungrier, and bolder. Soon his mate must shove them from the nest to go soar into their own territories, but today, he must hunt to fill their ever-growing bellies.

The sharp images below relayed by his eyes present a veritable feast of opportunity. Tree-rats, overgrown frogs, and a few fat lizards sunning on the porches and driveways below all present easily caught but less than desired prey.

A cluster of rodents catch his eye, but he knows the hexagon-shaped glimmers mean they are protected by that horrid human invention called “chicken wire.” Though he refers to it as “the shiny barrier” instead of “chicken wire.” Six rodents are stretching in the afternoon sun, nocturnal in nature; they are fat, lazy, easy treats if it weren’t for that glimmering hexagon protection.

Cackles erupt from the wooden box under some shade trees – no, those chickens aren’t easy fare anymore. They used to be. He used to be able to outsmart the checkerboard rooster despite his three-inch spurs and heavy wings – he would get the younger chickens as they wandered away from the big rooster’s protection. Now there were two long-spurred giants. The checkerboard one was always outside chasing the wanderers back into the brush or waiting for a hawk to test his power. The second was a giant red one – that one was missing a spur that had fatally wounded a previous hawk. The King is wise enough not to attempt those chickens. But he always looks. If one wandered too far away or if that effective team was ever unwary…

No, today’s fare will have to be a few tree-rats. The King settles his decision with a precision dive and catch. He swoops in with amazing speed, executes his prey mercifully, and glides high on majestic wings to drop the prize in his anxious chicks’ nest. He returns to gather another partial meal for his growing offspring.

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

Asian Blacks

Such beautiful new chicks to add to our flock!

September 20, 2018

Asian Blacks

About two weeks ago, we happened into Tractor Supply for feed when the girls spied the “cutest little chicks ever!”

Kimberly says, “Mom, they are on clearance!”

Since it was nearing the end of chick days, they had brought their money just in case. We had just moved our latest toddler bunch into the small chicken run and were planning to start another batch of eggs. When the chicks are at or below a dollar each, they cost less than us incubating our own.

Becky had $4, Kimberly had $8, and the little ones excitedly counted their money while the lady watched, rather amused. Jaquline and Jillian each had a dollar and change. The original count said 14 but a 15^th was hiding in with the white ones. Lucas hopped in his seat, “I have 1-2-3-4-5 quarters, I can buy him!”

So we brought home fifteen beautiful almost two-week-old Asian Black chickens.

Since each chicken was a dollar plus tax, they are mostly Kimberly’s to care for, but even Lucas spends time with his little one.

Jillian and Jaquline have been helping with food and care.

Jaquline poses with her chicken.

Jillian likes to tote hers in the egg basket!

I have no idea how they find “their chicken” in all these look-alikes, but they seem to always be carting around “their” chicken.

What a beautiful addition to our flock! (And a way to keep Kimberly occupied!)

*Note: the pen they are in is the PVC “Daytime Run” we built about ten years ago. In our yard, this is not predator-proof and the chicks need a heat lamp (or 85 degrees plus) so although the original design had a rabbit-wire floor and the lids were locked with hinges and a clasp (which was predator-proof), it has been modified for easy grazing. The chicks are put in a smaller cage in the shed to keep them safe at night.

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

Crafting Cages

June 5, 2018

Crafting Cages

Last month we built two big mobile cages for our livestock

One is for the “teenager” chickens (those between just feathered and adult, about 6 weeks to 24 weeks). Rebeccah bought the clearance Buff Orpington straight run (mixed males and females) from Tractor Supply at the end of their chick days and they are now a little over 12 weeks old – time for selling the males before we eat them at 24 weeks!

The other was for Rebeccah, Kimberly, and Christina’s newest project: Guinea Pigs. They had one named Jack, who, just like his namesake, was adept at getting out of cages (starting with a two-day excursion on the day she brought him home!). On one of his excursions, he decided to disappear into the wild for good (I think he’d heard some Wild Kratts: free and in the wild!).

But TobyMac stayed with his two girls, Taylor and Avery.

The bright orange is TobyMac and the pretty one below is Avery. Taylor is camera shy.

Shop day had us designing and building the cages. They are night-time predator proof and easy to move. We discovered that Guinea Pigs are a perfect lawn mower: one day and they graze the grass to ½ inch height. (Formula = 3 adult pigs to 32 square feet of grass.)

Kimberly and Jaquline using the portable drill to make pilot holes and drive screws.

Rebeccah tacking on the chicken wire.

Notice the painted guinea pig on the door when it’s open.

Even Lucas was helping! He painted, held screws, fetched tools, and helped measure boards to cut.

The best drill ever! Plus wire cutters for the chicken wire.

Three different lengths of screws and our poultry staples

We precut all of the lumber for the second cage!

The girls learned and practiced using power tools, critical thinking (this looked good on paper, but in reality it will cause this problem, how can we fix it?), planning, budgeting (looking prices up online and estimating our actual cost before we went), and applying this knowledge in a practical way to create a final product. We painted the walls to help keep them from rotting, but Rebeccah, who is never satisfied with leaving something plain and functional, turned them into a work of bi-colored art. (I only had white, so she had to mix dyes to get another color!)

Although this was a “day off” from school, the girls learned and used various practical skills and developed two products for our family livestock. They had a blast! They learned a lot. They had a very successful and memorable day creating and a huge surge of pride when they look out there now – something they made is being used everyday by cute little animals!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you later…

~Nancy Tart

Conquering Ticks

Our natural solution to ticks.

August 10, 2017

Conquering Ticks

We live on what we call a tiny farm. It’s just over an acre. It was abandoned before our landlord bought it, spruced it up, and cut down all the brush. When we arrived in April, we discovered that a twenty-foot walk from our carport to the front step attracted lots of ticks! Not the big, easy-to-see dog ticks, but tiny ticks the size of a period! (Yes, some are so small they can fit on the head of a sewing pin, the girls have tried it – they also are fascinating to look at under a microscope because the light goes through them!) Some were slightly bigger. (No, we’ve never taken pictures of them! We are usually inside when we find them and we smash, burn, or flush them, instantly!)

Research taught us these were a variety of deer tick. The small ones are called “seed ticks.” In part of the tick’s life cycle, they are newly emerged in their tick form (small adult form) and need just a little blood to finish growing. So they bite and release. The duration of this bite is between ten minutes and an hour, so sometimes we caught them and got them off. We got very adept at distinguishing tick bites from the bites of other minuscule horrors of Florida, like sand gnats, mosquitoes, fire ants, and yellow flies. We all know that ticks attach themselves once they are full adults. (For this variety, full adult size is about 1/8^th of an inch in diameter – the size of a small print “o”.)

I hate ticks. (Who doesn’t?) I don’t like pesticides. (We want to eat food from this yard!)

Luckily, I have chickens!

Chickens are opportunistic omnivores (aka, scavengers). This means while most people envision them eating dry seeds and corn, they actually have a palate that inclines them toward consumption of living organic material such as insects, microscopic organisms, fresh new plant shoots, and anything moving that is small enough to fit in their beak. My chicken flock has always been known to hunt actively for mosquitoes and flies. (Yes, they run along under the flying insect and jump to attack once they perceive catch is possible. Several times they have smashed into a fence or wall while hunting in this manner. Side-effect: human entertainment.)

Roosters (grown-up males) seem to find ant larvae a delicacy and get all excited digging up ant beds and telling the others, “here, some awesome food!” (A few hens join in this feast, but others look at the ant-larvae-loving chickens with “eww, gross” expressions.)

Our laying hens (females) and breeding roosters stay in the covered henyard. Our “biddie-babies” (the girls have made-up terms for every stage; this is newly hatched to 6 weeks) and “baby-toddlers” (6 to 10 weeks) share the brooding pens so they can be protected from rain, draft, and heat in the pre-feathered chick stage (biddie-babies) and to protect them from our area’s population of kites (beautiful, small hawk-like birds who hunt young chickens). The “big toddlers” (10 to 15 weeks) and “teenagers” (15 to 24 weeks) roam near the henyard because they are too big for the kites to carry away.

They will forage all day for insects and leave the free-choice feed completely alone. They stay within about 25 feet of their water source at all times (during or just after a light rain, they may wander a bit farther, but not normally). They LOVE seed ticks!

Within two weeks of our natural pest control plan, we could walk to the carport with zero ticks! Within a month, the strip of back yard where we hang clothes and the kids play was nearly tick-free! It’s been five months and they have cleared an expanded circle that includes parts of the front yard.

(My bulb beds helped grow the circle as they love to eat insects that eat the bulbs and the plants hold dew.)

Slowly, our chickens are conquering the tick population in the rest of the yard!

In closing, if you have a tick problem and don’t mind chickens scratching through your plant beds, maybe consider a pest control plan that rewards you with organic fertilizer… and eggs too!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you next time…

~Nancy Tart

The Real Egg Thief

June 6, 2017

The Real Egg Thief

We had forty little chicks in the high brooder. It was back when our little 4-level brooder held three batches of monthly chicks in stages and by the time they were in the bottom level, they roamed the yard. (At 12 to 13 weeks, our breed was too big for almost all predators.) Hardware cloth (wire) protected them from everything and a warm heat lamp kept them toasty (until their feathers come in at about 4 weeks, chicks need 100 degrees Fahrenheit).

But one morning when we went out to feed them, a corn snake had feasted! He had popped the staples and lifted up one corner of the hardware cloth to slide his seven foot body inside their tiny brooder and eat at his leisure. He was so camouflaged in their warm hay floor that we didn’t see him at first! We just saw that almost all the baby chicks were gone.

Corn snakes are very important around farms because they eat rodents and other pests. We had to relocate him to another area and use big u-nails instead of staples to make our brooder big-snake-proof.

Naturally, any adventure with our chickens turns into a Long Tail adventure! In Long Tail and the Egg Thief, the snake only eats eggs and tries to scare off the chickens. And, Long Tail’s humans shoot the snake with an arrow (this was because Christina and Rebeccah had been doing archery lately, so they thought that was cool). Usually, farmers don’t kill snakes unless they are poison snakes that pose a threat to livestock and people. We have a black racer snake living under our house and he routinely gets fat with mice that would try to get in the henhouse (or in our house).

Since then, we haven’t lost any chicks to snakes.

Raising chickens, like many things, is a learn-as-you-go activity. You can read and research forever, and try to do your best. Sometimes, everything will go along fine, but other times, the unexpected (three hungry fence-destroying neighbor dogs, a seven-foot corn snake, or a family of five dive-bombing 4 foot tall eagles) will show up and you learn from those mistakes on what to do next time.

For me, most of the upsets in our continuing chicken flock become adventure stories for Long Tail the Rooster. That’s seeing the bright side. Because just like everything in life, we can’t go back, only forward! Let’s march on, chicken adventures!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you later,

~Nancy Tar

The Chicken Castle

May 25, 2017

The Chicken Castle

It was one of those days when I felt productive. I’d managed to get the house cleaned, was hanging my third load of laundry, had finished catching up financial reports after our move, and everyone was still breathing.

Then there was a squeal that makes any mother immediately drop anything. It was followed by “stay in that castle!” (Okay, no one is hurt, probably.) With my adrenaline pumping like a bass drum in my ears, I try to breathe and respond without screaming “WHAT HAPPENED?”

Jaquline and Jillian had built a castle with the outside blocks and had corralled the 23 one-week-old chicks into it. Platinum, Chicka, and Sherlock (yes, they named the chicks!) decided the grass outside of the castle was better than the feed inside. While the girls squealed and attempted to catch the chicks (Mix prong-horn antelope speed with mongoose evasion & you have a young chicken) 19 of the remaining biddie flock fled the castle.

“Mom!” Jillian wailed, (I was back hanging clothes) “Only Kerjack obeyed.”

“How can we keep hawks away from you if you don’t listen?” Jaquline said to the chicks as they gathered in one spot under a billowing sheet. (Hawks only have a chance because they have super stealth.)

I spied a teaching moment! Perfect! So I left the clothes and helped them gather the chicks to the safe spot where hawks usually don’t spot them and the girls could attempt to watch them again. I told the girls: that is what we (parents) feel like when we give warnings (like the latest for Lucas, “don’t try to grab the goose at the park!”) but children choose not to listen. We know what the danger is; like they know the danger for the chicks.

Jillian looked at her shorts. “Like when you say wear pants but I have shorts and mosquitoes can bite me easier.” Jaquline pulled up her pants and checked her legs for bites, then announced, “but I have long pants so I listened and I have no mosquito bites!”

Bingo! This day now feels super productive!

Thanks for reading!

Type at you later,

~Nancy Tart

Tag: chick

Cousin Visits!

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Fresh New Year

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The King’s View

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Asian Blacks

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Crafting Cages

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Conquering Ticks

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The Real Egg Thief

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The Chicken Castle

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