Ok, so I explained in a post a while back that we got our cat, Pippin, in a very nontraditional way (a.k.a. a neighbour drove up on his quad and handed us a box with a kitten in it). Now we have another kitten so here is the story of how we got Petra.

So, our family wants to be as self-sufficient as possible on our little farm in the jungle. We have chickens that are giving us eggs every day, we have trees that are giving/will give us fruit, and goats that will have kids soon and will therefore give us milk for butter and cheese and yogurt and such.

I explained in my post about chickens that we had gotten some meat birds before that we then had to dispatch of and they were delicious. We then got laying hens for eggs but mom pointed out that if we are trying to be self-sufficient, raising meat birds might not be a bad idea. So yesterday, while we were in town, we picked up six new baby chicks.

Hi, this is Hannah, and today I am going to tell you about chickens in the jungle.

When we wanted to get chickens I did a lot of reading on multiple different websites about how to care for chickens and how to build a house for them and that sort of thing. Everyone says that before you buy chickens you need to figure out what breed you want, some are for eggs, some are for meat, some are for both and some are for show. Yes, there are show chickens, there are competitions and you can get prizes… for your chickens. You need to know your neighbourhood rules, are you allowed to have roosters? Are you allowed to have chickens at all? And people in, say, Canada probably don’t have chickens for sale in just any pet store so you then have to find a supplier and order your chicks.

(If you have, want, need stuff for or have questions about chickens go to My Pet Chicken or Backyard Chickens)

After doing all this research, we went to the pet store and said we wanted some baby chicks, the owner asked us how many we wanted so we said six. She then proceeded to put six chicks into a box for us, including the one little black chick that they had among all of the yellow ones.

The upside to this is that it’s easy; you get your chicks and you go home, there is no risk of losing some in transit and you don’t have to wait for them to arrive. The nice thing about ordering your chicks from a commercial breeder is that you know what breed they are, what gender they are and whether they are for meat or eggs, you get to carefully choose the exact product that you receive. We, knowing next to nothing about chickens, got six, brought them home, cared for them, built them an awesome house, named them and even cuddled them. But we had no idea what gender they were and were only hoping that they would lay eggs.

We named the black chick Agatha, and the five white ones Butter, Nugget, Princess, Freedom and Hufflepuff. Once they grew up they all looked so similar that it got very hard to tell them apart.

After talking to some of our neighbours we realized that we had meat birds and that they would get too fat and have health problems. To which mom said, “If we keep them active so they don’t get too fat then maybe they will still get old enough to lay eggs.”
We later realized that we only had two hens, Nugget and Princess. Which meant that we had a rooster named Agatha but that’s alright.

It actually became problematic when Princess died about a week ago. I don’t actually know what happened to her but I do know that meat birds, if they get too fat, are likely to have heart attacks and other lethal health problems. You can’t eat birds that have died of disease so we buried Princess and had one of our neighbours process the rest for us.

Agatha was always smaller than the other ones so we kept him and got four new hens. We purchased these ones as hens, not as chicks. He is bigger than any of our new hens though. They did not lay any eggs the first day we had them but in the four days since then they have laid ten. They seem to be earning their keep.

We were very sad to have to say goodbye to our first batch of chickens, though it wasn’t quite as bad as we had feared, and now we have healthy, happy chickens that are laying eggs and free-ranging around the yard. And the the best part is that we can tell them all apart.

Soup

Prince Agatha

Kiko

Dori

Hamster

The title got your attention, huh?

Hello, Ezra here, and today I want to discuss something that is every bit as important as the title implies, and that is what I name my pig.

You see, a short while after me and Hannah move to Costa Rica, we are going to start a farm on which our two personal pet pigs will live,which we will acquire because after a certain unnamed family member who is definitely not Hannah had a nervous breakdown over moving. This unnamed family member only completely calmed down after being given reassurances, several talks, several days and the promise of a quad, a surfboard and a pig upon arriving. Of course, I, who was originally skeptical of the moving plan but was convinced it was a good idea by the time that the breakdown occurred, was of the opinion that I should ALSO get a pig and stuff. So when we move, we are going to have a family quad and personal surfboards and pigs.

So the question remains- what should I name my pig?

I was thinking that I might name it Reuben- which is not a particularly GOOD name or anything but happens to be the name of the coolest pig I know. In fact, Reuben’s coolness among pigs is only challenged by George, the Minecraft pig hailing from Element Animation’s youtube series called An Egg’s Guide To Minecraft.

George becomes more animated, develops more character and plays a bigger role to the story in episode 15, which was made about a year after part 14.

Reuben is also a Minecraft pig. He can be found in the video game Minecraft Story Mode (which is actually a game unto itself and is not a part of Minecraft). I may be king of biased as I watch a lot of his videos, but I think that Reuben is best showcased in the Let’s-play video made by Dan from The Diamond Minecart.

I don’t want to spoil it, but much like George, Reuben’s usefulness to the plot is greatly enhanced in later episodes of DanTDM’s Minecraft Story Mode series.

So I think I will name my pig Reuben, but if you have any name ideas then please tell us in the comments below and I will consider using it as my pig’s name, and if any of your friend’s have good pig-name-ideas then please direct them to quewhatnow.com so they can have a vote too. We’ll see who will get to name the pig in a few weeks!

And by the way, in case you didn’t get it; when I said “a-pig-alyptic” in the title I was playing off the word “apocalyptic”, but we were… talking about pigs… so I slotted it… in… Oh, never mind.

More posts coming soon!

Ezra