Good for you! :) Raising your own birds for table is FAR tastier and healthier than production chicken from the store. It sounds like you have your head on straight when it comes to what counts--raising the bird in a healthy environment and giving him a good life before quickly and calmly doing the deed. :) Be prepared if you will be raising Cornish Cross birds for meat next, though--heed what others on this board have said about them being kind of nasty-messy to raise, and make sure you butcher them on time. Allowing Cornish X birds to live beyond their natural butchering age is cruel, as they eat constantly and gain so much weight so quickly that their legs cannot support them and they go down on their hocks or their legs simply break. :( There was a show on PBS called 'The Natural History of the Chicken', which was a kind of quick and entertaining overview on all kinds of people who owned chickens. It included a guy who kept chickens both for eggs and meat, and he was so dead-on about appreciating the birds for their beauty, contribution to his ecology, eggs, companionship and meat for his table. He butchered his own birds and has a great outlook, I'd highly recommend it. There is also a great story at the end about a little Silkie hen named Liza, it's heartwarming. :) The guy I'm talking about is here, the first 3 minutes of part 2, and part 5, about 1:40 in: http://video.google.com/videosearch?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=the+natural+history+of+the+chicken&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title# The entire show is great, the only part I didn't really like was the part about the guy who kept fighting cocks--sad story and the noise they put in is REALLY annoying. *L* Velvet ~:>

Some may have other information but I have always been comfortable eating fruit that was not fermented. Citrus has sections so the bird may have caused some damage to one or two sections but I'm guessing the damage goes little deeper than the rind. I say pick your first lemon, slice off just the skin at the deepest damaged place to better determine how deep the damage is and enjoy the rest! I also have bird problems with my Ponderosa lemons. Boat-tail grackles come in about this time of year and they don't peck holes in the peel but they scrape off the green zest. The lemons still fill out and mature but they are deformed because of the damage to the outter skin. I haven't found any ways to keep the grackles at bay.

Was in Guymon last evening and my pu just turned in at Wally World as I was leaving. So being I was in the parking lot went in to see what they had put out over the last week. Almost everything was out inside the store now. Just a few bulbs though and didn't see any seed potatoes. They had a lot of boxes stored just outside the doors in the outside area. I didn't go out to see what was there. This year they have a large Ferry-Morse seed display and a fair sized display with organic seeds from Seeds of Change. The FM seeds were very reasonable. Not sure if someone put the wrong price on the SoC seeds or not. They showed $5.49 a pack. Which I consider very high. Didn't buy anything but looked through both racks. They had all of the usual potting and seed starting mixes and supplies out. Last week they had a sale on plastic containers which I bought a few of and using as flats for onions, leeks, ect and wanted to buy a few more buty they were all gone and the area full of garden/lawn/Bar-B-Q items. Just 2 years ago I couldn't find any seed starting mix or potting mix anywhere before Feb 1st. So since I've kept at least a partial bag and some potting soil for insurance and both years the stores have had it out in mid Jan. More geese have moved in from the south over the last week. Notice a few more flocks moving north during the week. Everyone that is talking about it says it is due to little water and food south of here. They say the ducks/geese that use this fly way can go clear to the Mexico border and not find many water/food combinations. So not sure if them moving north is a good indicator of an early spring or just an indicator of hungry birds. I would say the numbers here have climbed to over a thousand now. The wheat is growing and some fields that they didn't even cut must have a little grain down on the ground as I've been watching them feed in them. They don't stay out feeding over an hour which indicates they are getting plenty to eat without a lot of work. Which somewhat surprises me. My two youngest apple trees just lost the last of their leaves a week ago and are showing signs of the buds growing now. The older one has buds I'm afraid won't wait long enough to bloom out from the way they look. I remember in the late 80's a winter like this. The last day of Jan it started raining. And then turned to ice and snow. Then the cold set in for around 2 weeks. Hope that isn't the case this winter. I keep telling everyone not to store their coats away yet. The good thing is the longer we go without a severe cold spell the less likely we are to have a prolonged extreme cold spell. But I've seen really cold weather through the 15th of Feb so not getting in too big of hurry starting too many seeds yet. Jay

I can help with that. I used pure sand to cover my washed out limestone soil when we moved in in 1992. After many years of being on an organic program my sand has enough dark matter in it to trick you into thinking it is dark soil. I know the sand is still pure white because I tested it during a remodeling job a couple years ago. The contractor dug up an old walk way through the back yard and I was surprised to see the very dark brown color of the soil under the St Augustine. I scooped some up and dropped it into a glass of water. The white sand dropped to the bottom of the glass immediately. Most of the brown stuff floated and there was some brown discoloration of the water. I used compost once on this yard in the late 90s. The sand came to me originally as a 50:50 mix with "compost" which was extremely hot at the time. It was basically sand and horse manure. Since 2002 I've used corn meal, alfalfa pellets, and corn gluten meal. That's all. The soil looks pretty rich but it really is only sand and the composted remains of roots, leaves, grass clippings, and whatever I've applied. Does that help?