Cooked!!

This lovely begonia had grown to twice this size and had about 10 flower stalks on it and it was beautiful! Just covered with blooms!

This was the geranium that Sarah had given me and it was covered with blooms, after having no blooms on it at all during the whole winter. Then...tragedy!  Ed and I went to visit his dad one Sunday a week ago, and all of a sudden, I remembered that neither of us had opened the greenhouse that morning. We were at least an hour a way from home by the time I remembered it.

Well, it was 80 degrees out side and a clear blue sky, so at home, in the greenhouse, it was over 120 degrees! I think the min/max thermometer said 127 degrees. Well, when we arrived home at 5:30pm...it was too late for most of them. They even smelled cooked!

Most of them looked like they had boiling water poured over them!

This airplane plant was so large and lush and just beautiful! It had two tiers of baby plants. The pots themselves were very hot to touch, so I filled the water can with cold water and just flooded everything! Now, after a week, I can finally see all the damage as it took that long for some of the plants to finally quit wilting and turning black. I think most of them will eventually put out new shoots as there is some green still there, but time will tell. So now we wait and watch and water!

Fuffy Little Butts!

We have had this incubator for a few years and have never used it before. We bought it used and mostly just let a broody hen hatch our chicks or we bought them from Rural King already hatched. But we don't have a hen that wanted to go broody, so we used this artificial 'hen' this time. I have the towels wrapped around it to keep the temperature more stable inside.

We saved eggs for nine days and put them inside on the automatic turner. The wire you see here is the thermometer probe.

The temperature was fairly stable, it would go up and down about 3 to 4 degrees. We let it run with no eggs in it for a week, until we could determine how it would work. Once we were satisfied with its performance, we added the eggs, then...just have patience!

Here is my homemade candler. I candled the eggs on day 5 and 13. You could see the embryo on day 5 just kicking and wiggling inside of the shell! On day 13, half of the egg was full of chick, but you could still see movement.

This was on day 20, yesterday. You can see that pipping has started to take place. This was at 8:45 AM and the first chick hatched out of its shell at 8:25PM.

Then, nothing much happened, for hours. There was a little movement here and there, but nothing much.

This wet and bedraggled little bundle, was the first to exit its shell.

I got up in the night, (didn't go to bed until about 12:00AM) and the second one had just hatched.

Here is the last one to finally make it out, at 8:30 AM this morning!

All nine of them HATCHED! We are so blessed! 100% hatch is unusual. Aren't they just too cute?

Especially those FUFFY LITTLE BUTTS!!!