Urban Farming and Chicken Mites

This past weekend my Dad who is 87 years old and in the middle stages of vascular dementia comes in and announces, your chickens have mites... Yikes!!! I tell myself ok stay calm you were president of the 4-H club, you fetched your own eggs as a child for breakfast, damn you can run a code and save a human life...surely you can save six little hens from mites.

Umm  what is a mite? where did my chickens pick up these little bugs, they haven't been out of their yard...it isn't like your children is exposed to day care issues.

Off to Google I go - wow there are a million links to read on chicken mites.  But I settled on one, The Chicken Chick - "Poultry Lice and Mites Identification and Treatment by Kathy Shea Mormino "

I quickly felt more in control - I made a note card and added the link to Evernote.  Off to Tractor Supply I went.  It is amazing what I can find at Tractor Supply.
Picked up Garden & Poultry Dust with Permethrin and some Sevin Dust 5%.  I also picked up some scratch - because I have been feeding them wild bird feed when I wanted them to have something extra. I also picked up a bag of mealworms.   I can't wait to see what they do with these. The doggies also got treats and fly spray. 

I am not sure what we did on Sunday afternoons before Tractor Supply came to town.

So, I am feeling pretty good about being able to handle the mites - I can't wait to see what other adventure occurs in my little urban farm.
Happy Thursday
~ Connie ~ 

Hashtag #urbanfarmer

I had the clinic block my Friday afternoon schedule last week, so I could come home early - it has been a really long week with a couple of nights consisting of four hours of sleep and I am on call tonight and Saturday.  So how does a girl in Northeast Arkansas spend time on a Friday afternoon - of course, enjoying her yard and sitting in the chicken yard, admiring her girls and teaching them to eat scratch out of a cup.

I was sitting there I got to thinking about sharing some awesome pictures of my chickens with my social media friends.  This thought then lead to me thinking about hashtags.  I  recently started using hashtags on facebook, twitter, and intsagram.  A hashtag is a type of label or metadata tag used on social network and microblogging services which makes it easier for users to find messages with a specific theme or content.

I almost always use the hasttage #scrapbookwife, which is easy to understand.  I enjoy spending time preserving our families life in scrapbooks.  Recently I started using the hashtag #urbanfarmer. 
As I was thinking about using the hashtag #urbanfarmer I started to questions myself  - am I really an urban framer?  What is an urban farmer?  

I do own a tractor and almost 3 acres of land???

I googled the term urban farm and found there isn't a consistent definition of an urban farm. So I will define my own little urban farm - Connie's space to grow fresh vegetables and house a few fathered and furry friends.  
All of this to say - I feel better about using the hashtag #urbanfarmer  
Do you ever have trouble defining who you are? Are adequately stating what you are doing?
~ Connie ~