I had a very productive week last week, and also have some sad news on one of hens, so let’s get to it!

Last week I received the box of peaches I had ordered from the co-op downtown.  I was so excited to find a good source of local(ish) peaches!  A girl can dream of having all the tropical fruits in the world, but when one lives in Maine, one gets very good at accepting berries and apples as the fruit of choice.  And don’t get me wrong, I love berries and apples…a lot!  But, there are times when I wish I could also have a banana tree in my back yard 🙂

With all those peaches I was able to make 13 jars of peach salsa and 8 jars of (very spicy) peach BBQ sauce.  I still have enough peaches to make another batch of peach salsa or another batch of slightly less spicy BBQ sauce, but we might just eat them.  They are absolutely delicious, and perfectly sweet.

I was able to use all of my own green peppers and jalapeno peppers for the recipes, which made me extremely happy.  I did not grow onions, so those came from the farmers’ market.  I still have PLENTY of jalapeno peppers left to work with for regular salsa as well.  In fact, I think I have enough jalapenos to do next years supply of salsa as well!

this isn’t all of them – i have a gallon freezer bag full and already frozen 🙂

We dug up our small planting of purple carrots this week as well.  I didn’t get a ton, but from what Emma planted, I think we did amazingly well.  These will most likely be eaten raw, because Emma doesn’t eat cook carrots – not sure why, she just doesn’t.

In other news, we also had to say good bye to one of our easter egger hens.  On Friday morning I went out to give them some kitchen scraps, and noticed that she was straining a lot, and looked to be pushing out a very red egg.  She is several weeks younger than the white chickens, and I knew it was way too early for her to actually be laying eggs.

A lot of googling took place, and I finally found something that made sense.  A prolapsed oviduct.  Her insides were falling out of her.  And I felt horrible.

There were only two options really.  One was to take her to the vet, but typically when a hen has a prolapsed oviduct, even if it is repaired, it will most likely happen again.  The other option was what we chose, to kill her so that she wouldn’t get an infection and be in pain.

Even though I strive to be vegan leaning, it has never been because of not wanting to kill an animal for meat, so I was surprised at how difficult this was.  I think that it was made even more difficult by Emma, who had an amazingly rough time of it, and was only calmed when I distracted her with news of us visiting her Aunt and Uncle for their baby shower.

I knew that we might have some issues with health, but I still wasn’t prepared, and I am not sure how you could be prepared for that either.  I wanted to write this post so that hopefully it can help someone else when they are searching for “hen that is trying to lay red egg.”

Have any of you ever had issues with this before?

Also, don’t forget to enter the giveaway for Tropical Traditions Coconut Oil, it is a great giveaway!

I am linking up at the Barn Hop.