Hatching???

We've got a duck beak poking out of one of our eggs!

There is peeping!!!

The chicks are coming! The chicks are coming!

Well...hopefully! :)

25 days ago we put 31 eggs into our brand new incubator!

13 Rouen duck eggs and 18 Standard Bronze/Standard Bronze, Royal Palm, Blue Slate crosses.

The last candling, a week ago, looked promising... :)

Yesterday was 3 days from expected hatching, so we have stopped turning the eggs and have increased the humidity.

Will keep you all posted about our new little ones!

Pigs!

Pig pen is ready.
The guys wrapped the tarp down over the straw bales and I forgot to get another picture of it...
They've got quite a view!

Potatoes!

A 14 tire U surrounding a mixture of layered horse manure, wood chips, goat lot cleaning, straw, small branches, pine cones...and the chickens are making their contribution as well...
When the pile is finished, we'll close it with 6 more tires, stacked 2 high...then it will be time to fill the tires with soil! :)
Ordered 12.5 pounds of seed potatoes. When we piece them out we should have 50 2 Oz pieces. We will plant 2-3 per tire stack and go from there! :)

New nest

There are 3 nests in it...
39 1/2" long, 12" deep, 20 1/2" tall in the back, sloping to 18" in the front. Need to redo the top...forgot to go from bottom to top-not that it needs to shed rain inside the chicken coop... :)
Made from saw mill slabs...

Baby Goats!

Emily Elizabeth surprised us with 2 baby goats this evening. One little boy, Pete, and one little girl, Maddie.

Compost is Cooking!

Building compost so that we have enriched soil to grow produce! 

50-ish degrees today and our compost is 162! smile emoticon

Btw-i don't still use this as a cheese thermometer!

wink emoticon

Chicken Garden on Contour

The first of our terraces, built on contour, for our chicken feed garden... :)

We will be planting mulberry, rye grass, amaranth, squash, oats, etc...for our chickens to free range through.

Terraces on contour

Built one of these to help lay out our garden terraces.

This is awesome!

We were able to stake out our chicken food forest terraces on contour using this A-frame surveying tool.

Building compost

On top of last year's pig pen, we have piled horse manure, chicken coop cleaning, goat and sheep barn cleaning, pine cones, small branches, yucca, pine needles, bark, leaves, and sawdust.

Pile is about 5 x 5 x 3, on top of the hog wallow and hog manure.

We are not watering the pile today. The materials from the horse lot are very, very wet. We will check moisture tomorrow.

Temperature today is in the 50s, and has been 40s through 60s for a few weeks. We know it isn't spring yet, but hopefully the pile is large enough to keep that warmth, make it's own heat, and encourage the breakdown of materials.

Turkeys being hams...

The white turkey, a royal palm, known as the Duke of Birdingham is all snooded up. Tom turkey  (T squared) and Junior are just hams...which is odd, for a turkey, and then there is one of our docile blue slate hens in the background...

Chim...chiminey...chim....chiminey

Chim, chim, charoo!

We've had our Blaze King stove for a few years now.

It has been amazing. It has a catalytic in it, so it reburns-which is so cool...or hot as it may be! :)

We clean out the chimney about a half a dozen times a years, and empty ashes maybe a little bit more often.

Free to Leave, Welcome to Stay

1/22/16

We've adopted a "free to leave, welcome to stay" philosophy for our ducks, chickens, turkeys, and worms for quite some time now.

Today, I subconsciously took it to a whole new level...

Let me give you just a little bit of a lay of the land:

We run our yearling lambs and our goats in the same pen. Off of that pen we have a graining pen; really a holding pen for bringing goats into the barn to be milked. I forgot to close the gate between these two pens.

Well, off of the holding pen is our duck hut-which has a hinged shed roof.  The duck hut is about 3 feet high at the front and tapers down to 12 inches in the back. Well, I thought I would take advantage of the chinook that we are having and prop open the duck hut roof and let that air out and dry out a bit before the next snow.

So, an open gate from the goat lot to the graining pen and an open door into the duck hut, and an open roof out of the back of the duck hut...yep, I went down to the barnyard to run water and there were goats here and sheep there, turkeys all in a fuss all over...and...

I don't know if two of our horses saw all of the carrying on and got spooked when they were too close to the electric fence (which is hot finally!) and they tore down the fence on accident...or if it was intentional, but both Blue and Ebby were out just wandering around...

smh

Free to leave

Welcome to stay...

Cheese!

Made a batch of mozzarella, a batch of cottage cheese, and a batch of ricotta cheese today.
Used the ricotta and mozzarella  in some lasagna...can't wait to try it! :)

Homemade Honey Shampoo

I love my homemade honey shampoo...

3/4 c honey

3/4 c castile soap

1/4 c apple cider vinegar

10 drops Rosemary EO

10 drops Cedarwood EO

10 drops Peppermint EO

10 drops Lavendar EO

Stir all of that together. I then dilute it 1:1 with water. This is a runny shampoo, and it doesn't get really sudsy. My scalp feels so fresh and my hair feels clean and it is relaxed and not coated with gunk.

I've just spent the last couple months or so using store bought shampoo and it always makes my hair just frizzy and tangled and I need to use product if I want it to hold any of its curl or wave-which just leads to more frizzy and just frumpy looking hair...

Cheese

Have a batch of Derby cheese that I put to age on Sunday. Have started a batch of chevre.

8/11/15

Chicks showed up today! Not ready AT ALL for them...but that is how things have worked this summer. We ordered Rhode Island Reds, Pioneers, Black Australorps, and Araucana chicks. We've raised all of these breeds before, except for the Pioneers. Only ordered two dozen this time. But we have a broody hen setting on another dozen. And we will keep at least one rooster out of the Pioneers, so we won't have to order chicks for a while.

We have turkey chicks too-we are down to only 9 of them though...gosh they seem to like to die... :( Started out with 15. They are about 2 weeks old now, so hopefully we are past the worst of it.

We picked up 7 ducks the end of May. 6 Mallards and one Pekin duck. They were about a month old when I got them-so they are about 3 1/2 months old now.

Our pigs are coming along well. Tripp and I went over to Judith Gap and got 3 feeder pigs June 3rd. They fit in our dog kennel, like three sardines, so were about 30 pounds. We make nightly trips out to Roundup-living only 4 miles from town helps! We pick up food waste from the Grand, the Youth Center, and one of the assisted living places.

So...

Horses-3

Pigs-3

Goats (does)-3

Goats (doelings)-2

Goats (bucks)-2

Goats (bucklings)-1

Goats (wethers)-4

Sheep (ewe lambs)-3

Sheep (ram lamb)-1

Sheep (wether lamb)-1

Chickens-5

Chicks-26

Turkey chicks-9

Ducks-7

Fertilized eggs-12

Cat-1

Dog-1

8/9/15

Mushrooms are growing! We have about a half a dozen of them so far.




These are wine cap mushrooms planted in a bed of compost, topped with hard and soft wood chips.

8/5

We've had a broody hen the past few weeks. We are, however, short a rooster...so I went in search of some fertile eggs. Was able to get some yesterday and tucked them under her. She was on them still yesterday evening and this morning.
She seems happy as a clam!

8/4/15

Well, we got a dozen fertile eggs today to hopefully bring contentment to our broody hen, Henrietta.

We didn't candle them or anything, from my (limited) experience candling brown eggs is difficult.
I keep forgetting to ask the lady I bought them from what chicken breeds she has-although it is readily apparent that she has Easter Egg chickens (aka Araucana) and then a brown egg layer.

So 21 days from now we should have some new chicks!...in addition to the ones that we bought from the hatchery that are supposed to be delivered next week... I wish that I had realized how broody Henrietta was a month ago when I ordered chicks!!

http://www.backyardchickens.com/a/how-to-incubate-hatch-eggs-just-21-days-from-egg-to-chicken