Why it’s so quiet… No comments yet

It’s a little quiet around these parts right now because we just got married September 19th. We are getting things squared away and ready to leave on our honeymoon on October 1st and we’ll be gone for a couple weeks. We have family taking turns staying with all the animals, but there’s still lots of prep work to make the stay easier on them.

The garden is mostly winding down at this point. I’ll have to do a recap on it this winter. We didn’t do quite as much because we got distracted with wedding prep and other projects.

The new laying hens are laying, although a bit sporadically. This flock has an incredibly different personality than last year’s. It’ll be interesting to see what next year’s will bring. We lost one of the “older girls” last week and one of the new girls wouldn’t home to the coop, perferring to sleep in the trees, which didn’t serve her well either. There have been lots of reports of predator activity in the last few weeks, including my mother discovering bear scat on the easement through our property. We’ve seen the coyote several times and the neighbors have reported seeing a bobcat and a lot of active raccoons. So we are just trying to be cautious and aware and work through it for now.  This year’s rooster, Boots, fended off an attack at some point.  He is missing a chunk of feathers on the back of his neck that have just started to grow back in, fortunately it was only cosmetic damage.

We managed to get a good deal of firewood put away although there is still plenty to cut, split and stack.  In order to start milking next year we need to make arrangements for Obi to go on a “date”.  We plan to work on that when we return.  I’m wildly nervous about her kidding, just because they are really pets to us as well.  I’m terrified something could go wrong and she or the kid(s) could end up hurt in some way.  Unfortunately that’s not really any way to learn these things other than education and hands on learning so we’ll have to see how it goes and do our best.

I’m sure I’ll have more to post when we return and the winter gets started.  Winter is when we get to plan all the projects and dreams for next spring.  I think it’s been mentioned before but we got a tractor this summer so we should be able to make a little bit more progress next year.  A lot of clearing has been done, particularly in the way of landscaping the front yard, at this point because we’d like to have a fence put in and have a bunch of diseased trees that needed to come out.

We just had the chimney swept and it’s currently a chilly 41 degrees (even though it’s supposed to hit 70 today).  I think I’ll go build the first fire of the fall/winter in the wood stove to knock the chill off the house.

The circular decision No comments yet

We’ve gone completely in circles on the decision to move the chickens and/or to trim their flight feathers.  We eventually decided to re-home them to the “Big Girls” coop by the house instead of moving them to the pasture by the goats.  I was worried about the amount of variety (or lack there of) they’d get foraging in the fenced area and we started running out of time and motivation for dealing with the fence and getting it secured.  This has also been a quite remarkable summer in that we’ve come this far with no losses to predators especially considering we’ve seen a coyote on the property several times.

The “new girls” are now nearly indistinguishable from the “big girls” and have begun laying in the last week or so.  They’ve started out laying peewees which was a first for us as last year’s girls started out strongly from the beginning.  We are waiting for them to grow a bit and size and for a few more to start laying.  Right now our highest daily count was six eggs, but it won’t be long before they’re producing 9-10 eggs a day.

We are having some challenges with some of the girls hiding eggs.  We’ve found several wayward nests and destroyed them, but when we let the girls out early in the morning (as we typically do on work days) we consistently find about half the number of eggs in the nesting boxes as we do on days where we don’t let them out until noon.  I’m hoping with the weather turning they’ll give up this habit since we haven’t yet located the new hidden nests.

Our re-homing was 93% successful after a few days.  We managed to get two of the three “tree chickens” to home to the coop, even the Araucana named Lady that we thought we’d never get to home to the coop (she was our first “tree chicken”).  One of the other Araucanas is still flying in to one of the evergreens out front and is very sketchy.  We’ve gotten her in the coop once but she went right back to the tree after being kept inside for two days.  We’ll have to work on her again at some point, but it’s been challenging.  We find her roosting on the window box of the chicken coop each morning waiting to be let in for food and water, but at that point the girls inside are bursting out.  Maybe this weekend we’ll try to catch her in the coop again, but we’ll see.  She’s pretty safe in the tree as she’s easily 15-20 feet up in the branches, but I do worry about her laying a mess under the tree and succumbing to some nasty weather this winter.