It’s April 15th…

…and have you all finished your taxes?  We filed ours in February so I don’t have to worry about this.  But also a big thing happening on today is my husband’s great grandma’s 100th Birthday!  (Not many people can say they have grown up with their great grandma (I had mine until I was about 10) or their great, great grandma!)  What an accomplishment!  We celebrated her birthday on Saturday with many family and friends!  It was so nice.  I have been married to my husband for almost 18 years and there were people there that I have never met.  They came from far and wide!!  Not everybody could come so there were lots of missing people too, but it was still nice.

So Happy 100th Birthday Nanny!!

 

 

So on to our little farm news.  We have had two more ducklings hatch as of today.  One the night before last and one this morning.  The one from this morning is still in the incubator drying off and getting all nice and warm.

So the duck on the left was hatched on Friday.  The duck on the right was hatched on Sunday night or very early Monday morning.  Look at the size difference already.  I may not be able to put the new duck with these guys.  Ugh.  I have one more in the hatching incubator that is pipping and two more in the other incubator that are not going to be ready for several more days I think.  I will have to go back to my notes and check to make sure.  Turkeys should start pipping on Thursday if there are going to be any.  Keep your fingers crossed.

Do you guys know what this is?  Ugh.  This is the nest of duck eggs that I finally found today.  I have only been getting one duck egg for several days from my two ducks.  This is the first time I haven’t gotten one from each so I was pretty sure something was going on.  I have been all over the area that the ducks roam in looking for the nest.  I finally found it today.  Want to know what it is under?  The lawn mower.  Ugh.  It is going to have to be moved probably this weekend.  I kind of want to leave them for the duck to sit on when she decides she has enough, but with this yesterday

 (yeah, that’s snow) I’m not sure if any of these will hatch or not.  And I’m not entirely sure that she is going broody.  But normally the eggs are just laid willy nilly around the yard.  So maybe she is. I just am not sure how to handle moving them or taking some out so there is room for ones that might actually hatch.  So I just left them this morning.  One reason I left them is because I set my hand in a big pile of duck poop while trying to take a picture of them.  I always have some sort of poop on me.

Can you tell I have a hole in my water hose?  The ducks can.  They love to play in the water that puddles up while I’m trying to get everything watered as fast as I can so I don’t waste water running out.  Have to buy a new hose this week.  I was happy that I was still able to use the hose this morning even though it was still below freezing when I went outside.  I am so over carrying buckets of water around.

Well, that is all the updates for now.  I’m going to leave you with an example of what I find on my phone every time Gabby gets done playing with it.  Have a great day everyone!

 

It’s been a busy spring and I’m not kidding…

But, my goats have been.  4 out of 5 does have kidded and we have 5 babies hop, skipping around.  The first two that kidded are first fresheners (means that they have never had babies before).  Penelope had a baby girl that was 7 pounds.  Princess followed exactly a week later with a boy that weighed 9 pounds.  Cotton (who has had babies before) followed 2 weeks later with twins, a boy and a girl.  The girl weighed 7 pounds, the boy 8 pounds.  Della (who I bought last year as a first freshener) had a single boy who weighed 8 pounds.  So we are waiting for one more to kid.  Her udder is just starting to grow a little so I am predicting the middle of May. But what do I know?

Out of our 5 ducks that made it from the 7 we hatched out last year, we have 3 ducks (female duck) and 1 drake (male duck).  We had 4 females until one day last week when I got home and 2 were dead.  Don’t know what happened to them, but that is what happens when you have livestock.  It makes it hard sometimes. Especially with the little kids.  We have been getting duck eggs for over a month now.  And had been getting almost 4 eggs every single day.  So now we are down to 2 duck eggs a day.  The ducks are free range and they don’t necessarily lay in a nest so every day is an egg hunt.  Which makes Gabby happy.  March was still pretty cold this year so most days by the time I would go outside around 8:00 a.m. the eggs were frozen.  We put some (the non frozen ones) in the incubator and out of around 32 early eggs we had 10 eggs that have begun developing.  Yesterday the first of the duck eggs hatched.  One other was trying to hatch but didn’t make it all the way.  Ducks seem to have a hard time hatching.  I’m assuming that’s why they are $5 a piece at the farm store.    So right now we have one duckling.  The other two that should have hatched by tomorrow aren’t looking too promising but we will see.  Then some more should be hatching out this coming week.

The turkeys started laying on the 20th of March.  The first day of spring.  I told them they needed to wait a bit longer, but they didn’t listen to me.  We have two hens and one tom left.  We were going to butcher the extra tom that we had, but we gave it to a friend of ours (who we got the initial turkey eggs from in the first place) so she could replace her tom of unknown age who suffered an injury last year.  So hopefully, between the two of us, we will have plenty of eggs to hatch out.  We have 22 turkey eggs in our incubator right now.  And the turkeys have gotten so big and the tom turkey is starting to get pretty aggressive when you go up to their pen and try to get in to get the eggs.  So my hubby rigged up this little gem.    It is a piece of PVC pipe with some wire in a loop taped to the end of it.  Then the net part was made out of some bird netting that we had.  We can use this to get to almost any egg in their enclosure.  And hubby put a back door on their little house area so we can sneak in that way now too.

We have wanted turkeys for a long time but I wasn’t sure if we would ever get to have turkeys.  The cost of the day old poults are pretty cost prohibitive.  ($8 at our local farm store this year)  (And they are usually straight run so you don’t know if you are getting a girl or a boy turkey at that point)  And turkey poults are hard to keep alive.  But luckily we have good friends.  The plan is to raise the poults we get this year to butcher probably next spring.  Heritage breeds grow slower than the hybrid ones.  But that is ok.  Hopefully their meat tastes much better.  And we may end up keeping another breeding set, but we will see what our set up is by that time.  If anyone has any old trampolines they want to get rid of for free, let me know.  We built a pretty neat pen for the turkeys out of our old one last year.  http://wp.me/p1pMVD-2Z

The chickens have decided to start laying eggs now that I have decided to make chicken and noodles out of all of them.    Ugh.  The ones we hatched out last spring that never gave us one egg last year when they should have started to lay.  We will see what they are up to while I use them to help scratch up parts of the garden before we plant to get all the weed seeds out of it.  And I had kind of decided not to do chicks this year.  Just to butcher everything we had and concentrate on the ducks and the turkeys.  But Gabby and I went to the farm store 2 weeks ago and somehow these things just jumped right into our cart.  

I’m not entirely sure how it happened.  But we got 8 Rhode Island Reds and 8 Barred Rocks. I got 16 because I eventually want to have 12 laying hens and something usually happens to some of them.  We have had Barred Rocks for the past 3 to 4 years.  They do pretty good in the egg laying department.  Until they get older.  We have had Rhode Island Reds in the past and have had experience with the roosters getting pretty mean and sometimes the hens too.  But we are planning on all these to be in chicken tractors or something so hopefully we won’t have to worry about any chicken attacks.  AND, I didn’t buy any roosters.  Hopefully.  Then last week I got a call from our local county Extension gentleman and he asked me if I wanted any chicks that a preschool had gotten for their class.  So I took those 6.  I was thinking at first that they might all be roosters (and we know what happens to roosters) or 4 of them were the Cornish Cross chicks.  But I’m leaning more towards these guys being pullets (girls) and that makes me happier.  But that also means that my no chicks this year has turned into 22 chicks this year.  LOL.  AND then the old ones that I thought weren’t going to lay or were eating their eggs have started laying!  Yikes.  We have to figure something out.   This chick was laying on top of the feeder today just hanging out.  He would just hang his head down over the sides like he just couldn’t stay awake any longer.    Then this one the other day fell asleep in the feeder.  You can’t really tell from the picture but his beak was actually in the food.  Just like a little kid falling asleep in their dinner plate.  But these guys are getting big and we are needing the room in the house for ducks and turkeys so guess what.  They got moved outside today!  Yay!  We redid our chicken brooder that we had last year for them (that used to house rabbits) (we reuse and recycle and repurpose everything around here) and we had the Cat-tastrophe of 2013 last year with the brooder until I rigged it up to be Fort Knox.  Well Kevin took all the old chicken wire off it and put solid sides and back and put new 1/2″ x 1″ wire on the front and now it should be all ready to protect those babies.    This is what it looks like without the chicks in it.  I have weighed down the top with 6 really heavy landscaping bricks so the cats can’t lift up the lid.  They seem to like the bigger space and this should hold them another few weeks until they are big enough to go in the chicken tractors.  I feel like all we do is move animals around all the time.

Sorry this post has been so long but I wanted to get these updates in here for my records.  Hopefully it doesn’t rain too much tomorrow and we can get lots more work done on the gardens and everything else that needs done.

We all survived the winter…barely.

Wow.  It has been a while since I have posted anything.  But gosh, this winter just about did us all in.  It was CRAZY as most of you all know.  All the animals survived the winter with us.  Yay!  Lots of times with livestock any extreme in weather is just a recipe for disaster.  But with going out multiple times a day and breaking ice in their water buckets and blocking drafts and such, everything made it through.  Well, except one thing.  ALL of our bee hives died.  (observes a moment of silence for the thousands of bees lost)

We started the winter with 3 hives.  We made it through to the first of the year.  We added food stores for them, then we had some pretty brutal temps for a very long time.  And they just did not make it.  So now we are wondering what to do for this year.  I have my name on a list to purchase some nucs from a gentleman in our bee club.  A nuc is different from a package in that a package is only about 3 pounds of bees and you put those in an empty hive and they have to go to work making all the comb and everything so the queen can start laying her eggs.  Well,  a nuc is either a 5 frame or 10 frame set up.  You have your brood box with either 5 frames or all 10 frames pulled out and the queen is already laying eggs and there is already brood hatching and everything.  The price is not that much more expensive so I think we are going to go that route this year.  I’m not sure if we are buying one or two.  But I need to start saving my pennies so I’m ready when they are.  Our honey was so good last year that I will miss it if we don’t get any this year.  We are also planning on trying to catch a few swarms if we can this year too.  So if anyone sees one, give me a holler.

That is it for now.  Will be updating on everything that has been going on lately here in a day or so.

 

 

Fall updates

Are you guys ready to hear about all the stuff that has been going on?  I don’t even know if I will be able to remember it all.  We had our pumpkin carving party the weekend before Halloween.  I thought this was our 9th party but after looking at my Facebook pics from last year I guess it’s our 10th.  I don’t even remember what made me decide to have this party to begin with.  I know we always carved pumpkins for the kids and we would use those kits that have the patterns with them.  I guess it just kind of evolved into trying to get others in the family to do it.  Or something.  But I think we have a good time.

This year I pulled a friend and her family into the festivities. She has a hard time cutting up perfectly good pumpkins just to carve, but the kids carved some really nice pumpkins.  We had a lot of yummy food like usual.  My mother-in-law always makes something in the theme of the party and her Frankenstein brownies were a big hit.

The kids loved them.  I don’t think very many adults got to try any.

On Sunday we went to the trunk or treat that my church hosts every year.  The kids got a lot of candy and goodies and had a good time.  It seems to be getting bigger and bigger every year as more members participate in it.  Gabby had her first Halloween party in Pre-school this year and Daniel had his last Halloween party in Elementary School.  They don’t have parties in the middle school so this is kind of a bitter sweet year for me.  He’s growing up so fast and I don’t know if I’m ready for it or not.  But I guess it doesn’t matter, it’s happening.

Thursday we went Trick or treating around town.  It was rainy and cold and Daniel wanted to quit early but Gabby wanted to keep going.  We went around town for about 2 hours or so.  That seems like a lot but most of it was going to family to see them and then driving around trying to find neighborhoods that had a lot of lights on so we didn’t have to keep getting in and out of the car.  It used to be a lot easier when more people would hand candy out.  Gabby was a honey bee this year.  Daniel was a lumberjack for the trunk or treat and then a duck hunter for Halloween and his school party.  Gabby is already planning out her costume for next year.  After we had went to a few houses she told me “Mom, this is so much fun!”  She finally was old enough to enjoy it.  And then it had to rain.

I have been trying to get some more stuff put up for the winter.  I have gotten 10 quart bags total of sweet peppers put up.  The first five bags I don’t know what I was thinking but I diced the peppers.  All of them.  We don’t used diced peppers in a lot of stuff, but I guess we will be this winter.  The last five bags I sliced up for stuff like fajitas and stir fry.  I was going to put onions in with them but I was lazy and didn’t.

I bought a few extra pumpkins to cook this year.  I went ahead and got the bigger ones because you get more out of them.  I know everyone says they are not as good, but it’s worth a try.  So I baked one pumpkin on Sunday.  I put the whole pumpkin in the oven.  It almost didn’t fit.  After it baked (I put slits in it for steam to escape) I let it cool (I was actually cleaning out the goat shed) and ended up not having time to mess with it Sunday evening.  So I put it in the fridge and went to work on it Monday morning.  Out of this one pumpkin I got about 16 cups of puree.  I ran it through the food processor but think on the next one I’m going to run it through my food mill on my kitchen aid mixer.

I put about two cups of puree on each tray of my dehydrator that I had lined with parchment paper.  I put it kind of thin, but I think next time I will make it a bit thicker to make it easier to get off the paper.  I only have 7 trays so had to put two cups in a baggie in the freezer.  I used an old mayo type jar that I got from my aunt.  She gave me a lot of canning jars this summer and I am using the mayo type jars for dry storage and for water bath canning.  And they will definitely come in handy for milk storage this spring.  So after dehydrating the pumpkin the 14 cups that was in the dehydrator fit in one jar.  Amazing.  I can save on jars and space.  And I don’t have a ton of extra room in the freezer.  To use the pumpkin I read that you grind it up to a powder and then use 1/4 cup of powder to 1 cup of boiling water and let it sit for 20 minutes to reconstitute and use as you would any other puree.

So I put a post on Facebook to ask friends and family if they had any pumpkins that they had carved or not that they had used for decorating that I would take for my chickens and goats.  I got several responses and have been picking up pumpkins around town.  Then I got a call from a friend and she said she had a trailer load of pumpkins for me.  So we went and got them.  Oh my.

  So these are the pumpkins that we got from Kelly.  Thanks Kelly!  Our chickens and goats are going to be happy.  I’m also going to be happy as there are several nice smaller pumpkins that I am going to cook.  I bet the neighbors are wondering what is going on now when they drive by.  We always have something strange going on here.

 

And I’m not just talking turkey

Well, I guess I am.  We FINALLY got the turkeys moved into an enclosure where they can be on the grass and get out of their little house and move around.  Yay!  It seems like we just can’t get caught up lately.

 Here are the turkeys deciding if they want to come out or not. We had to load up that wooden house thing on a little trailer and pull it down here and figure out how to enclose the end in where it was.  It’s a conglomeration of all kinds of materials.  Beginning with the old trampoline frame.  Then there are some hog panels across the top and some fencing around the bottoms.  But it works.

 Here they are finally out and going to their food.  I think they are much happier here.

  They like their roost.  It is higher off the ground.

  This is a close up of one of the turkeys.  I wish I could get a good picture of the boys strutting their stuff.  They haven’t done it in awhile but today they were strutting around and showing off for a friend that dropped by but I didn’t have my camera.

So we were going to butcher one of the jakes (young boy turkey) this fall.  But I got to thinking about what if something happened to the other one before spring time and then we wouldn’t have anyone to fertilize the eggs.  So now we are going to be keeping both toms and see how things go.  Once we start getting some poults hatching in the spring we will probably pick one to make into a yummy turkey dinner.  I’m already drooling thinking about it.  I hope we have as much good luck with turkeys next year as we did this year.

I wonder how everyone else houses their turkeys.  I have tried to read up on it but I am not having much luck with finding information that fits the type of set up we have here.  We don’t have hundreds of them and right now we don’t want to free range them.  (They can fly.  Um, I want them to stay here.)  But next year we may have to find something different if we raise up several for butchering.  If we get several.

Hey Honey!

Well I started this blog post on September 28th.  It was my hubby’s birthday.  I’m just going to leave most of it and add some more to the bottom.

September 28th:  It has turned out to be a very busy day so far.  First off today is my hubby’s 42nd Birthday!  Happy Birthday Honey!

This picture was taken when we were on vacation on our last day on our way home.  We drove the long way home and went through Hermann, Missouri.  I have been to Hermann a few times with my hubby, but this was the first time I’ve been since I was old enough to drink.  🙂  Yay!  I got to taste the wine this time!  We only went to Stone Hill Winery because we were needing to get home and unload the van and stuff before dark.  We did the tour and had a good time.

We started the weekend out by going out and getting the honey supers off of the bee hives.  Honey supers are boxes that are about 9 inches tall or so and have frames in them that the bees store their honey.  We had 2 supers on each of our hives that we bought this spring.  Earlier in the summer the supers were pretty full of honey.  We waited until now to give the bees a chance to take any of the honey from the supers and put down in their brood boxes if they needed it for winter.  During the winter the queen doesn’t lay eggs so they fill those areas up with honey and they cluster there to keep warm.

One of the hives that had had pretty full honey supers had taken quite a bit of honey down and they really only had about a super and maybe a half full.  These guys were real calm and us knocking them off the frames and brushing them off didn’t seem to phase them a bit.  So we got all the bees off these and brought them in the house.  We went back out to work on the second hive.  These guys were NOT happy with us at all.  We tried to work fast to leave them alone but they were hitting our veils and hats and everything.  Telling us to get away.  I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with them.  This was usually our calm hive.

After we got both supers off Kevin looked into the top brood box.  We found out why they were so mad at us.  They had not brought any of the honey down to their brood box.  It was empty.  Duh!  We were robbing them and they were protecting their winter stores.  But silly bees need their winter stores down in the other boxes.  So we are feeding these guys to help them build up some stores for winter now.

So we got the supers in the house and got the extractor set up.  It is my sister’s extractor and she let us borrow it.  Thanks Cinner!

This is Kevin cutting the caps off the frames of honey.  The bees fill up the cells and then when the honey is at the right moisture level they put a cap of wax on top of it to seal it up.

 This is Kevin spinning the extractor.  It is a manual extractor.  You have to spin it by hand.

 This is Kevin redneckifying the extractor to be able to spin it with the drill instead of us doing it.  We done it by hand for about 10 minutes and had not hardly gotten any honey out of the frames.  We are worthless sometimes.  See the heat gun in the lower left corner of the pic?  I started using it (it is supposed to be used to melt embossing powder in rubber stamping) to warm up the honey a bit.  I would run it a few inches away from the frames up and down to warm the honey a bit to make it flow easier.  We also turned off the air conditioner.  Honey definitely flows better when it is warm.

 Yay!  Success!  It took a few times of finagling to get it to work right but now we are cooking!  I mean extracting.  We got about half of it done when we decided to take a break and go out for supper for Kevin’s birthday.

 The extractor has a spout at the bottom but once it gets so low it is just easier to lift it up and pour it.  I’m going to share a little tip with everyone.  Don’t go and take a shower and then help your husband by scraping the honey from the bottom and sides of the barrel.  You will get honey in your hair and on your clothes that did not have honey on them.  Also, extracting honey in a kitchen with carpeting was interesting.  (We didn’t put it there, it’s just still there.)

We got about 56 pounds of honey off of our two hives.  We were told we probably would not get any or at least very much.  We would not have gotten as much if the silly bees in the one hive would have moved it to their brood box.  But we have figured we can sell the honey and buy some sugar and feed them and still come out ahead.

 So here’s three jars of our honey.  See how dark it is?  I have heard that everyone is saying that their honey is dark.  I don’t know if it is because of the drought or what.  But it is delicious.  I have a little secret to share with you.  I’m not a huge honey fan.  I mean I can eat it and it is good and all, but I don’t go seeking it out for my biscuits.  Until now  I don’t even know if the honey that my dad got when we used to have bees was this good.  It might have been and I was a kid and I didn’t really care one way or the other.  But man, this stuff is yummy.  It is not overly sickeningly sweet like store bought honey.  It’s just good.  Now I’m not sure if I want to sell it.  Just kidding.  I have a few people that have talked to me about it and we will sell some but I am keeping a good amount of it too.

I’m just hoping that our bees make it through the winter and we get more honey next year.  We will hopefully have four hives to start the year out with.  Wish us luck!

Stay tuned for the next installment from my Funny Farm.  We have been really busy lately and I have actually remembered to take pictures of some of the stuff we are doing so I will be posting again in the next few days.  Hopefully I will get caught up with the updates.

 

 

It’s Been A Busy Summer Part 2

Okay, Part 2.  Man I just can’t seem to catch up anywhere.  We have fence that still needs fixing so the goats can go out in the pasture.  I’m trying to figure out why when they have acres and acres of pasture they want to come up to the house and eat dead grass.

So this year Gabby started pre-school.  She just turned 4 at the beginning of September (I didn’t get a post put up about that.  My bad.)

 

Here she is on the first day of pre-school.  She is in the 3 year old class because of when her birthday falls so she is older than most of the ones in there.  She never cried or anything.  She was SO ready to go.  Everyday I have to let her know if she has school or not and on the days she does she is so anxious for the time to go. She’s a hoot.

Gabby was our surprise baby!  We were not planning on having any more kids and along she comes.  But she really finishes the family.  It is a totally different dynamic with three kids.  TOTALLY DIFFERENT!  I really didn’t think it would be.  I feel like I am always in such a rush to get somewhere or to get something done, but Gabby always makes me stop and smell the roses.  She is fascinated by the stars.  When we come home at night if it is not cloudy and she can see the stars it takes me forever to get her into the house because she just wants to look at them.  We all love our Gabriella very much.  Don’t know what we would do without her.

So I’m working on a fodder system for all the animals.  Fodder is a food that you grow without dirt in trays from grain (barley or wheat) and you water it a few times a day and let it drain and in six days your first tray has grown enough for you to give the animals.  I know all the stuff in my head about it, but I am not good at going into all the details.  If you are interested in this just Google fodder and you will get all the information you could ever want.

So we have been experimenting with it all summer off and on.  I really need to finish getting it going.  Kevin set it up outside for a few days to see how the automatic watering set up would work so if it made a big mess it didn’t make it in the house on the floor.

 

As you can tell from this picture the chickens approve.  I kept having to chase this rooster out of it.  He was really enjoying the sprouts.  We are working on getting the watering and draining worked out so it doesn’t mold.  I don’t know if we are going to grow the chicken’s fodder out the full six or seven days or if I am just going to grow it until it sprouts and maybe has  a little bit of green on it.  I just don’t know. I’m still working on it.

So my aunt called me up one day and asked if I wanted some canning jars.  I said sure.  Here is a picture of our pump house with the jars.  Granted I had about 100 or so jars to begin with.  But this is what it looks like now.  And I didn’t even take a picture of the other side with another shelf of jars.  Now I am just trying to work on getting them filled up with stores for the winter.

The ducks are getting so big.  We had 7 but we are down to 6.  Our dog got in the fence and got one.  So now she has to be in a pen.  I hate that, but we can’t have her killing all the animals.  Ugh.  So I have been trying to figure out if I have drakes or ducks.  I have read many conflicting things saying when you can tell if your duck is a duck (girl) or drake (boy).  The drakes get a little feather on their back that curls up.  Some websites say it can show up in about 4 to 5 months.  Others said it waits until they are about 9 months old.  So I was anxiously waiting to see.  And tonight I noticed on one of them there is a little curled up feather!  Yay!

You can also tell by their voices.  Ducks can actually quack and drakes have a raspy voice and don’t really quack.  I have been trying to listen to them to see if I could tell what was what, but I am usually rushing around and can’t sort them out.  So tonight I stood out in the middle of them and listened to them.  I really think this one drake is going to be our only drake out of all of them.  So that is my prediction.  One drake.  The ducks are not all the same age.  There are three of them that are about a month younger than the first batch.  So if any of those are drakes they will show up in about a month or so I hope.  But I still really think I only have the one because of how they quack.  But we will see.

 

So here’s a picture of the two oldest kids on their first day of school.  Elizabeth is a sophomore in high school and Daniel is in 4th grade.  They are doing great this year.  Elizabeth is taking 2 math and 2 science classes and is getting A’s in everything.  I’m so proud of her.  Daniel is doing great in school too!  His progress report was awesome.  Just like his shirt in this picture says.

Okay so I think I have you all caught up.  I know there are things I was wanting to share but forgot, but I will try to do better at getting the updates sooner.

Hope everyone had a great summer and is having a great start to their fall!

It’s Been A Busy Summer, Part 1

Oy!  Where has the summer gone?  I can’t believe we are almost to the end of September!  Ack!

Today is my son’s 10th birthday!  Happy Birthday Daniel Kevin Meyer, Jr.!  I can’t believe it has been 10 years!

 

 

He is my funny man!  He is always being goofy and horsing around.  Sometimes too much for this mama, but I am learning to deal with it.  It has only taken me 10 years to get there.  This picture was taken while we were on vacation this summer (our first since the kids have been born).  He was showing off and being his normal awesome self!  I love you Bubby!!!  I don’t know what I would do without you!

Well, summer has just flown by.  My garden sucked and went downhill from there.  I did get zucchini out of the garden and a few tomatoes off our plants before the goats got out and ate all the tomatoes and the plants.  Kevin was able to salvage one plant and has it planted in a big tub on the front porch.  We will see if it does anything before it dies this fall.

I did get a whole bunch of tomatoes from my aunt in the past few weeks after she was done picking her tomatoes.  Here is a picture of part of the ones I got from her.

 

So I have been diligently canning and dehydrating tomatoes as fast as I could.  Which really isn’t fast at all.  Luckily I didn’t lose too many tomatoes and the ones that got past the prime became chicken food.  They LOVE them.  So I don’t feel as bad about some of them going bad.

Speaking of chickens, our older ones are not laying as regularly as I would like. And half of them are still free ranging and I have to try to find eggs every day. Which doesn’t always happen.  They had been laying in the goat shed in the hay rack and in a corner. But now they’re not so I have to try to find their new nest.  Who knows how many eggs it will have when I find it.

Our turkeys are getting so big. We still have the four and they are still in the same enclosure.  I want to get them moved to a bigger spot so they can have more room to move around and so they can forage a bit for their food.  They are heritage chickens so they can forage and stuff but they can also FLY.  So we are in the process of building something for them.  Luckily our trampoline decided to bite the dust this weekend.  It has been working on it regularly by the springs breaking.  Well, the springs don’t break, but the part that they’re attached to the mat does and then you don’t have a spring holding it on.  Kevin has been threatening to take it down for some time this summer, but this weekend Gabby went to get on it and another spring broke where she was and it scratched her.  So that was it.  It was done.  

 

 

I wanted to put a picture of the kids jumping on it, but of course I can’t find one right now.  I will as soon as I get done with this post.

So this is going to be a new turkey enclosure.  I’m not sure it is going to stay like this exactly, but Kevin was just playing around with it.  He said he didn’t really want me to see it because I would want to turn it into something else.  And I do.  A GREENHOUSE!  Wouldn’t that be AWESOME?  But that’s okay.  The turkeys need new digs.  I will get my greenhouse some day.

So in the last few months I have finally sold my last two Kinder goats.  We are now officially a full sized dairy herd.  The problem with this is fencing.  Obviously the fencing that kept our Kinders in all day long, is nothing for these full sized and full sized to be goats.  Arg!!!  We have spent all summer trying to outwit the goats.  It has not been easy.  It would have been easier if we had unlimited amounts of money to just go and buy new fencing, but we don’t.  So we have had to use a little bit of imagination.  I have finally rigged the pen fencing up enough that they don’t get out of their pen.  But now they don’t stay in the pasture and that really bugs me.  They have acres and acres of grass, clover and trees and brush to eat. But heaven forbid they stay out there without me.  They can jump that fence while they are standing flat footed in front of it.  Just jump.  Or they walk up it.  Like climb it.  Like it is just a ladder for them to use to get to the other side.  It wears me out.

So on the evening that we took our last two Kinders to my friend’s house for her to take to the sale barn (I didn’t want to, but sometimes you just have to), somehow one of the goats she was going to sell at the sale barn ended up in the back of our van.  I’m not entirely sure how it happened, but I am pretty sure my friend and her goat were in cahoots against me.  She is a Saanen and she is HUGE.  I am finally starting to get used to her, but she is still bigger than any other goats we have or have had.  I call her a cow.  Luckily for me she loves to just do what you ask her to do and will walk with you anywhere without fighting and pulling.  She is a sweetheart and always wants hugs and scratches.  She is all lovey dovey to me, but when another goat comes along wanting some loving, she butts them away.  I am working on teaching her that she can share.

 

I can’t wait to get babies from her and milk her.  My friend said she milked around a gallon a day!  I hope so!  I will hopefully have five goats in milk next year.  I don’t know how I’m going to deal with it right yet, but we will figure it out.  We always do.

So if you have been able to keep up with the craziness of our Funny Farm, stay tuned for more updates in the very near future.

Can’t think of a title for this post. So this is it.

Oh my goodness!  It feels like forever since I have posted here again!  I thought we were busy in the last post?  Ha!  That was nothing.

My oldest daughter was back from Tomah for about a week before she left again.  This time she went to San Antonio, Texas (her first time on a plane.  Her mommy cried.) with her youth group from church. She had a great time.  They left on the 30th of June and then got back on the 5th of July.  Then she was going to leave on the 7th for Nashville, Tennessee.  At least I thought they were leaving on Sunday.  At 8:00 in the morning her advisor called and asked where she was.  I was like “Um, in bed.”  Well, lo and behold, they were leaving on Saturday morning!  We had got home after picking her up at 11:00 or so the night before.  Had a load of her laundry in the washer that needed dried but no time.  I told her advisor for them to go ahead and go on, I would catch up to them at some point.  We got her packed (with wet laundry) and out the door in 30 minutes.  It was horrible.  We caught up with her group a little over 100 miles down the road.  Did you know I have a pilot’s license and can make my van fly?  Neither do the cops, so don’t tell them, okay.

So I didn’t have time to be sad that she was leaving because of all the chaos.  But I was sad.  So she was in Nashville until Thursday with FCCLA for a community service project that she did with another girl this past year.  It was the No Kid Hungry project.  They raised money for our school’s Paw Pack program. This program sends food home with needy students on Friday after school so that they have some food to eat over the weekend.  We lost our funding from the area food bank and now it is all donations.  So they competed against 7 other teams that were invited to the National Competition.  Which was awesome.  They got a Silver medal for their project and now it is growing this year and Elizabeth is the chairperson or something (I really can’t keep up with it all right now) and they are going to take it to bigger and better places this year. She is really excited about it.

Meyer Family

The rest of us left our little homestead on Wednesday morning to go to Nashville to pick Elizabeth up.  We got there about 9 (at the hotel) after almost getting killed between two semi trucks.  So we decided not to get out anymore that night and had to wait until the next day to see her.  We picked her up after her recognition ceremony, spent one more day in Nashville and then started home.  We camped on the way home and had a good time.  First vacation we’ve had since before Kevin and I got married and that was in 1996.  Ugh.  It was interesting.

Kids playing in the river at Silver Mines campground

Daniel learning to use flint and steel to start a camp fire.

Got it.

Hiking up to Silver Mines

Elizabeth had a bit of a culture shock going from the Hyatt Regency hotel in San Antonio and the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville to camping.  But she did it.  I really think she was just happy to be with her family again.  We were happy to have her back with us.

On the home front.  Let’s see.  Before we left we had a snake try to get into my redneck duck tractor to eat my baby ducks.  I had put the newest baby ducks out there, but realized that they were smaller than the others when I had moved them, so they could stick their heads out of the little squares.  Well to me that is just putting them on a platter for the cats and the dog.  So I took some wildlife netting and draped over it and held it down with bricks.  Gabby came in one day after playing on the swing set (about 5 feet away from the ducks) and said there was a dead snake by the baby ducks. I was working at the time, so got up and went out with her.  *shiver*  I seen the snake there and was turning around to go get Kevin but he was already on his way out there.

Snake tangled up in wildlife netting by my baby ducks

The snake all stretched out. Yuck.

(Kevin didn’t like this picture, but it’s the only one I have showing how long it was.  Sorry Kevin.)

This thing was pretty big.  We don’t know if it was just a black garden type snake or a king snake. All I know is it tried to eat my babies and got itself caught up in the netting and killed itself.  I had just moved them and been out there a few hours before.  It also gives me the willies that the kids have been playing out there around it.  Ugh.  I know that those snakes aren’t going to bother the kids but still.  We do have a bigger one somewhere because I accidentally stepped on it after taking the goats back to the pasture.  It was stretched all the way across our one lane road/path thing and still had parts of it on both sides.  It was pretty big in the middle where I stepped on it too.  I shrieked and ran like the girl that I am a little ways away and then turned around to make sure it wasn’t following me.  I know, I’m such a girl.

So the turkeys and the roosters that we are growing out are getting big.  Yay!  It will be about butchering time for the roosters.

Turkeys and roosters

On that last batch of chicks that we hatched and had 8 live, I do believe that 6 of them are hens.  

The 8 chicks, hopefully 6 are hens.

So those along with the other 4 from the hatch before that and one from the farm store that survived we have our replacement laying hens for next year.  So we will be retiring the laying hens we have this fall probably when we do the roosters.  They are three years old and are slowing down on the egg laying.

Our first batch of ducks have gotten so big.  I can’t believe how big they are.

On hatching ducks I have learned at least one thing.  I read that you shouldn’t play with baby ducks too much for like the first 3 days or else they will get overly attached to you.  But I read this about a day and a half after our first ones hatched so then I was trying to keep the kids out of them for a bit.  But the brooder was on the floor and they kept going over and picking them up.  Well those ducks are fine.  No problems with being too attached or anything.  Nice calm ducks.  The next ones we hatched, I had the brooder up on a table so the kids couldn’t bother them too much.  I think that was a mistake.  Those ducks are the flightiest things.

The Three Stooges

I think the one that is almost all dark is a chocolate color instead of black.  That will be neat.  Then the one is all solid white.  Hope a few of all of these ducks are females.

I go over to give them food and water and they just run back and forth in their tractor bumping into each other like the Three Stooges.  They are nuts.  Hey, I think we are going to name them after the Three Stooges.  Just thought of that.  I don’t normally let the kids name the poultry because around here with all the wildlife, you just never know and I don’t want them to really get attached to them.  But these guys are just asking to be named Larry, Curly and Moe even if there are some girls in there.  So I know what we are doing the next time we hatch out ducks.  Letting the kids play with them.

The goats are doing fine.  Always hungry like normal.  Well, they think they are hungry.  Silly goats will eat themselves to death if you let them.  (Sorry didn’t get any recent pics of the goats.  I put them out to pasture today and they were all confused because the hay was gone.)

We finally got the hay done. The friends that do it for us and we split with them had quite a few places to bale and he works full time so it took a bit longer.  And the stupid weather wouldn’t cooperate long enough to give us hot, dry days.  But it is done.  We have double what we got out of it last year which is awesome.  We finished putting it up yesterday and sold the last 30 bales to a friend because they wouldn’t fit in our shed.

Hay in shed.

After looking in the shed I think we could have fit those 30 bales in there but Kevin would have had to get the first 15 or so out for me.  It’s going to be tough as it is.  It goes up to the roof of the shed.

I checked on my zucchini today.  I haven’t been picking the squash bug eggs off of it since we got back from vacation because I knew they got attacked while we were gone.  So at this point it is a lost cause.  I might pull them and plant some new.  But I got this pic today while looking for any baby zukes.

Frog on zuke leaf

See that baby frog of some sort on the leaf.  He scared me.  But not too bad.  I wish he would eat the squash bugs or at least those eggs he’s sitting beside.

Well, I think that is about all I have to update here at The Funny Farm.  Sorry for the extremely large post.  Hopefully things are going to slow down a bit, but I’m not holding out any hope for that.

Chicks, goats, bees and celebrities …

Man, has it been a week.  Or whatever it has been since I’ve last posted.  We had a total of 17 chicks hatch from that last batch, but we lost nine.  It has been a really weird year for hatches.

New chicks, a variety, not sure what all we have. But think the two light ones are silkies.

This one is so funny. He makes me smile every time I look at him. Or hopefully her.

Saturday, Sunday and today we have been working on ducks hatching.  They weren’t supposed to hatch until today, but one did on Saturday.  Then 3 more started yesterday, but one died before it hatched.  The other two Kevin coaxed out of their shells today to hopefully keep them from dying.  The membranes were just super dry and they couldn’t get through them on their own.  We don’t really like to help a hatch too much, but sometimes you just have to do it.

New baby ducks

So we have a total of 3 ducks out of 12 eggs.  Don’t think that’s too awfully good.  But oh well.  We have four from our first hatch and I was going to give a friend of mine these, but not sure if she is going to take them now and if my kids will let them go.  Hmm.  And we have lost 3 bigger chicks to what we think is cocci.  We have never had a problem with this before, but this has been a very bad year with illnesses.

I took the goats out to the pasture this morning.  After a few hours one of them got out and hopped back in the pen.  Then the two other adults stood at the pasture gate and cried for the one that got out. So I let them out and brought them back up.  Well, instead of leaving the babies (5 month olds) in the pasture, I left the gate open and they came up. But then I couldn’t get them in the pen.  So I let them free range for a few hours.  We were getting ready to get in the bees so I went out to try to get them in their pen again so they wouldn’t mess with us while we were messing with the bees.  2 of them were in the rabbit shed trying to find some grain.  I got them to follow me to their pen and was looking for the third one.  When I got down to their gate I heard something and looked over and seen the third one with her head stuck in a metal chicken waterer. It was only like 100 degrees out today and I don’t know how long she was like that.  I was finally able to get her head out and she ran right in the pen and in the shed.

I went up to the house and got a bucket of fresh cold water and tried to get her to drink.  She was panting terribly and had foam coming out of her mouth and was shaky.  She wouldn’t drink any water so I came up to the house again and made her some electrolytes.  I was able to drench her with 72 cc’s of electrolytes before she started fighting me with it.  I also got some probiotics down her too.  We coaxed her out of the shed for a bit so she could get in the breeze.  So I left her alone for a few hours and went and checked on her again.  She isn’t as shaky as she was and isn’t panting anymore.  But she is very skittish around me now.  Don’t know if I made her mad drenching her with the electrolytes or what.  So will check on her again here in a bit and hopefully she will survive this.

In the meantime after we got her settled we checked in on the bees.  Man, was it hot in those bee suits.  And we only have the jacket and veil.  Thank goodness.  Our three swarms are doing pretty good.  We had put a second brood box on the first swarm last week but they haven’t really done anything with it.  Hopefully they will start on it this week.  Our big hive is needing it’s second honey super.  It’s first one that has been on their 2 weeks is filled with honey and pretty much all capped.  The small hive we put a second honey super on it last week.  The week before we had put a second brood box on it, but they filled it with honey instead of baby bees.  And we had to put another super on it in the middle of last week.  So their first honey super is completely capped and the second one is almost all drawn out and each frame has some honey in it.  So tonight we are making frames and getting them ready and will put more supers on these two hives tomorrow sometime.  The little hive we are going to put a big box on them under the honey supers to see if they will put brood in it or what.  If not, then they will have more room to put honey I guess.  We just are worried about them not having enough bees to go through the winter.  I know most aren’t thinking of winter yet, but we surely are worried about it right now.  Luckily we have a bee meeting tomorrow night and we will get to ask some questions about it all.  Now we just need to build some more boxes to be able to continue to put supers on if needed.  I understand that when stuff stops blooming then they won’t be making honey obviously.

My sister’s swarm that she caught. It got the second brood box last week.

Daniel is in archery with 4-H and has been practicing a lot lately.  Gabby wants to shoot too.  Well, we have a small bow that is still really hard for her to pull back, but she tries.  She wants to be so much like her brother.

Kevin has been busy making another tractor for the poultry.  This one is going to be for the first 4 ducks we hatched.  Our dog Laddie thought he needed to be in it for some reason.

 

Elizabeth went with my brother to Tomah, Wisconsin on Wednesday and just got back on Sunday.  They were there for a big tractor pull. Elizabeth called me on Thursday and said she got her picture taken with Jack Nicholson and Danny DeVito.  They were there with something that turned out to not be what it was supposed to be.  But they were walking by their booth and my brother’s other helper ran out and asked if they could get their picture taken with them.  So they did.  Elizabeth has been on cloud nine for the last few days.  It was such a great experience for her.  And of course, all of us back home were totally jealous!!!  So here’s the pic just in case nobody believed me.  She also said they were both super nice too!  She is planning on printing out a few copies and seeing if she sends it to them, if they will autograph it for her.  I sure hope so.

Jack Nicholson, Elizabeth Meyer and Danny DeVito

Well, that’s been the week for us here at the Funny Farm.  It has been especially hectic it seems.  Nothing really out of the ordinary though.