TheBar1 Homestead- From a sword to a plowshare

This will be the wrap up post from my leave I think We did not get much more done with the piggies this trip, they did not go through their area as I thought they would so we are holding off sending them to a new paddock until next trip in July.  They are growing fast and have even the more skittish of them (Chew Bacon) will now come up for a back scratch.  Here is an updated picture, Ham Solo is the one with the large white strip on his front and Chew Bacon (Chewie) is the one mostly brown. So in addiation to the animal front we also did a lot on the equipment front, on a cold rainy day we went to an Auction for a hobby farmer who was moving back to town due to health reasons.  While there we bought a 130-gallon water tank on a trailer with a PTO powered pump that can be pulled behind a tractor, we also picked up what is probably a 5 foot deck mover also to be pulled behind a tractor, I also picked up a nice 12 gauge Iver Johnson special trap shotgun (I did not ...

OK at this point we needed to switch gears, so far we had lost 3 of our 50 chickens from what I understand that is not a terrible amount considering they were mail order, what we quickly evident is that the small starter brooder we made was not going to last long they were growing so fast, as we did not have coop yet and meant another intermediate brooder.  Part of the scrap wood that was left with the house when we bought it was 2 boards about 10 feet long and roughly 18 inches or so high.  The chicks very much seems to like all the extra space, and they seemed to thank us by increasing their rate of growth!  It was very quickly evident that we would need to come up with a normal coop very quickly. Out intermediate brooder when we first moved them! about 23 March The previous owners did have a small coup but it would not fit our needs at all, they only had a couple chickens (4-5) compared to our 50 (well 47 now).  Their coup also had an overabundance of nes...

Well this will be first of a series of posts about what happened the last couple weeks while I was on leave! Part 1 I am sorry this update has taken so long, a lot has happened since the last update.  About the 19 th or so I got back to Mn from DC with a Uhaul full of stuff that was in storage in DC, it was about ½ of what we had in storage, a 15-foot truck full.  I was able to convince the movers who was unloading it in DC just to put it into the uhaul rather than unpacking it in the house and making me repack it.  Truthfully, I probably would have only fit about 2/3s of what they did in there! The first day or two back was mostly unpacking the trucks before Saturday when the bees finally arrived.  I think we made about every mistake possible unpacking those bees plus we had the bad luck of one queen dying in transit.  At the end of the day we ended up with one small have rather than 2 stronger ones.  Right after hiving them we ended up with ...