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| Non-gas operated lawn mowers! |
It is hard to believe I am so far behind on my blog posts.
Spring is a busy time on the homestead, especially
a first spring!
Two and a half inches of
rain last night in about a two hour period has given me some time this morning
to write as it is too wet to get much done!
So much has happened in the last two months, I will probably on touch on
most of it in an attempt keep this post readable!
First, we lost our bee hive from last year, the bees ate the
stores in the middle of the hive, all the way to the top, but did not eat the
outermost combs. From the looks of it
they ended up starving themselves out because they moved too far from the edges
for them to reach them with the cold weather.
We were able to salvage about 15 lbs of honey and a pound or so of wax
out of the dead hive. We also managed to harvest a couple containers of virgin honey
comb.
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| This years honey harvest |
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| In this picture you can really see the pollen in the honey! |
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| Took me a while to property clean it but 17 ozs of wax! |
I left quite a bit of
the empty comb in the hive in order to help this next batch of bees get
started. We did restock the hive along
with a second hive and as of now both hives seem to be doing well 6 weeks after
stocking them.
A note on the honey, as it is raw and not extensively
filtered, you can see a lot of the pollen, I think it looks pretty cool but as
the honey settles the pollen drops to the bottom of the jar and it almost looks
like you have two separate layers in the honey!
It does taste wonderful!
Since our last post our Kinder heard has increased by two,
on 24 May, about a week early, Pippa delivered twin kids, one boy (Primus) and one
girl (North). I was there for the birth
and it was a pretty interesting experience and I think I was more nervous then
the momma! Before the birth Pippa was
kind of nervous around me, except for feeding time, after the birth however it
is like she is a different goat! Now it
is like I am one of her best buds and she is extremely friendly towards
me.
Six weeks later momma and babies are doing fine except that
momma seems to be having a little trouble maintaining her condition and weight
with producing milk for the babies, this week I am going to start to separate her
and feed her some additional grain on her own.
Next week we plan on separating the babies from her at night and milk
her in the morning (as she is getting her additional grain). We will see how that goes
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| North on the left and Primus on the right a couple hours old. |
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| Mom with the babies a couple weeks old |
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| Out for a little stroll for fresh greens! |
At the end of April, we also received our Galloway cattle, a
Cow/Calf Pair named Candy and Evie and three heifers, named Storm, Ms Kitty and
Charlotte. Initially we put them in the
old corral the previous owners had here for barrel racing as I continued to
work on their pasture fencing (more on that later). It was about the third week in May before we
got them moved to their new pasture, by that time it was nice and lush with
green grass, something they really appreciated after a winter of just hay! In the time we had them in the corral, only Candy
and Charlotte really warmed up to me, Storm and Evie would very timidly take
treats from me but Ms Kitty would have nothing to do with me! Not sure why, but after about three days in
the new pasture, Ms Kitty warmed up to me considerably, to the point that she
was the first one to come running when she saw me out there with treats! She is now the friendliest with me, not sure
what caused her to come around but I am happy she did. Now all of the girls are pretty comfortable around
me.
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| Is it time to eat yet? |
Our pasture fencing project really got thrown for a loop
with the late winter and heavy snow fall this year which buried a couple of our
fence lines in snow which we had to wait to melt before we could get started. On top of that when we had the property
surveyed when we bought it we found out that our northern property line was 5
feet or so INSIDE our fence line, meaning that 600 feet or so of fence needed
to be moved, including driving new corner posts and pulling out the old ones,
that further pushed out our pasture time line. Initially I was trying to keep two of the
fence wires from the previous owner’s fence, a line of braided wire and one
line of smooth wire he used for electric. I realized that would not work a couple hours after
moving the girls to the new pasture, as Terri was sitting down going over
pictures with my step-dads new wife, Barbara, she looked out the winder to see
three Cows in our side yard, outside the fence.
I will never understand why they
left the pasture, which had by far the better grass! It took us about an hour and a half to
wrangle them back in to the pasture, after they had crossed the road into a neighbor’s
field (which luckily was not cleared or planted yet!). At that point, with some help from the family
to include my sister, Sara and her boyfriend Tyler we quickly replaced the woven
wire and electrified the fence, we have not had any escapes since then! Right
now we have one, 1.5 acre pasture or so set up plus the .5 acer corral fenced
off(which will be the home to two pigs next week). I am in the process now of finishing the next
1 acre or so area which will be the goat’s main area. What has surprised me so far is that the five
cattle, really have not put much of a dent into the pasture grass yet, now what
they have done is thinned out the brush in the tree line a bit!
This year we also added some additional poultry, in Mid-April
we received 52 Austrolorp chickens, 8 Cayuga Ducks, 8 Swedish Grey Ducks and 12
assorted geese (from the looks of it, it ended up being 6 Brown Chinese Geese
and 6 White Chinese Geese). So far, they have all survived, which is quite remarkable
as you can generally figure on some losses from mail ordered day old
chicks! About 2-3 weeks ago we
successfully moved the chickens into the main coop with very little issues from
the Barred Rocks who already called the coop home and we moved the ducks and
geese outside. The coops is a little
more crowed but that will this out in a couple months when we cull the excess
roosters from the new group but it is not bad as the free range during the day.
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| Chicks and Ducks a couple days old |
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| Geese and Ducks after first being moved outside (that is a puddle, not a pond!) |
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| Ducks and geese about 8 weeks old |
We are down to about 21 Chickens (including 2 Rosters) from
the 50 from last year. We harvested about 23 Rosters, lost three within the first couple
days of receiving then and lost 4 from predators (including three from our new guard
dog, more on him later). We are down to 4
(maybe 5) guinea hens from our original 15 from last year. We lost 9 to predators, mostly a great horned
owl, before they learned to come in to the Chicken coop at night! We gave one to a friend, who needed a male
(and looks like we may have ended up giving him a female!) and we have one who
is currently MIA and thought to be sitting on a nest somewhere! We currently also have two “broody” Chicken hens
who are currently sitting on eggs now, one is sitting on a small batch of
barred rocks eggs and the other is sitting on a sizable clutch of guinea eggs. We
should know in the next week or so if they are successful.
The last addition to the farm this year is a 12-week-old
livestock guard dog(LGD) puppy named Uncle Jesse (we have goats coming in named
Beaux, Luke and Daisy Mae). The issue
with Jesse right now is he is a big puppy who likes to play and seems to have
already developed a taste for chicken, he has killed three chickens so far (and
severely injured one) including killing one yesterday when he got out of his pen,
that was the first one we saw him eating in earnest, so that we know it was not
just a too rough in playing situation.
We still have not decided for sure what to do with him. LGDs typically can not be fully trusted with
livestock until they are about two years old and are out of that puppy stage, my
concern right now is that he has developed that taste for chicken, we will have
to see how this ends up.
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| Jesse right after we got him. |
Well, that will end this weeks posting, I will leave you
with what is probably the biggest lesson I have leaned so far about
farming. Only plan for half a day of work,
the other half will be taken up reacting to emergencies, break downs or tasks
that took much longer then you planned for it (and maybe a hour or two just to
enjoy sitting with and being with the animals…)
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| This has got to be the fattest squirrel I have seen, think he raided my feed all winter, this was the start of spring! |
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