TheBar1 Homestead- From a sword to a plowshare

Bees busy finishing of the comb in the second box Well, I have kind of fallen behind on this month’s blog, already the 10 th !  While the homestead/farm is progressing along nicely it is a little harder for me to write about it as I have not been back there this month, not scheduled to be back there until the first week in Sept.  The one good thing is I do get a lot of pictures so in many ways it is like I am there. Our keets (baby guinea fowl) are growing quickly and have already proven to be escape artists.  Terri and Lexi finished getting their new home put together and some poultry netting put up above their run.  One big difference between Guinea fowl and Chickens is Guinea fly!  At 5 weeks old they can already take flight.  We could have clipped their wings but I would prefer not doing that if possible.  Guinea have this strong flock instinct also that chickens do not seem to have.  12 of them survived out of the...

Well a little behind on this months post!  Spent the 4th of July weekend back on the farm as much as possible. Granted I did lose a day due to the following in order, bomb threat outside the airport pushed the flight back, in the time we were delayed bad weather snuck in between DC and Chicago meaning the plane had to take a route to the south, a route that the plane did not have enough gas for, so back to the gate for an hour to add more fuel. once we finally did take off the leg to Chicago was now three hours rather then 2, so ended up in Chicago 3.5 hours later, my plane to fargo actually landed in Fargo before I landed in Chicago.  But we are not done yet, do to the holiday weekend, all three United flights to Fargo for Saturday where booked, so they transferred me to American to fly in to the Minn/St Paul early Saturday morning, so meant I slept at the USO in the airport.  An hour before that flight was to take off it was also canceled, stranding me in Chicago until ...

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 ...

Well as usual I am a little behind the power curb as far as getting the blog out before we are too far behind!  We got back to the states on the 4 th by flying into Chicago where Terri’s mom and aunt was there to pick up us and the dogs, from there we basically drove through the night in order to get to the homestead as soon as possible.  Once we got there were really have not stopped!  Since we were scheduled to get the pigs in the next week or so and I only had a few days before I needed to sign in to Washington DC one of the top priorities for me was to get the electric fencing up and do some fence repairs for the “training area” for the pigs.  A training area is where you teach the pigs to the electric wire, it is a relatively small area with electric wire run around two or three of the sides with a hard fence to back up the electric wire so that the pigs relate the wire with both an unpleasant shock and a physical barrier to the point where they do not challen...

Another month down and one month closer to getting the homestead started!  We still do not know when we are leaving Jordan yet, still waiting on orders, and a definite location for that matter!  Still thinking I will be somewhere in the DC area but not sure exactly where!  We have started to lock a couple things down for the homestead. We ordered the bee hives and they have arrived at the house!  Two Warre hives is what we decided on.  I have not locked in the bees yet which is starting to concern me the later it gets but I cannot do that without knowing exactly when I will be back home to receive them and get them settled in!  Hopefully we get orders this week and I can contact my gaining unit to get some things locked in so I can order the bees.  We have also locked in our two feeder pigs for this year.   We are purchasing them from the Haffner Family Farms in Eagle Bend Mn.  They are running a farm similar to what I would possibl...