We hope everyone here in the U.S. had a lovely Fourth of July holiday! We kept busy around here, as usual, between farm duties and projects, and George having to work a few hours each day (including the holiday) for his off-farm job. You may know, he works as a network engineer, and when companies want to upgrade servers and networks, they want to do it during off-hours, hence, he works most evenings and weekends, on top of being in the office and at clients during the day. If you’ve ever been to our farm and wondered, “Why is the landscaping overgrown?” or “Why isn’t this project completed?” perhaps that helps shed some light on the matter. We work a hard schedule around here, to the point where we can’t “do it all” and we are often behind on the things with which we are trying to keep up. We can’t even leave the farm unattended for more than about a six hour period – so if we want a vacation, we get it about six hours at a time. This is the reality for many small farmers like ourselves. There’s no end to your to-do list as a farmer! And also, no offerings through Kelly Services for an experienced, qualified farmsitter, I might add. 😉
We decided to let the goats help us out with some of our issues and give them a little added nutrition by leading them up to the house to nibble on some of the overgrowth we’re trying to tame back. They did a pretty great job in just a few minutes. You can see them in action in the video:
The tadpoles and frogs are growing up quickly. There are a ton of them that have developed all four legs, lungs, and have lost most of their tail, and they can frequently be seen climbing the sides of the tank, hanging out on the walls. I’ve added a fallen tree branch to the tank, and it extends from the bottom, going across the length of the pool and reaches to just outside of it on a diagonal, in the hopes that if they need something to perch on, they will use it. I’ve seen more tadpoles nibbling next to it than anything else, but they are still very small and may just enjoy the security of the dark walls, where they can pretty easily camouflage themselves. Check out this little guy! (Click on the photo for an enlarged view.)
As you may recall, the turkeys have been presenting us with some issues, the foremost being their unwillingness to remain in a contained yard, even though it is mobile (along with their coop), so they were getting a change of scenery every day. They just fly out of the yard. But we can’t just keep them in their coop the rest of their lives, so we had to simply grin and bear it, hope for the best, and let them free-roam. So far we haven’t lost any (knock on wood), and they seem to have the sense enough to run back into their coop during rainfall, but rounding them up at night has been a challenge otherwise. Last night, I used our ATV to herd them back to their coop for the night.
They have enjoyed their wanderings during the day, so hopefully they remain safe. It is frankly a huge financial risk for them to be out and about like this, but being caged their entire life is counter to our farm philosophy.
If you are interested in purchasing a breeding pair of turkeys (or just live turkeys), we have pairs of Bourbon Reds and Chocolates currently available, and we have a few Blue Slate toms and Standard Bronze hens available for $25 each. They are almost four months old and were purchased from Murray McMurray Hatchery back in March 2013. These will be available at this price through the end of the month. We also have reservations for Thanksgiving turkey starting – please let us know if you are interested so we may place your reservation on our list.
On Saturday night, we discovered a colony of mice had taken up residence in one of the trash cans inside of our chicken coop (we use plastic cans with locking lids for food storage; this one had old feed bags in it and was apparently rodent luxury condos). I dragged the can outside and a bunch of them immediately began to abandon their homes, jettisoning to the ground as quickly as they were able, which is to say, quite swiftly. We called our three barn cats over as quickly as we could, and while they did get a couple, we had to take out some of the mice ourselves with our boots. It may sound cruel, but we can’t have them decimating our feed, especially not the new organic stuff – it costs about triple what the feed we switched from did! George looked out the next morning and saw the local family of crows cleaning up after the remains of The Moussacre, so the circle of life continues. Thanks, crows!
These are just a few highlights of our four-day holiday weekend. “But that doesn’t sound like much of a holiday to me” you say? Well, we did have a bonfire, our little family of three, on Thursday night, and roasted marshmallows, played with sparklers, let off some Roman Candles, and one of those Chinese New Year’s Lanterns – our first time doing one of those, and we all thought it was beautiful and very cool. We got to go swimming a couple of times before we tore out our old rickety deck and started working on the new one. We hope to finish it sometime this week. So we did have us some fun here and there!
We’re looking forward to the new pool deck being done so that we can take a refreshing dip in the pool after we complete our chores at night, even if it is a midnight swim!
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