All the animals seem to be one big happy family...except for Dixie. More on her later in the post. We train our dogs to leave the chickens alone so everyone can pleasantly live together. This hasn't come without any hardship. There have been dead chickens and lots of dog training but it's all worth it to have everyone live in harmony.
We were in the chicken coop the other day to collect eggs and the egg on the left is one of the ones we found. We're assuming it came from CoCo, our black copper maran, because she is right around the age to start laying. We haven't found one since then. However, her eggs are supposed to be a cholocolate colored speckled egg so we're not sure that it's from her. It is cute and tiny though.
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| Top View |
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| Flat View |
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| Big Mama |
Hopefully we'll have a dozen new chicks here in about two weeks. We have a broody hen laying on 12 eggs. She only gets off to eat, drink, take care of business, and she's back to her clutch. If another hen even thinks about coming to her nest she bows up and squaks at them very loudly. Such a good mother hen :)
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| Our farm fresh eggs |
Our hens are laying about 24 of these beauties every day. It never gets old going out to collect fresh eggs.
The lady we are getting our two month old kid (baby goat) from should be contacting us later this week to pick up GG. If not later in the week, we're hoping by early next week. We're anxious to add her to our farm.
We found the pigs we are interested in raising (hamp/york cross) for sale today. Unfortunately for us, we do not have the pig pen built yet so we cannot purchase them. We're dissapointed but maybe it'll spur us on to go back to the family ranch and get our old hog pen taken down and set up here. Maybe...it's already hot here in Texas.
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| From this.... |
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| to this! Still growin' |
Our garden is still doing well. The green beans are growing like crazy! We need to fertilize the tomato plants & weed everything out. Hopefully that'll get done tomorrow evening. Our herb garden is small but doing well. I don't tend to cook with a variety of herbs so I only plant what I know I will use. We have garlic (I do use a lot of this), cilantro, chives, & basil.
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| Sun Gold Cherry Tomato |
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| She's helping us compost naturally |
When my dad was here back in February, we built a compost bin that has three seperate sections. The idea is that you can get one going, then start another, then another so that by the time the first bin is ready for use and you start it all over again, the second one should be close to completion so you don't have to wait so long for compost. I think it's something we need to educate ourselves on more so we can do a better job. Although the chickens do help. They get in there, poop, then scratch and move everything around for us. Composting at it's best if you ask me :)
We also have dewberries that are almost ready for harvest and Brian found a wild grape vine along our fence line. We'll be picking berries to make cobbler and sell at farmer's market and picking grapes to make jelly. My friend, Kyle, makes a yummy fruit leather that I want to attempt this year. Brian just picked the first batch of dewberries today...still have a bunch we're waiting on to ripen but we're getting started.
Tomorrow evening we're supposed to go get dirt to put in our back yard to put our swimming pool on. Lots of shoveling but many hands make the load light and it'll all be worth it once we're in the cool water in this scorching Texas heat this summer.
The dogs are doing well for the most part. Dixie, our female Catahoula Leopard, is in heat and is being quite irritable with the other dogs. We're going to have her spade because she's been having seizures. We'll see if that helps with her mood swings as well. We do not want her to get pregnant again because her seizures seem to be worse during pregnancy.
That's about it for now. Hopefully we'll have pictures of GG soon!
