Big Farm Day!

First thing this morning, a family came to pick up several of our very beautiful (very annoying) wild chickens. My mom saw a post online last night of a family looking for some more to add in with several young hens they had. Shelly & I went right out and apparently Shell is some sort of feral chicken wrangler/whisperer... she caught 3 roosters and 2 hens. I caught one rooster. While placing them all in a big dog crate for the ride to their new home, unfortunately one of the big roosters got out. Oh well, 3 roosters and 2 wild hens less here! Slowly we are getting rid of them!

Don't get me wrong, they're beautiful! But they're just annoying ... they crap everywhere, roost all over the horse barn, occasionally jump up on the backs of the horses and sheep (if I'm not riding them, you can't either!) and nothing is more traumatizing than finding a drown chicken in the horse water troughs! Plus, we've had an odd ration here of like just three or four hens and maybe twice that or more of roosters... I'm tired of watching these few girls getting cornered and humped by numerous roosters. It's just disturbing.

I sent quite a bit of information off to a friend who knows someone looking for a pasture pal for horses. I said Babydolls were great for that! Aside from links about Babydoll sheep and described Fawn, our newest baby, and Franklin, our withered boy. I think she was looking more along the lines to rescue, but I don't know how you can't see their faces and NOT love them.

Moving along with the farm day, we also had conversations with several people about our broken tractor and possibly selling it after posting it on craigslist. Within minutes someone was calling! Quite some time ago, my dad was on the tractor and it broke. With his condition, he just doesn't answer questions straight anymore ... especially important ones unfortunately like "What do you mean it's broken?" "How did it break?" "What happened?" "When did it break?" "Did you try to fix it?" "Can we fix it?" which is also terribly frustrating because if my dad was healthy, it A) wouldn't have gotten broken or B) he'd be fixing it, not walking inside to sit down alone in his room.

We've had a few calls, but because it's mysteriously broken, nothing has really been firm. We it on craigslist now though, my mom has also become re-interested in what's wrong with it. A friend is coming out later tonight to look at it, hopefully. Even if it doesn't sell for what we have in mind, it was undeniably exciting to have so many calls.

Not done yet! Back to the sheep, actually - I also got in contact with someone looking for a Babydoll sheep ram ... This man called a few weeks ago looking for a ram. Although we don't have any young, white unfixed males (which was what he wanted when my mom spoke with him), I called him today to suggest "trading genetics." I said that we have two pens and he could breeds his ladies with our ram in one pen and we could breed our ewes with his ram in the other pen at no cost to either one of us.

We've now had 3 seasons of babies from Arthur with Olivia and Mellie ... some new genetics would be wonderful! Not to mention, we could breed Rain who I think is a very classic looking Babydoll sheep. The man said this wasn't what he had in mind and he was considering just buying a new ram, but he said he would think about it, so ::fingers crossed::

Considering the wild chickens finding a nice home of their own alone, this day was a success!