July

This fluctuating weather is making us crazy. The excessive rain and then heat have things blooming early, ducks happily digging in mud, and plants growing out of control. I genuinely can't keep up with pruning and containing my tomato plants. Some are growing into all three surrounding tomato cages! Our little tomatoes, pictured to the left two weeks ago, have a hundred tomatoes on each plant. Which is just about enough for me to snack on while weeding, pruning, and harvesting a few to bring inside.  I've also got an abundance of cucumbers flowering and growing all across the garden. It truly is a beautiful thing! I certainly won't complain about too many edibles.

Sully meeting Charlie for her 6 month photos

Our ducks, which we purchased in late May are really growing up nicely. They grow much more quickly then chickens, so we were a bit unprepared. They've been outside since week 3, it's certainly warm enough outside for them. They share space with some of our very spoiled chickens in the "little kid house." This is where newbies go and our most spoiled hen, Sully. It's a tough life for her here on our little farm. 

Our neighbor purchased a great duck house for our ducks, so once it's fixed up a bit, they'll have their own space and safe house to sleep in. Here they are growing out nicely, and enjoying their kiddie pool.

Besides an abundance of fruits and veggies, some amazing flowers are in full bloom. We've had flowers since april it seems, but these I've been really looking forward to. A lily, calla lily, and morning glory growing in among my tomatoes.

Incubating: take two

First hatched chick

A chick unzipped from it's shell

Well, incubating: take one was quite the disappointment, so we tried again. This time we did things a little differently, with dry incubation. Instead of adding water every few days to keep the humidity around 50% we added none, left the vents open (in very humid NJ) and allowed the room to control it. The incubator is kept in the bathroom, at a steady temp inside and outside. Because of this, humidity stayed between 25-30%. 

This second batch from the incubator:

Charlie helping me take pictures

I had 30 eggs inside and 20 made it to lockdown. Pretty good statistics for the obvious infertile eggs and a sizable gap of no electric. Half hatched, 5 others pipped but didn't make it, and the rest didn't make it all the way. I'm pretty happy with these results, we've got another Cream legbar, 2 araucanas, and a few more polish on our chick porch. YUP I've re-named the porch seeing as we've got twenty little chickies running around out there!

To the left is my frizzle polish from the first batch.

To the right is my legbar pullet (90% sure it's a pullet at least!)

Mama and her chicks

So the humans had a 50% hatch rate... My broody hen outside on the other hand had a 100% hatch rate. I gave a first time mom, 8 eggs the same time we started up the incubator. She's a few years old, but hasn't been given the opportunity to hatch eggs, and she did a fantastic job. When I had checked her eggs before I thought only 6/8 were progressing properly, so imagine my surprise when I found seven chicks this morning! Clearly mama hens are better at hatching then we are, even with 3 thermometers and two hygrometers.

 More lessons learned, more chicks on the farm. Pretty soon we'll be selling a few of these polish chicks, if interested, stay tuned!

On another note, my beautiful lilies are blooming:

Incubating: take one

It all started with a teeny tiny pip! 

So a few weeks ago we bought a nice new incubator, a couple of eggs, and did a bunch of reading on incubating. I was using a method that held temperature and humidity steady until the last few days. I read quite a bit about it, and really thought we were ready. Unfortunately, we only had 6 eggs pip and 4 survived! It seems New Jersey may have a bit too high humidity to really get a proper gauge. So, I won't call it a fail, but out of the 18 that were fertile and growing, we only have a handful to show for it. Sigh..

Here's a nice little play by play of the exciting though, because believe me, it was still VERY exciting!!

This is the hatching of one of our mixes, it's a Sultan/Cochin bantam mix. 

Top left is it's little wing popping out. This was about 18 hours after it's first pip, hatching is a long process. 

Bottom left is it breaking the shell all the way around so it can "unzip" the shell around it.

The right pictures is it 75% pushed out of the shell. Only a few minutes until it was free!

Finally free, all it had to do was sleep and dry off a bit. 

Here's hoping our next hatch goes a bit better!

Egg-scellent News!

This past week Donnie & I found an awesome, new (crazy) chicken lady. Don't get me wrong, I accept the fact I am also a crazy chicken lady, just try owning a few chickens and not becoming one!. This one though, she had a whole assortment of fun new chicken breeds. Some rare, some that lay beautiful eggs, and some are just plain fun.

So we traveled up to civilization (Mt. Laurel, NJ) and met her. She showed me her fabulous breeding program and her unbelievable cabinet incubator.. which I've since added to my dream list. 

While there I got a nice little collection of fertile eggs to hatch. We also had to purchase a new incubator seeing as the old one was ancient and faulty. The new one circulates air for a nice even temp and has an egg turner. It also holds over 30 eggs Quite the chicken upgrade on the farm.

We're adding the following breeds to our chicken coop. Crested cream legbar (blue eggs), Araucana (blue eggs), Tolbunt Polish (fabulous bird), and some silkies, since we lost our last one over the winter. 

So egg clients, prepare yourselves for BEAUTIFUL light blue and green eggs this fall! We are ecstatic to see how well we hatch these babies in 21 days. Three weeks until new baby chick pictures!

Until then, check out Tolbunt Polish on the google. 

Garden Growth

 Some spring updates from the farm:

  Our February additions to the flock are growing! At nine weeks now, everyone is outside, with no light, and lots of room to roam. We've given them an unused shed and Donnie's been adding on to their run. These two are our trouble makers. Above, our sicilian buttercup is eyeing me up as I tried to put he back into the run. To the right is Morty, our polish (hen) sunbathing, clearly unaffected by my arrival. A few of these hens are for sale since we just do not need 15 new hens!

We've got lots going on in the garden. Peas, strawberries, oregano, chives, asparagus (for the first time is coming up nicely!!) and other greens are popping up.

Lots planted, lots in the green house! We are ready for this summers excellent veggies. This weekend we got some potatoes in the ground on one side of the yard and some squash in the other. 

Here's a few of the pictures of what's going on 

It was a little too sunny to take great pictures, but here's a few attempts.

The lovely chives on the left.

A terrible picture of our asparagus we cut this weekend. Any tough ends went to some very eager hens. Now we'll just wait patiently for new stalks to pop up where we cut these down. One already is from the cut I did last week. It's much larger too, SO happy we're finally doing the asparagus right!

Strawberries are flowering : ) We've got wild and planted strawberries all over the place in our yard. These are right next to the pea box. Hopefully, since its all fenced off those pain in the butt rabbits and deer won't get them this year!

Just a few more days and we will have ripe, red strawberries all over the place. What better way to take a break than snacking on strawberries fresh of the plant?

Above is our enormous oregano plant. It's sort of growing out of control at this point. Good thing we use a lot : ) 

If not we've got great plans to dry some out and use it all winter. Maybe next year we'll get around to controlling it some

Some of our tallest pea plants. Conveniently half of them were ruined by our adventurous pullets. But, we've still got a few dozen plants growing! Lotsa pea coming soon.

Just a few more days and we will have the beginning of our frutis and veggies.

Still lamb-less

Well the yard looks a mess from all this rain, but all the sheep stood still long enough to get a picture. I was trying to get a few of their enormous bellies, but as soon as they  learned the cookies were gone, everyone scattered. This picture was sort of funny though, everyone looking in different directions. From the front we've got Rain (drop), Olivia, Nina's butt, and all the way in the back is Mellie. Mom was quite sure we'd have babies in all this rain, but still not lambs. 

Olivia's large belly looks to have a dropped a bit, I'm hoping she will be giving birth soon. If history repeats itself we should have twins, too : )

Here's another shot of our pretty little mama, Olivia

We wandered over to give some lunch to the hens and silkies. Donnie's little black hen wanted a closer look before we started feeding them their snacks. She's such a silly hen. 

Donnie had gotten some great work done in the new silkie shed so that we could move a few in. Right now we've got the 6 week old chicks in there along with our newer silkies. 

When we went to feed, Sundance did a little dance around Donnie's feet. I tried to get in on video but he was moving around him much too quickly.. one day I'll get a good one.

This week SHOULD be warmer, we just need to survive this weekend of rain first. Maybe we will get our new lambs with the nice spring weather. Don't worry, we'll make sure we update here immediately! 

Chicken Work

Well, I didn't realize it had been so long since we updated this. I assumed our next post would be full of little lamb photos.. Unfortunately, we are still waiting. This Thursday is the due date estimation, and don't worry I  have informed the girls of this. I'm not sure they were all that worried about it as they chomped on hay and  waited for more grain, spoiled brats.

While we haven't had any new babies born we have had some progress with our few warm days in the past month or so. Thank goodness it's been starting to look more like spring, minus today  of course. 

So, we have added a few new chickens to our flock our the last few months. Two polish will stay and a couple of silkies to go along with our current  few. We decided to add some coop space, and in the words of my old swim coach, "go big or go home." We've done just that by repurposing an old shed that was left empty. With the help of a few Amish we got it into a great place near all our other chickens, and now the work inside is starting. Putting up nesting boxes, fixing up some good roosts, and closing off half to keep  two separate groups in there. Here is Donnie and Mom checking out whats going on in there before we made any decisions. 

Mom got some great work done outside. Peas are planted, tons of plants are started inside, so she (and all of the chickens) were turning over some of the beds outside. We've been moving in some of that great aged manure into the garden areas so we have excellent soil to grow in.

She also got some leaf clean up. She's SO lucky to have the puppies helping. Christian loves laying on anything on the ground. He's a little weirdo, as soon as I put his bed down he's on it, or if part of a blanket is on the floor, he's in heaven! Mom was not so amused.

Miss Maisy, our wry neck Buff was VERY helpful during all of our work outside. She checked all the dropped screws and tacks and walked around all the fencing as we started to put it up. As you can see, she got nice and close to the camera when I stopped working to take her picture. I believe she was telling me to get back to work. Slave driver..

Eggs

Our chickens have slowly been starting back up with their laying. We've got a few mix girls that were born here this past spring. They are both black with hints of blue or green. The one, I swear shines a little purple! She's beautiful. Well they are Ameraucana x brown layers so they have olive eggs. Our first olive eggs! I got a picture of one compared to one of our regular tinted eggs. You can really tell the difference against this one.

Hopefully by spring we will be back in full egg laying mode, right now it takes a few days to lay a dozen, but soon we'll get a dozen or more a day! It's about time, I've been threatening to turn them into stew for months, unfortunately they know I'm all talk..
I got a few pictures of our lovely olive egg layers.. figured I'd make them bigger so you could see the color a little more.

 This little girl is our AmeraucanaX Cuckoo Maran mix. She has some purple, blue, and green in her feathers. It's easier to see in the sun, but she just refused to pose properly for me in the sun..
To the left was her giving me angry looks for chasing her around while great snacks were on the ground. I brought out pancake, banana bread, veggie sticks, and mushrooms. She was not happy I kept disturbing her.

Obviously, since i was trying to take pictures, T-rex had to check me out and make sure I wasn't bothering his hens too much. He cracks me up, but is an excellent rooster. 

Since I had previously written some about our wry neck silkie hen, Maisy, I figured I would show a picture of exactly what i meant by "star gazing" Here she is checking me out when I surprised them. She doesn't do too well with surprises, I should have warned them I was coming. She's really silly and completely independent. Just every once in a while when she gets nervous her neck goes back like this.

An Excellent Birthday

We had a very fun groundhogs day here on the farm. Not at all because of the super bowl, but my quarter century mark! This year, I got the best sort of gift, new silkies : ) Yes, that's right, some chickens for my birthday, but these four are absolutely beautiful and just full of personality. First up, here I am holding Sundance and Cassidy.. We left behind Butch, don't worry though, he has a whole harem of ladies. These are splash silkies, which we have never had before. We'll post more close ups of these two, they are absolutely beautiful, and even more social than some of our other birds. 

So we went to meet our two new silkies at a wonderful local farm. *Small side note, this was after quite a bit of communication back and forth. During this time I had realized I had found another "crazy chicken lady" just like us! She had mentioned her wry neck buff silkie, Maisy. And, during our conversation she had mentioned we could take her and her pal Lily if we wanted to. Well, not wanting to get in over our heads we talked it out quite a bit.. and big surprise, got there with enough crates to bring home all four, you know, just in case. Honestly though, getting there and meeting them, it was hard not to love them! Maisy was obviously nervous, which causes her to "stargaze" ( the perfect name for it) When she does this, her head goes back, I mean all the way against her back. It's weird to watch up she isn't uncomfortable at all and still completely independent. If you haven't realized yet, we are suckers for those "special" pets. So, we obviously brought her home too. Yes, four new silkies to add to our flock. These four will go with Nugget, Smokey, and Boo. We intend to make a nice new silkie container for them with a nice new run next to the garden. 

Fall Activities part 3

Thank goodness we keep Donnie around, we spent hours chopping wood. It really wasn't too bad, we just had quite a bit to be cut for winter. Good looking pile of wood, huh? 

I had a few of pictures of Luna on my phone I had to share. It's so cold out, I don't have anything green to share! So, here she is with our nice little Christmas tree. This small couch has become hers.. It's hard to say no to a dog so stinkin' cute.

For a while we had three chicks on the side porch. These were the ones born in October. Sweetest little things, three was the perfect number to socialize and spoil. Here they are staying warm in Donnie's enormous shoe. As you can see you can fit at least three in one shoe. 

We also had a family friends wedding in the fall. Here is the whole family all dressed up. It's nice to do every once in a while : )

Fall Activities part 1

Well we had TONS of great veggies and fruits this summer. What we don't grow ourselves, we buy as local as possible. I'm talking road stands around the corner. There are some great secret spots down by us with inexpensive, organics that you can buy in bulk. We go a little crazy with freezing and canning these delicious treats.. Tomatoes, salsa, peaches, apples, tomato sauce, apple sauce, and grape jam are all canned throughout the year. We have eggplant, asparagus, broccoli, eggplant, peaches, beans, peas, and leafy greens frozen. Good thing we got a bigger chest freezer!

 One of our batches of peaches

 Top left shows most of our canned goods. The other two pictures were random baskets we picked this summer for meals. It's hard to not miss these days. Fresh berries, still warm from the hot sun.. Crisp peas, a pepper you can bite into like an apple, cucumbers you don't even have to wash to enjoy! Who can beat that!? My mouth is watering just thinking about all the great tastes of summer!

Mum saved lots of seeds from our garden for next year. All of our melons did wonderful this past season.

 Jen invited mom to sell a few things at a nice event at her work. She set up a table, took local apples, honey, and apple sauce. We brought one of our dogs, met interesting people, and really enjoyed ourselves. There was also a great group called Howling woods farm. They rescue and care for wolves and wolf hybrids. It was very informative and we got contact with these amazing creatures!

 This wasn't our best summer for being on top of our garden.. I know this, but it was still a beautiful garden. Here's two shots of different angles. The first shows a line of our enormous sunflowers all lined up against the chicken pen. When these started to die the chickens would fly up and pull the flowers down. They absolutely LOVE the seeds.