I got pictures!

My older daughter brought a camera from the school's photo club home for the weekend so I borrowed it to get some pics of the animals for everyone to see first up is the goats.

Now The white goat is as far as we can tell younger than our black one, who is also the head goat in our tiny herd.  She's always chasing the white one (Milkshake) off the feed while she (Momma) is eating.  The little one is our buckling Oreo, he's still too small to do his job, but I doubt the girls care right now.

I don't know how many people saw back when we got our first flock here how we called the chicks "food tv" for our cats.  But.. we got new programming on the "food tv".

It's the Cornish Cross show, I was in the farm store with Silver picking up a couple things when they brought them into the store.  Silver thought it was funny, my head when up as soon as I heard the peeping from them and I started scanning the store to see where they were.  These guys are going to be an experiment to see if it is worth the cost to raise a bunch next year for the freezer.  That's why there is only 6 now, we had considered getting 12.

Speaking of chickens...

This  Is a picture of about 1/3 of our current laying flock.  I unfortunately have about 5-6 roosters in there and they are getting reduced to 2 roosters next week.  That white bucket in the foreground is a feeder Silver made for them out of a 5 gallon pail and a feed bowl.  He bolted the two together and cut some holes in the bottom of the sides of the bucket and it is now a 5 gallon chicken feeder.  The two leghorns in the picture are roosters as is the bird in the doorway, we're keeping the one in the doorway he's a mix) because he is just so huge.

Here is the other one we are keeping:

It's a turken, we got two of these roosters and two hens of this breed and after watching all of the boys I noticed the turkens are built massively.  Also this turken and that mixed rooster (I call him pretty boy and once I can get a pic you'll know why) are the most vigorous breeders in the batch of roosters.  So it was size of the bird and behavior that determined which roosters are going to be put in the freezer verses left with the ladies.

I have the chicken coop in the same location it was though the yard got an upgrade,

The tarp is  up over the coop and part of the yard partly to keep the tarp from getting torn and to help the roof which needs repair.  We bent rebar for the "hoops", we also used pieces of wood at the bottom to hold the chicken wire down with rebar stakes hammered into the ground which will also prevent anybody from digging into the yard.  We also now have a full sized door on the yard instead of having to bend in half to go into the yard.  All of the chicken wire is the same fencing we had on the old yard reused on this one.

That next building is the new rabbitry with those 2 barrels there to store food for birds and rabbits.

Except for the 2 cages on the upper right everything was gotten from one person.  The cage 'condo' on the left side is a  multi lab cage that can be broken down into 6 cages  when you put dividers in.    We temporarily have just tarps on this structure, we're going to put some wood up on the sides to keep the wind down, we're trying to figure out if we'll need a heater int here or not for the winter as they are all New Zeland and New Zeland crosses.

This is Harriet,

I love her coloring, I am hoping when I breed her, that her color will be in her babies as I personally love that silver grey fur.  I am hoping at least down the line to keep the furs off of the ones we butcher for projects.  She's under a year old so I have a few years of breeding her to try for more with her color.

We do have one top notch animal in this bunch.

This is Ziggy, he came with a pedigree and an ear tattoo that is on his opposite ear.  I am going to be putting does in front of him this week as we have cooler weather this week so we should have fully functioning boys this week.  Seems the bucks' equipment doesn't work well when it hits over 90 degrees.  The only colored rabbit I have is Harriet everyone else is a white New Zeland, and we're trying to figure out what she might be.

I am working on trying to switch the rabbits to forage feeding over pellet food, as I'd rather cut them some food myself than have to buy it.  We had gotten some geese from the person we got the rabbits from too but they wandered off.  Which I did expect, and was figuring I'd have to get some goose eggs to hatch next spring so we have friendly ones to guard our yard.

Well I need to get moving, as it's taken me an hour to set this post up due to pictures and I am still cutting firewood for this winter as our chain saw was out of commission this spring so we're half our wood behind.  Though pretty soon we'll have it all and will be chopping/cutting wood for next year.

Be Well, Be Safe, and Blessed Be...

Silly Things in Life.

There are some really silly words/phrases in the English language and sometimes other ideas are strange as well. Example... “They shot him dead.” So can someone shoot someone alive? Really, come on folks think about it. The phrase is just downright silly.

We even have silly things in gardening, Everytime I look up how to grow something different, everything says “sandy loam” is the perfect soil to grow “X” item. So what doesn't like sandy loam if you are going to grow it? Think on it how many things tell you that what you want to grow wants hard pan, or heavy clay soil?

On the concept of silly things in existence, P.E. class at my kids' school. Now, this school always has the money at the end of the school year to buy all the seniors a gift because they are graduating. However, they don't wish to keep up the gym floor constantly so all of the children are required to have brand new gym shoes that have never been worn outside for the kids to wear for gym class. Otherwise they are required to do P.E. in just socks, which personally I have an issue with.

Now anyone who regularly reads my blog knows that I am a Pagan, and I let the kids go to a local baptist church as it's what they want. I discovered something that is done there that I have an issue with. They bribe the kids with candy to learn their bible verses, and to get them to keep coming back. That isn't right because it shows kids that you only want what someone is willing to pay you to do something. Also I find it wrong that kids are gaining belief in something because someone is paying them to believe in it. What happened to following with your heart?

As for a homestead update, tomorrow barring rain we pick up rabbits and we just got the rabbittry built yesterday. It has temporary sides on it at the moment (tarps) but it is weather proof, as Harriet and Snowball have shown us as they did not get wet with all the rain we had last night and this morning. We have constructed a new sawdust toilet for the building my and Silver are in for this winter, it still needs a seat on it, but shrugs we'll get there. Granted it would have been great to have had it done this morning with the downpour and all the lightning we had. The garden is still producing tomatoes, cucumbers,peppers, and squashes. Seems we did have one pumpkin on the vine, however once it started turning orange it started rotting away. The chickens loved it.

Be Well, Be Safe, and Blessed Be...