Hello everyone,
Hopefully you are all doing well this fall. Mark and I have been busy getting ready for the snow. The harvest is in, the weed fabric has been pulled up along with the drip lines for the garden and orchard. The chickens have been getting a treat by being let out into the garden area to eat what greens are left, weeds mostly. We have been stacking fire wood for my mom’s fireplace. It has been pretty chilly here with frosts just about every night. We also received our first snowfall though it only stayed for 24 hours.
Our new project in October was getting a duck house built next to our pond. Mark has been busy milling lumber for it and Robin, our contractor, has been building it. We call it the duck chalet. It’s so nice that it’s even insulated and has a concrete floor. Well, two inches of concrete over the wood for easier cleaning. It is up off the ground to allow air ventilation and to keep the dampness out. It is 12 feet by 12 feet total but only 8 by 12 is the duck room and the other part is the feed room. Our Muscovy drake does not like to be around chickens so it is very nice to finally get him out of the old chicken house where my mom’s Red Star chickens are kept and put him into his own house along with Daisy our Pekin hen duck. Soon we will be getting three Muscovy hens from a friend of ours to keep our two from getting lonely.
I finished selling produce down in White Bird for the year but still have some customers wanting eggs through the winter. My egg production will be down for a bit though as I sold 23 laying hens to make room for 54 pullets, young hens, that should start laying soon. Twenty-six of those hens are Rhode Island Reds. If the Rhode Island Reds are as good as everyone says they are then we will eventually change over to that breed completely. In the meantime, we still have Black Australorps, a few Buff Orpington and seven Americana. Of the twenty-three I sold, thirteen were the Barred Rocks and ten were Black Australorp we purchased last year. I was not overly pleased with the Barred Rocks in general. Their eggs were small to medium and they liked to peck you when trying to reach in to get the eggs from under them. The Australorp are a nicer chicken and lay larger eggs. The ten I sold had gone broody on me during the summer. Everything I’ve read told me this variety of chicken rarely goes broody. Well, out of twenty-seven hens, ten of them went broody. Not good when you want egg production. For the most part I was getting an average of fifteen dozen eggs a week during the summer and easily sold every dozen. My hope for next summer is to have twice that amount. Between what we have in the barn and my mom’s chickens in the old chicken house we will have 90 laying hens once the young ones start laying. That’s up from about fifty-seven layers this summer.
The hen house is quieter right now. We butchered ten roosters. One rooster was last year’s bird and the other nine were hatched out in April. Our new roosters are Rhode Island Reds that we purchased in June with the twenty-six Rhode Island Red hens. Our neighbor had a chicken plucker we borrowed to help in processing our roosters. Then I gutted and saved the liver, gizzard and heart for our cats and dog. We cooked all ten roosters in two very large Oster Roaster ovens overnight and then I picked all the meat off for freezing. Our cats and dog got an excellent week of chicken skins and innards. Today I am making chicken curry for lunch. Yumm!
The goats are doing great. The little girls are growing up so fast. We’ve been debating on if we should breed Saber who was born March 1st. We think she is at least 80 pounds now. The other two girls who were born beginning of May are still too small and won’t be bred until next winter. The three does I am still currently milking have finally gone into heat but we will wait until late November when they go into heat again to breed. Saanen goats go into heat in the fall and winter months every 21 days for a three-day cycle. The signs of being in heat is a lot of tail wagging, stretching their neck like a preening model and being very talkative. They are funny to watch especially when teasing the buck from the other side of the fence. We took the girls for a walk one day so they could forage and had a hard time with one of them that was in heat. She didn’t want to leave the barn where the buck was. After the girls are serviced (pregnant), they have a five-month gestation so the plan is to have the kids in April next year when our snows should be mostly gone. Our first kid this year had been born in February and it was still very cold wintery weather. I’d prefer to have some green grass showing this round. We also hope that our little buckling Tovia will be big enough to do his job, especially with our largest girl. We estimate our largest girl to be around a hundred and twenty pounds. Tovia is probably half that size. He was born end of April. I suspect next year he will be double in size. So will see how the breeding goes in a few weeks. At least he hasn’t been aggressive to either Mark or I even though he’s showing signs of being in rut. He’s very stinky. We are very pleased with his personality.
That’s the latest happenings here. I hope you all have a great November and stay safe during the changing of seasons.
Many Blessings,
Joey