Gardens & Children

Wow, four children makes life really busy.  I am sure that statement is not a new revelation for most people, but I have found the last couple of months to be crazy.  Once again, I am doing a lazy post and just giving a quick update on the farm.

First off, all our goats are gone.  We have had to prune a lot of unnecessary things from our life right now and the goats were an extra.  Clarabelle was the last one to leave a couple of weeks ago.

 

We had some trouble with our egg production going way down again.  From 55 hens we were only getting around 15 eggs!  That is not okay with me when we are feeding them expensive Organic feed.  We noticed that some eggs were broken and eaten so I decided to take an empty egg shell and stuff it with hot pepper flakes.  I put it in the nest box where we often found the broken eggs.  The next day it was completely gone, not a trace of anything.  It seemed to work.  We still have a few broken eggs, but not as many.  It took two weeks before anyone laid an egg in that box though! After some help from a nice local farmer at Funny Duck Farms we figured that the protein level in our feed was too low for young hens.  Apparently older hens do fine with the protein level we had in our feed, but the young ones need quite a bit more.  Our feed supplier was very helpful and milled us up some new feed right away.  It did the trick and we are now getting around 3 dozen a day and it is slowly increasing.

Our pigs recently decided that they didn’t want to stay in the pasture.  They were getting out once to three times a day.  Not great when we have worked so hard in our gardens.  We have had to use the electric netting that we had purchased for the goats.  It seems to be working, but it has only been two days…

Fencing continues and we have almost finished going around the yard and house.

I decided that I will show you pictures of the gardens because if I wait until they are weed free and perfect, there will never been any picture.

 

I will end with this picture of the front of the house.  Helpful for those of you that have trouble finding our place.