New Kids on the Farm!

Lucky gave birth on Friday, May 25th to two beautiful little bucklings.

Mom and babies are doing very well.



New Additions to the Henhouse

Our poor hens are outnumbered. Severely.

In fact, it's so bad, that the roosters don't even bother fighting each other over the hens anymore.... they just all take turns on them. One after another. And we've had hens come close to death because of it.

The last straw was seeing the roosters take out their pent-up frustration on a fellow rooster- taking turns on him, just like they would on a hen. It absolutely disgusted me!

So, we called in some reserves: sixteen young hens. Not nearly enough yet to satisfy all the roosters, but hopefully it will relieve the older hens a bit from the constant torture.



Commenting?

I'm hoping the issue with commenting has been fixed. Apparently, certain browsers don't allow commenting due to a "glitch" in the formatting and I've had to manually edit some of the HTML on the blog to allow for it. Let's see if it worked...

Boys' Room- It's a Start

We were anxious to get started on the boys room, so, over the weekend, Handy Husband and I alternated between working in the Parlor, installing a toilet, and we also began painting in the boys' room. We went with a neutral color on the walls, with white trim. I love it! Even with all the imperfections of the old sheetrock.

Here's a before:

And here are the afters. We only painted two walls, as the third and fourth walls need some work done. But at least we can get started getting the boys room decorated the way they like.

Uncovered Doorway

While continuing our demolition of the Parlor Room, we discovered the kitchen's original doorway.

We'll probably use this original doorway and fill in the "old" one.

 



How Does My Garden Grow...

It seems like the garden got off to a slow start, even considering that I started almost all of my seeds indoors, and we were able to plant so much earlier this year than normal, due to the mild winter.

For the most part, everything's doing pretty well. Some of my old seeds didn't have a very good germination rate, so I had to buy a few packs of new seeds to re-sow in places.

The corn looks funny, with all different size stalks, due to the old seed's low germination rate. Tomatoes are doing well, all being grown from 4 year old seeds.

Jon's garden looks good! The only things that never did sprout were the green beans.

Cucumbers are growing well and are waiting for me to build them a trellis to grow up.

I made sure to do successive sowings of radishes this year.
We ALL love radishes and almost never have enough to go around.



Billy the Weedeater

Makin' Hay

We met a friendly neighborhood farmer a couple weeks ago and asked him if he knew anyone that could bale our pastures for us. He offered to do it himself and came by last week and got the job done. The pastures look SO much better now. He said it's really good hay.

We got 27 bales total out of the two pastures, and he'll be keeping half as payment for his work. He said he'll move our bales into the haybarn for us, since we have no way of moving such big bales by hand. If the grass continues to grow at the current rate, we'll get a few good cuttings throughout the course of the year, and have more than enough hay for all the animals.

Equine Arrival!

Yesterday was one of the most physically exhausting days I've had in a while. I went to a friend's farm in the morning to watch her do her horse chores, so that I'd be able to do them for her when she's out of town. It was fun visiting with her and seeing all her beautiful horses, but all the walking and feeding about wore me out.

Then, in the afternoon, my parents and sister came out to our house, with a special delivery for me...

Zander and Zorro!

Unfortunately, we made the mistake of releasing them out into the pasture, where they enjoyed eating belly-high grass. I say unfortunately because, as it turned out, we spent 4 hours trying to catch them again to lock them up in their pen. Being overweight that they are, over-eating can be very dangerous for them, so they HAD to be brought in.

Thanks to the help of my sister's ingenious plan, and my Handy Husband's quick sprinting-through-tall-grass ability, and to my daughters' helping hands, we finally got them "herded" into an enclosed area where they quite willingly allowed us to halter them and lead them to their pen. They were exhausted and sweaty from all the excitement. And so were we!

We all felt a huge sigh of relief when they were locked away safe and sound in their pen, where they were lavished with treats and pettings. It made all the stress and frustration worthwhile.