Meet the Goats and New Chickens

Pippen-Alpine Billy-rather bashful

Brandon-Boer Billy

Tulip-Alpine Nanny

White Legs-Alpine Nanny-She doesn’t have white legs

Fresh goat milk

Rob milking on the stanchion he built from just a peek at a picture in an old book. I think he did a fantastic job!

Black Jap Roosters- I have never heard of  this breed. Anyone have a link on any info?

A random bantam breed. The gal I got them from couldn’t remember the name of the breed but they are pure bred. Any ideas? I am going to do a search tonight.

Ant these three fellas get the ax tonight.

Off to buy freezer paper. As soon as I get videos loaded I’ll post those too!

Farm Videos

I didn’t get the video made of Rob taking care of getting the raised beds filled today. It started to rain so I brought the camera inside. Here are the videos of the chicks, the rabbits and the chicken flock outside, however.

To update, the video of the chicks shows a chick that had help hatching. S/He is doing great, drinking and eating and chirping and peeping along with it’s brothers and sisters. So that makes 4 hatchlings so far. I hear chirping int he one incubator he had been in, so there are more coming in the next few days. I’ll sex them in about two weeks. They are fed on non-medicated chick start that we buy from an organic feed supplier over in Wadena. Their feed is a bit pricier but worth it to not contribute to the destruction of Cargill and the likes. No GMOs in my chicken feed thankyouverymuch!

Okay! So with the shows….

The Rabbits:

Just a note there are going to be vermiculture bins underneath the rabbit hutches for a mini-eco-system. I am friends with Ellen Sandbeck and plan to get my bins directly from her this summer on a trip over to Duluth.

The Chicks:

The Coop and Henhouse:

MAKE-OVER!!!

You’ll notice that the previous posts have been removed. I am giving this blog a makeover. As Rob and I are both at home working, doing our farm building, self sustaining action, etc. this blog is going to chronicle our weekly, sometimes daily goings on in building our life in the manner we see the world around us. I’ll be posting about everything from our rabbit adventures, our organic market gardens, the chicks I have hatching as I type this post, kids growing up in the forest, butchering animals, foraging for wild foods (we have an abundance in our forests!) frugal living in our menus, etc. etc. I may even throw in a video or two from time to time. Such as this afternoon. I am going out today to take video of our 5 rabbits to introduce them to you, take you on a tour of the chicken coop, a bit of video of Rob putting in the raised beds and a bit of video of the chicks we hatched from our birds.

A little about our chickens. So far the birds we have procured have been gotten for free off of Freecycle from a lady who needed to be rid of them as she couldn’t take care of them anymore. There were 2 that had been purchased for $5 each from a local organic farmer and one hen that I had rescued from a fellow farmgirl. So all told our flock consisted of 18. After one has been butchered and 2 escaped and got eaten by someone else, now 15 remain. Eggs have been gathered from them to hatch in still air incubators and some have been left to be hen hatched. So far 4 have hatched. One pipped but died so there could have been 5. I think there are 6 more of our birds to hatch out.

So after getting into the hatching game, a bug seriously bit us both. Online I ventured to find some pure breeds. I ended up getting Plymouth Barred Rock, Red Dorking Bantam, Silkies, Buttercups and Black Langshans. Those eggs are all still in the incubators and all here are thrilled for them to hatch. As they are our pure breeds, we plan to build separate living spaces for them from our mutt chickens. Three of our mutt chickens, a roo and 2 hens are going as homewarming gifts to some friends of ours who just put up and moved into a tipi. Sort of a get you started small flock.

The pure breeds that had been chosen were chosen because of their beautiful show qualities, some of them are pretty docile and some of them are super broody. All are good meat and egg birds, sans the bantams as they have tiny eggs.

So join us on our frugal life adventure! Feel free to leave comments, opinions, recommendations, etc. If you have a frugal living, farm living, organic living blog, a pagan farm blog, business or whathaveyou, let me know and I’ll link it.

One last venture for our farm life that I am working on is a podcast of farm living. That is a few weeks out yet though….but keep your eyes and ears open!

Spring is here and there is a lot to do….off to make a couple of videos for your enjoyment!!