rachels.haven's Journal

[rachels.haven]

Last hatch of the season under way (last, that is, if I have anything to say about it of course). Chicken and duck addition is now over, onto subtraction in the name of (short) family vacations and winter stable numbers. For the rest of the year it's time to fight broodies of various species. And find a hay source. And maybe put up a bigger, stronger permanent goat pen around the temporary one

(and maybe join ADGA and do my goats' paperwork, and maybe get the older doe bred in the fall, and whatever else comes our way). Lots of stuff.

3 khakis in the incubator (muscovy/chicken incubated, incubator hatched), lots of muscovy in the nest. Unfortunately we had a run of rats come through. It used to be 14 khaki eggs, but the rats got to most of them. We'll see how many muscovy eggs made it because I failed to count when removing the khakis. I believe the rats are all dead now. Instead a groundhog decided to take up residence this morning Gotta love the suburbs. No weapons. No one kills pests. They just dump them around.

 

[rachels.haven]

Here's the main garden over at our "Firebird Gardens", weeded and cleared and mulched every winter courtesy of the Firebirds when I open the partition between pens (after shutting off the perennial herb gardens on each side). Everything's been growing kind of slow this year with the crazy temperatures, but it's finally growing.

We've also got strawberries going, with goose berries and raspberries warming up. If we stay here a few more years we'll have what feels like a dozen other things bearing, but right now they're just barely not stick trees.

 

[rachels.haven]

My goat shed has almost totally disappeared. You can just see the roof on the right. I'm not sure if I want to allow it to be eaten by vines so no one knows we've got "suburban" goats on our acre or to expand the pen and beg the goats to get to work. They prefer alfalfa and their pen is starting to grow back. We may lay off the alfalfa pellets (but not hay, I guess) for a little while to encourage them to eat what's in their pen so I can justify giving them more space.

See that mountain of vegetation behind and over their goat coop? (for reference, that roof peeking out is 5 feet high) The buckthorn and trees of heaven are starting to consume the goat house and fence too. I'm worried that it will happen to everything and the understory browse will die and it takes a very short amount of time for things to grow taller than me-months, in fact. I think I have a new weekend project in the form of putting up a new temporary fence. If they can eat enough of that so we can see the groundhog pits and branches that we've got to move, we can mow at least most of that. Right now it appears they do not care for buckthorn, wild grape, catalpa (not a problem tree, but it's in their pen), winter creeper, and trees of heaven. Only alfalfa, black walnut, and wild raspberries.

More goat pictures. I'm trying to figure out how to take pictures of my short, camera adverse goats. Eating all the black walnut branches they can.

 

[Bruce]

Buckthorn is a nasty invasive. I'd cut that stuff out as soon as you can before it gets even bigger and harder to remove.

 

[rachels.haven]

Tell me about it.

 

[rachels.haven]

Just found a new friend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celastrus_orbiculatus

This is getting kind of annoying. Basically if it's an invasive in north america, most often from asia, we've probably got it in our tiny patch of heaven. Need more goats!...Or giraffes more likely.

 

[rachels.haven]

I believe my garden soil has too much nitrogen. Remember the last pic? Well, everything has a whole lot of greens and not much else. I got a few peas, but the weather has been too hot for them to be happy. Now I have a jungle of leaves and volunteer sunflowers.

 

[rachels.haven]

Actually, got a couple zucchini and cherry tomatoes today, but it's still kind of unsettling. No bean flowers, zuchs seem to dislike how much water we're getting this year and are mostly rotting on the plant before reaching size. Hot, hot hot and wet. Early season fast crops did provide a few dinners though. I forgot those. Things are going okay, the weather is just weird.

I added a goat. Meet Ava. Now I can take one of my goats somewhere without leaving one at home alone. Now that our "herd" is complete it's time to send in their registrations/transfer forms.

Happy Summer!

 

[rachels.haven]

Went out to a hay farmer's house and checked out some drying cut hay in the field. I think we're getting this year's hay delivery this week or next-3 small round bales. Now I need some pallets and to clean a spot out in my "empty" garage. It's funny how open space seems to creates stuff to fill it. The hay is good, thank goodness. I've been feeding them TSC alfalfa bales (not good hay, IMO and pricy to boot) and alfalfa pellets...and of course every day I bring them a whole bunch of buckthorn and crab apple saplings, a pile of grape vines, some honey suckle, and/or some wild rose bushes if I'm brave enough to cut and collect them and that's after I take out yesterdays stripped trees and sticks. We're just about out of excess wild black raspberries. I'm so relieved to have GOOD hay coming! It's been so hot and dry here, relatively speaking. My goats might be fat anyway. Eventually my tsc bales ran out (pulled all over the goat coop floor) so I decided to give my local feed store another fair shake. I should not have. I paid $7 for a 30lbs bale of what could very well be last year's first cutting and it shows. No smell, very little green, BIG COARSE yellow seedy stems like straw, mildly dusty. Not cool. Using for straw in chicken nest boxes. The goats would not touch it. I did not want to be stuck with that hay and thank goodness I won't be.

I think it's time to add some genetic diversity to my chicken flock. As soon as I know my first son is starting school in the fall I'm going to order some buff orpingtons from MMH and breed back to red in coloration and heavier build, because red IS best (and fat, they have to be fat) and have them delivered the first week of school.

Butchered 3 muscovy drakes on Saturday, and skinned this time because plucking ducks is not fun at the moment. I put 3lbs, 8 oz breast jerky into the dehydrator and there's a big bowl of wings, legs, necks, and organs needing to be taken out of the brine and frozen. Those were the first drakes of the season because I managed to sell the earlier ones. I hope the skinned meat is still as nice as the plucked meat. I'm looking forward to butchering all the cockerels from this year. THOSE are easy to pluck, even dry. For some reason it looks like we're mainly getting drakes and cockerels this year, which is great for meat purposes, not so great on the chicken breeding front. Just a little odd. I currently have 2 young female muscovy out of about 24 ducklings, and NO pullets. We have about a dozen little roosters running around. Really odd.

Oh well, things are still pretty good all in all.

 

[Bruce]

Does that mean you have a dozen future dinners running around?