Stuff around the farm

Yesterday while working outside I decided to take some photos of stuff around the farm.

This is actually from February, when my mom visited.  She and Joni got along fabulously.  This was taken before it started pouring, and pouring, and pouring for days.

Our fowl scene has been hit hard.  I wrote last time about the duck tragedies.  We also had some major chicken tragedies.  I had bought 8 australorps, and 3 Texas leghorns a bit ago. They were too young to lay, but all seemed well.  The leghorns disappeared first.  They're smaller than all of the other types of chickens we have (australorp, rhode island red, rhode island red/white mix).  Then slowly but surely our birds started disappearing... and when we wised up to what was going on, there were 3 birds left :(. The mongoose had eaten/ killed them all :(  

Now the mongoose traps are out and I think that while we're still catching them, we've made a pretty good dent in their population.

This is what's left of our flock of maybe 15+ birds.  Pippi, Maude (duck), Onyx and Blackie (australorps) and Ginger (Rhode island red).

They've been getting on well.  But I think the stress of losing all of their sisters (and the constant mongoose visits) kept them from laying.

Now, a month or so later....

 We've finally started getting eggs again.  The brown one was laid by one of our Australorps.  The two dirty white ones came from Maude the duck!  She laid another one today.  So despite her incessant quacking, we might like her after all!

and we really wanted a few more birds (eggs).  So last week I got 8 rhode island reds.  For our records, this week they are about 5 weeks old.  They should start laying in the summer.
 


We brought Joni down near the house to be closer to us.  Here you can see her, Milo and the baby chicks (in their serious mongoose-proof enclosure)

This is a photo of our worm bin that we were working on in the last post.

 Compost happening!

Some projects

This is us working on our black soldier fly worm bin.  The idea is that we stick food scraps in this large 55 gallon drum with black soldier fly larvae.  They process the scraps into nice compost and then supposedly they climb up a ramp- which we have set up to dump right into a trough for the chickens to eat.  It's been over a month now and the ramp hasn't worked yet. Several websites listed the degree of angle for the ramp, but we saw larvae falling.  So we've modified it and are hoping for the best.  In any case, they are doing a number on the scraps.  That's always a good thing!

These next photos are from fencing in the pond.  We busted out the concrete mixer-- the one that we used SO much back a few years ago but which now sits lonely much of the time (not that I am complaining!)
Ra'am was there to help.  We set the posts this day.  Luka was a big help too :D

 Reads: Ducks R Stinkets

1/4/2012 K, GB, R, L, N

December 2011 highlights

Seems like there's never quite enough time to update this blog.  But I went through my photos to highlight what I've missed writing about.

 This is the last photo we have of the great duck experiment of 2011-2012, which was a big fat failure.  We fenced in the pond area and though there were many duck escapes, all seemed to be going ok.  But then one of the 3? males started wobbling and not looking so hot.  And then one of the females looked kind of bad.  We thought (maybe rightfully so) that one of the males was being agressive towards other ducks.  So the "offending" male was picked up by Jake for dinner. 

In the meanwhile the wobbly male died.  And the ducks numbers started decreasing.  One female (the one who had been beat up) disappeared (she wasn't so healthy looking) and then we had 2- one male, one female- Harold and Maude.  And then on the day of Luka's birthday party, Harold died (after getting wobbly).

The verdict?  Our pond wasn't clean.  The ducks died of botulism.

Maude never got sick and has since moved in with the chickens.  

GB and I spent 2 days draining and cleaning the pond.  We also bought a very large aerator.  It looks MUCH better, and we've decided to not get any more ducks in the near future.  Too loud, too poopy and too stressful.

 This sneaky kitty snuck into the house and onto OUR bed!

Ra'am returned for winter break!!

Christy, Brian, Emma and Maya visited!
We spent some quality time at the beach!


We had a super fun New Year's Eve party!

Joni spent some time near the pool!

We tackled a large pond project.... we're now unsure about it since the whole botulism fiasco (which was caused by anaerobic activity in the pond)

GB and I traversed the upper pasture to clean up the fenceline.  We opted to leave the giant tree that had fallen (too big!).  But GB cleaned up many many smaller trees/ branches that had fallen across the fence.