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!