Monthly Update

Things have been very busy here over the last month.  So busy, that blogging has taken a massive back seat.  I will try to catch-up on everything that’s going on:

Fauna

• The chickens are doing well, laying eggs and getting big.  I have finally butchered the last of our meat chickens.  I ended up processing thirty of them, each weighing btwn 4-6 pounds.  I pieced all of them, some were frozen, others turned into jerky or chicken sausage.  I was able to make a bunch of stock using the pressure canner and have about 20 quarts in the basement shelves ready for use in winter stews.
• Our chicks that hatched last month are doing well, they especially love to hang out in the pigs area and eat any bits of slop they can find.  We have 10 home grown chicks, and another broody hen sitting on eggs.  It is amazing noting the difference between chicks raised by a chicken and chicks form the hatchery.  They are so much smarter and hardier, we hope to never have to order chicks again.
• We ended up butchering our turkeys, one went missing (we suspect our resident fox), and some friends needed a few of their turkeys done as well.  We made delicious turkey jerky and ground turkey for burgers, plus stock.  Of the twelve turkey eggs that one of our chicken hens was sitting on, three hatched, but they all died within a few days.  They were kept in a separate area in the coop with just their momma, so we don’t know what happened.  Turkeys are very fragile, especially as young chicks, and very hard to raise.  We still have four broad-breasted bronze turkeys we are raising for Thanksgiving.  Maybe we will try again next year with breeding turkeys, or maybe we will just buy poults from the hatchery or other local farmers.
• Our ducks and geese are doing well, those that are left.  We have had a fox problem and for some reason, the geese seem to be particularly vulnerable.  We have four adult geese, two toulouse, one emden, one white Chinese.  We think we will likely keep one male and one female and butcher the other two.  Not yet sure how to sex geese, but I guess we will learn.  A number of our ducks are close to butchering size, and then we will make some choices about which to keep through the winter as breeding stock and which to sell or butcher.
• Our rabbit litters are now eight weeks old.  We have started separating and weaning them from their mom, taking a few away each day.  We have 17 and plan to give one away to our neighbors.  The rest we will butcher once they reach 12 weeks old and then we will have bunny burgers and try our hands and tanning their pelts.  We are willing to try anything once, this could be a total failure, but we won’t know until we try.  So far, raising the rabbits for meat has been the easiest of all the livestock.  They are no trouble, eat all of the thinnings from the garden, and are very easy to care for.  We will probably re-breed again at the end of this week once all of the kits (the name for baby rabbits) have been weaned and have one more litter from both female rabbits before the cold weather sets in.
• The pigs are getting big, they love their spot in the woods, they have a nice mud hole and are eating all our leftovers.  We have not had any breakouts, which is such a huge relief.  They will stay with us until the end of October and then go to the butcher.  We don’t think we will keep pigs this winter, trying to keep our work light and our costs down.  They have to use so much of their feed to keep warm in the winter, it does not make as much sense economically as during the summer.
• The sheep and goats are so lovely.  We all enjoy watching them graze on the grass.  Their fleece are getting so long, we have set a shearing date of mid-Sep.  The black lamb will likely go to the butcher this fall, or maybe early next spring, after he is sheared once more.  Our female goat has been favoring her back feet, so we treated her for a hoof fungus.  We have had the wettest, coldest summer in almost 100 years here in CT and the constant wetness is not conducive to having dry hooves.
• So that leaves us with the cows.  They have been complete and utter pains in the *ss lately.  A few weeks ago, Mike, Jackson, and Mike’s parents (who were visiting from NC) were heading out to visit his sister in NYC when Jackson spotted the steer in the front yard.  Mike managed to get him back in, but not before he took the tops off of several of my fruit trees.  I was out for the day with Charlotte and cut my plans short to go buy enough electric fence to cover out entire perimeter.  The next day Mike and his parents installed it, no easy task at all, but not before getting a 6:30am call from our neighbor saying the cows were all in her back yard.  I was honestly ready to call and take them all to the butcher that very day.  They have learned to respect the fence, but now the problem has been that they have been breaking into the garden.  There can be NO mistakes in fencing when it comes to cows, they are like the velociraptors from the Jurassic Park movie, testing each spot until they find a weakness and then pushing through.  Up until this point, we had been letting the cows free range through the whole property so they could get all their own food and water.  We are now in the process of making a fencing solution using the electric fence that will keep them confined to the back part of the property where we won’t have these issues anymore.  The steer goes to the butcher on 10/4, but we still have the two dexters and their calves to keep in line.

Flora

• The grass seed we put down earlier this spring is doing well in this incredibly wet weather.  We have not needed to water, in fact in many parts of our property we have had standing water.  One week we got 12 inches of rain.  This is highly unusual for CT.
• The fruit trees and berry bushes seem to be doing well.  We have been picking a few raspberries and a TON of beetles off the trees.  The kids and I go around and check them all with our bottle of water to put the bugs in and then bring a special treat to the chickens.
• The garden is doing okay.  This week we have been doing what we call “extreme home garden makeover”.  The garden needed MAJOR weeding, staking, pruning, etc.  We have all been going out for two hours each night this week and getting it back into shape.  Our efforts appear to be paying off.  What we need more than anything is sunshine.  We have what I call and really great “Irish garden”.  We have tons of lettuce, greens, turnips, peas, and potatoes.  Anything that likes cool, damp weather is thriving, but our ” Native American” crops (corn, beans, squash) and our “Mediterranian graden” (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant) are not doing so well.  We have really been enjoying have so much of our home grown food to eat, we are really loving Chinese cabbage and kale lately.
• There was a slight break in the rain in the last two weeks and we were able to help our friends who have a farm around the corner from ours put up hay.  We took 200 bales home for ourselves, enough to get us through the winter.  They cut a total of about 1300 bales, enough for themselves and to sell to neighbors and friends like us.  They hope to do a second cut (the grass has a higher protein content in its second and third cuts) and we may take 20 or so bales from that as well, especially if we have pregnant cows and sheep (the next project).  Haying is such an amazing process, equal parts art and science and if you ever have the chance to be involved in it, I highly recommend you take the chance.  You may be sore the next morning, but there is nothing that compares to the sense of community you feel when working on such an endeavor with neighbors.

I think that sums it up for us for the last month.  We have been busy, enjoying time with friends and family, planting, eating, and taking care of our animals.  It is hard to imagine that we have been here less than a year, it feels like forever.