Category: Update

Hello again! This Thursday I’m going to give you another update. Surprisingly a lot has happened since I last updated you, a little over a week ago. This last week has been fairly hot, and the last few days have been smoky. Yesterday it rained quite a bit where I live. We have worked on the chicken (duck) tractor a little but not to much because of the heat. We are almost done with it though. 

Last week I started with the garden so today I’ll start with the animals. There is a little bit of bad news regarding the chickens. Our last Rhode Island Red chicken has died. We aren’t exactly sure why it died but we think it might have gotten into the fly poisoning. On a much happier note one of the new chickens laid an egg. I was thinking that nothing really happened to the goats but then I remembered that they knocked down one of the walls on there shed. A few weeks ago they put a hole in it and one day while I was doing chores I saw the wall laying in the dirt.  The kittens that were born earlier this year have taken to playing on our front porch. Some days I go out and read while they play. It’s pretty entertaining to watch them fight. Other then that nothing else has happened with the animals.

There isn’t much to say on the garden. We did end up getting a bunch of cucumbers this past week. This weekend my sister and my dad are making pickles. When they went to get the pickles some of them froze in the fridge, those ones are going to the chickens but they still had plenty to pickle. I am currently at our camper but when I get back I’m going to check the aronia berry bushes. I think they should be ripe. I just checked the apples yesterday and they aren’t quite ready yet.

I think I have told you everything that has went on the last week but I’ll have another post up on Monday.

Hello again, I have decided to start posting two times a week. So from now on I will be posting on Mondays and Thursdays. This Monday I am going to give you all an update.

I have been updating you on different animals and insects but today I will be talking about everything that has happened. I am going to start with the garden, if you have read some of our other posts you will know that we have six raised beds. In these beds we have planted, tomatoes, radishes, beans, cucumbers, and other things. Several of those things are growing well and almost ready for harvest. We have already picked most of the radishes and have also got some garlic that we planted next to the potato patch. Which leads me to the next thing, potatoes. I will ask my dad how he made the patch itself but we have six rows of potatoes. Each row is marked with stick that I wood burned the “potato” on. There are four potato plants growing and those four are doing well. I will update you again at harvest time to tell you what we got from our garden. We also have a small apple tree that has a bunch of apples on it. In past years we have had little apples on it but this year there are some bigger ones two.

Now I will move on to the animals. There isn’t much to say about them, the goats are doing well and so are the chickens. The ducklings are getting bigger and switching moms. We aren’t sure why but MC’s child has joined Splash and rarely visits his mother. All the ducks normally follow around Splash now but sometimes we will spot them with MC. In my post ( Click here to read) about ducks I mentioned the duck house and how all the ducks got out of it. We did catch them all again besides the two mothers of course, but they managed to get out again. My dad found a hole where the tarp and deer netting met and he fixed it. We still need to catch them again and we will soon but it is actually pretty difficult.

Now I will move onto some birds who haven’t escaped, the chickens. In my post ( Click here to read) about chickens I talked about some new ones we got. They were only a week or two old at that point. Now they are much older and nearing the stage when they will start laying eggs. I will tell you when they do start laying.

There is one other thing that is not about the animals or plants, this year my mom has decided to home school us. I will  share about our curriculum later when we have everything figured out. That is all I had to share about today, and I will be posting another post on Thursday this week.

Ducks are in the family Anatidae along with geese and swans. There are several types of ducks the rarest being the Madagascan pochards. There are a lot of more common ducks too. We have one Khaki Cambell duck and a few Muscovy ducks, plus one that we aren’t sure of what type it is. One of our Muscovy ducks was sitting on a nest of eggs and 4 of them ended up hatching. 3 of the died right a way. We aren’t really sure why, but it might be because they hatched in a week where we were having exceptionally hot weather. One of them lived for about a week before dying unexpectedly too. One of our other ducks laid eggs under our deck and 9 of those eggs have hatched.  We yet have another duck that is sitting on a nest.Her eggs have not hatched yet, but we think they will hatch within the next one to two weeks. Earlier this year me an my dad built a duck house out of PVC pipe and deer netting. When we first built it the deer netting was getting caught a then ripping because of weeds. So we wrapped steel mesh around the bottom of the house. We captured all the ducks and put them in the new duck house. One of the ducks escaped because she apparently had a nest and needed to get back to it. We let her stay out and then a week later my dad was gone getting bees. Since my dad and mom were gone my grandma came to stay with us. That week it was really windy, and while my grandma was watching us the duck house blew in the air. The duck house was fine, it only blew a few feet but all the ducks escaped. They are still out but soon we will get them back in the duck house now that it is staked down. That is all I’m going to write today but I will keep you updated if the other eggs hatch.

About six weeks ago my dad got two nucs. A nuc is generally four frames that are already established. We could have also got a package but then they would take about two weeks to draw out comb and even start producing honey. In a nuc all the bees are related to the queen where as in a package they are not. Anyway the hives are doing really well and today when we did a hive inspection we put the honey super on at least one of the hives. A honey super is a box that you set on the top of the other boxes that the bees will put honey in. They can’t become brood frames because the queen can’t get in these frames so therefore she cannot lay eggs. One of our hives, hive 1, is doing really well it has two boxes that are full of honey, pollen, and eggs. There are 15 frames in this hive and we didn’t need to feed them when we checked on them today. The other hive, hive 2, is bigger with 19 frames in it. They are doing pretty well two but the whole top box is still empty, except for a little bit of comb they have just started to draw out. I am not sure if this one has a honey super on it or not. earlier I mentioned feeding the bees. We use sugar syrup with a 1 to 1 ratio of water to sugar. Overall I think the hives are doing really well and I’m excited to continue with this project.

Today I am going to talk about chickens, the first animal we ever bought for our little hobby farm. We have had all sorts of different types of chickens, buff orpingtons, black australorps, and rhode island reds are the tree main types but we also had a few random chickens we acquired in one way or another. Recently we got 13 more chickens, which was 13 more than we were planning to get. We knew we were going to get three chickens from a family friend that didn’t want them, so me and my mom drove to our closest TSC.  We went straight to the chicks and looked at all the kinds they had. They also had baby turkeys which look surprisingly like slightly bigger chicks. We ended up getting six isa browns. We chose these because they are supposed to be able to lay up to 350 eggs a year. Then we after we left we realized we forgot to get cat food so we went to Runnings. When we got there I instantly went to the poultry section to see if they had any cool breeds of chickens, and they did. They had Easter egger chicks, which can lay blue eggs when they get older. The eggs you buy in a store are white most of the time. Chickens like white leghorns lay white eggs. You have also probably seen brown eggs, which is what all of our chickens up until this point have layed. Now we have chickens that will lay blue eggs. There are actually a few different breeds that lay blue eggs, Easter eggers, Ameraucana, and Araucana. There are a few differences between these breeds. The Ameraucana and Araucana are both pure breeds and an Easter egger is a mix of a Ameraucana and a another breed, normally one that lays brown eggs. Our Easter egger chicks are a cream color with some brown stripes on it’s back, but ate the store there were also ones that were a charcoal gray. So now we have talked about chickens that lay white, brown, and blue eggs, but did you know that there is a breed called Olive Eggers that lay green eggs. Or maybe you want speckled eggs, then you should get Welsummers. Actual chickens themselves can be weird colors too. Ayam Cemani for example, these chickens are completely black. Their feathers, legs, bones, and even their meat is black. These chickens are like this because of a dominant gene that causes fibromelanosis, or hyper pigmentation. Chickens can also be extremely fluffy like silky chickens. These chickens are fluffy because there feathers don’t have barbicels. Which according to Oxford Languages are, “any of the minute hooked filaments that interlock the barbules of a bird’s feathers.” That is all I’m going to write about chickens today but I will keep you updated on the chicks this month.

Hi so it’s been a long time but we are back, this is Reagen, Rick’s daughter, and I’m updating you guys now. A lot happened while we were gone so I’m going to start where we left off goats!!! My dad (Rick) built a shelter for them, the shed is made of plywood (or something like that) and has a metal roof. We never really did milk the goats, I think we did once or twice then stopped. Then that winter Cookie (one of our goats) got sick and died, Thor (another one of our goats) got sick too but we gave him medicine and he survived. Before that Morgana (another goat) had her kids, unfortunately, one of them was born dead but the other one is really healthy. We decided to name him Jellybean. Now let’s move onto chickens. Nothing much happened to them, we got several more groups of chickens but now we only have two. The same thing happened to the ducks, we got more groups of ducks and now we have two. One girl and one boy. The girl’s name is Puddles and the boy’s name is Mingo (don’t ask why i’m not sure). Puddles is young and just started laying eggs. When the eggs get bigger we are going to incubate them. That’s all I have to say for now I will be back with another post sometime.

It really did feel like it would never come. Just 3 weeks after we were digging out of 18 inches of snow, we are enjoying 80-degree weather.  Finally allowing us to make some progress outside.  It is a great feeling to finally be moving our plans forward.

Thanks to some help from my dad and mom, we were able to get the fence up on the pen for goats.  I am putting a few coats of paint on the gates and will get those hung this week.  The next step will be to build a shelter for them. Then we will be already to bring our first few goats on the farm.

We will be putting up 12 raised beds this spring for the garden.  We are taking the approach of putting them up slowly as needed.  We have three up, filled and planted.  We have our onions for Dixon Dale Farms, salad mix, and radishes planted into those beds.  We will be working on building and filling three more beds this week.  There are tomatoes, peppers, broccoli and cauliflowers started under grow lights that will be ready to be translated in a few weeks.  There are a few different berry plants that are potted up in gallon pots that we are babying a little right now.  Just bring them outside slowly to get them used to the climate.

We had to wait a little longer than we wanted, but we are finally outdoors.  We are happy to able to get out and get some stuff done while enjoying the weather.  What are your plans for the spring?  Please let us know in the comments.