A Rose for Mother's Day

The first equine denizen of our farm arrived on Mother's Day, May 2010. She is a 10 year old grade Belgian mare, 16.2hh and approximately 1600lbs. She was known as Rosie but we shortened it to Rose a la Dr. Who's companion. She has a freeze brand on her off shoulder that several people have said is the mark of a Premarin pregnant mare urine farm. We've since learned she was green-broke at one time, and we've ridden her around the barn paddock with very few issues. We plan to buy a work harness and see what she knows about that as well, soon.

Our first chickens

Soon after bringing home the NZW rabbits, we were in TSC aka Tractor Supply in Huntsville (as we often are). They were having "Chick Days," so they had baby chickens all the time, and sometimes they had ducklings as well. We had already bought heat lamps, feeders, waterers, etc., in anticipation of ordering chicks from a hatchery. We (as in, I, after DS11 Sean begged) decided to take home a dozen of little red fluffballs from TSC. So around April 18, these came home with us:

See the white splotches on the sides of the brooder? Those are the remains of coralline algae. This is one of the 100 gallon stock tanks that housed coral and anemones back in the garage in the house in Durham. We almost didn't bring the three stock tanks with us, but now are glad we did. They've been wonderful poultry brooders!

The meat rabbits

A few days after acquiring George the bunny I saw a Craigslist ad for four New Zealand White does, about four months old, that could be put in with a NZW buck before pickup if the buyer liked. I answered and it turned out someone else had been a no-show to buy them so they were available again. I arranged a time and place to meet the seller and off we went, an hour away, to Falksville, AL. I was very pleased to see four healthy, bright-eyed rabbits in the back of her truck, so they went home with us to be the broodstock for our future rabbit consumption. They were almost impossible to tell apart until they got separate cages but they were jokingly named Broiler, Roaster, Fryer and Stewer (later renamed Hasenpfeffer).

George the bunny

The first livestock we acquired for our little farm was an albino Angora buck that I named George. As in, I will hold him and pet him and squeeze him and love him and call him George. George was about 4 months old when we drove to Boaz, Alabama (1.5 hours one way) to get him. But I really wanted Angoras and they are kind of hard to find. A solid white one was definitely worth the driving time to me. I've never spun wool/hair/bunny fluff before but have been interested in trying it since I got back into crochet and knitting a couple of years ago. So when this ad came up on Craigslist for the Huntsville area, I answered it. I was hoping for a buck and a doe but there was only the one buck left. Eventually we'll find George a girlfriend or three and raise little fluff factories of our own.

Resurrecting the blog

Fast forward two and a half years after the last post...

Life throws totally unexpected changes at you sometimes, and sometimes plans get put on hold because of it.

In January 2008, while picking up the boys for a visit, their dad asked me if they could come live with Greg and me "for awhile." He said his current job contract would soon be up and he was having trouble finding another one. I told him I'd talk to Greg about it and let him know. Somewhere along the line the "staying for awhile" became "staying permanently."

So land searching went on the back burner. The school system we lived in was one of the best in the area and moving away from it didn't make sense. Moving on top of adding a teenager and a 9-year-old to our household didn't make sense. So it took almost two years to get back on the land search.

Fast forward to October 2008. Greg finds out that his employer is going to be cutting tens of thousands of jobs sometime in January 2009. He doesn't know if his job is going to be cut or not. Skip ahead again to January. After the cuts, he still has a job but his team of 150+ engineers is down to less than 10. There's no longer any requirement for him to go into an office since all his work is done online and on the phone. We start talking about land again. We also decide to go ahead with a tubal ligation reversal for me.

Thanksgiving weekend 2009 we were 8 weeks away from the birth of our son. Greg goes to Chattanooga, TN and Huntsville, AL to look at potential farms. Chattanooga was a bust, but there were several interesting properties outside of Huntsville. One in particular everyone said "felt like home" when they drove up the driveway and I should see it. So I saw it, and I agreed. Long story short, we closed on that property on March 31, 2010 and moved from Durham, NC to the exurbs of Huntsville, AL the following weekend. Driving two 26 foot Uhaul trucks, one of them pulling a minivan behind and the other with a 2 month old in a car seat, is an experience we hope to never repeat. But we made it and in the almost-3-months since have been working on unpacking and settling in and stocking the place with livestock.

We have +/- 20 acres here, about 17 of it fenced and cross-fenced pastures. We have a small pond, a 9 stall barn and a work shop. The house is a 3 bedroom 2 bath ranch, with a large two car garage. You can't see our house from the road, but you can see a small section of the road from the living room windows, the office windows, and the front porch.

So that sort of brings us up to the present day. I will make posts about each animal/type of livestock and hopefully include pictures, then you'll be acquainted with all the denizens of our little farm. Said farm is still nameless, but we'll think of something to call ourselves one of these days. :)