Definitely more ducks.

So, the funny farm just went quackers! :) We've had Muscovy ducks for a year or so, but they don't quack. They hiss when upset but don't quack at all. But now we are the proud owners of two trios of Ancona ducks. And they definitely quack.

Mature trio is: a black and white drake with a heart-shaped patch on the back of his head, named Romeo. A lovely chocolate and white duck that lays green eggs. And a lavender and white duck. Juvenile trio is: a blue and white drake, and two black and white ducks with iridescent green wings.

They're residing in the Chicken McMansion for a few days, so they learn that this is home now, and where food will always appear. And I'm planning on baking my bread with duck eggs in the morning! :)

Ducks, ducks and more ducks.

So, the people we bought the Ancona duck eggs to hatch out here, are moving out of state. They are selling out a lot of their adult and juvenile ducks. I'm pretty sure I'm going to go buy at least an adult trio (a drake and two ducks) from them in the next couple of days, and possibly a few 14 weeks old juveniles as well.

Pretty sure the baby goat is sold, just have to find out how soon his new owner wants to take him.

Still need to put up a CraigsList ad to sell Missy, the TWH mare.

Still no eggs from the Chicken Horde. They stopped laying, probably because of the heat wave last month, and haven't started back up again that I can tell. Really dislike having to buy eggs at the store and still feed 2 dozen hens! Maybe the new ducks will pick up the chickens' slack.

Just write something!

The only way I'm going to get this blog going again, is to just write something. So, I'm writing something...

We lost a Buff Orpington hen to a predator yesterday. I don't think it was a stray dog, because her head was gone but there was no other damage. A weasel or a raccoon probably. I smelled either skunk or fox musk around where I found the carcass so I suppose our neighborhood fox might have grabbed her then got chased off its kill by our Great Pyrenees. Sad though, we've had her almost a year and the people we bought our Buff hens from had them a year.

Have 7 newly hatched Buff Orpington/Rhode Island Red cross chicks in a nest box in the Chicken McMansion, our first hen-brooded and hatched chicks. They are adorable bundles of fluff right now. I really like the Buff/RIR cross chicks we hatched in our incubator earlier this year, they're growing fast and excellent free-rangers. Having more of them is a good thing.

Our 100 chick order from Hoffman Hatchery (that was really only 98 chicks but that's a rant for another post) is down to about 75 chicks now, and most of the casualties have been the Red Cornish Cross cockerels. They just die for no reason I can see. I'm assuming it is heart or organ weakness, the Cornish Crosses are infamous for that and it's been pretty hot here. They have the shade of the chicken tractor, and food and water and can forage as they please so I'd think they'd be in chicken heaven. Well I guess most of them ARE in chicken heaven now, just not the one that does me any good here. :/

I haven't attempted to count the survivors, but we started out with 26 Buff Orpington straight run, 23 RIR straight run, 24 Ameraucana straight run, and 25 Red Cornish cross cockerels. There is one Ameraucana that hatched out here before this order arrived, the sole survivor of 42 eggs in the 'bator during the tornado power outages of April 27-May 1.

I bought four solid white guinea fowl keets from the feed store down the road a few days ago and put them in the chicken tractor with the chicks. No sign of them now. *cries*

We have 22 Ancona duck eggs in the incubator, about 10 days from hatching. I bought 2 dozen but two never started to develop. Looking forward to them hatching and having cute fluffy ducklings, but not looking forward to the extra work that ducklings entail.

Our first goat kid born on the farm is almost 3 weeks old now. Little Bit had a single buckling on June 13th. He's brown with frosted ears, nose and white crown. Hopefully he is sold, to someone that wants a purebred Nubian herd sire.

Sold the two problem children goat kids, Spot and Runty, last week. The barn and goat pens have been so much quieter and calmer since then! The remaining goats don't leave the paddocks even if the electric isn't hooked up. They don't yell all the time or pick fights. Next on the sales list is Missy, the Tennessee Walking Horse mare we bought last year. She's too small for adults to ride and too green for kids to ride, now that my two older sons have gone back to live with their father in South Carolina. So she needs a home with a job.

There's more to write, lots more, but it's 1am and I need to get some sleep. Hopefully more soon.

Trying again

... to get this blog going. I'm going to leave it open as a tab in Chrome in hopes that will remind me to write more often.

We got 100 baby chicks in the mail a few days ago, May 26th 2011. 25 Rhode Island Red straight run, 25 Buff Orpington straight run, 25 Ameraucana straight run, and 25 Red Cornish cross broiler cockerels.

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).