The barn and Athena

It's been a long time...

So it's been way too long since my last post, which I'm not proud of but what can I do about it now? Let me just say that life on the farm has completely taken over my free time. Most farmers will tell you that May-July are some of the busiest times in their lives. There's lots of work to do in the garden. On top of garden work I've had the meat chicken enterprise going on, which demands a lot more management than I thought it would require.

The meat birds are going on their 6th week right now and are enormous! My 3 month old wyandotte pullets are half the size of these monsters. Basically all they do is eat and poop. At first we got away with moving the chicken tractor only once a day, but it quickly became apparent that we needed to move them more often in order to keep them on green pasture. In the beginning they didn't seem to show much interest in the grass and bugs available to them, choosing the easily available pellets instead. Now they seem to enjoy laying in the grass and pecking at whatever moves in from of them. These guys have another 3 weeks left before the big day when BBQ season officially begins on Green Acres.

Because we just couldn't get enough from our first chicken rearing experiment, Heather and I ordered 100 Freedom Ranger chicks from J.M. Hatchery back east. These guys will be much easier to manage although they will take nearly a month longer to mature than the Cornish X we have now. The Freedom Rangers are much better at being chickens, so we can trust them to range on the pasture without the chicken tractor.

On other poultry news, Justin and I scored a $100 12' x 12' shed off craigslist last week. Justin, bless his heart, tore the entire thing down and hauled it to the farm, where we will build a big enough poultry house for the meat birds. We were desperate for a new house for the chickens since the baby goats decided that the tractor was a really fun jungle gym to play on. The poor tractor is in shambles now and the babies have been banned to the barn until the house is built. Pretty soon Green Acres will have a full-fledged poultry operation going complete with chicken house and an exclusive chicken pasture where goats are not allowed!

The garden is finally to the stage between planting and harvest where we can sit back and watch things literally grow before our eyes. Weeding and mulching are the only things we need to worry about at this point. We've had relatively little loss to gophers this season, but I'm not kicking my heels up yet. We've got fruit growing on most tomato plants and some baby pumpkins started! Right now the only veggies we've enjoyed are radishes and zucchini.

Oh, and the county fair is coming up in August and I think I may enter a couple of my pullets for fun! Their beautiful silvery laced feathers are replacing the all black ones every day, so they may have a good chance of a win. Yay!