We have an out of town visitor in our house! Visitors are always fun. And sometimes they point out the obvious. In this case, the obvious is that there are many ways to catch a chicken. My husband goes about it very carefully. He is extremely concerned about hurting the chicken. He finds the chicken… Read More The many ways to catch a chicken
All the meat chickens are in the fridge/freezer, and I have done up my numbers (cost, poundage, etc) to share. (Sorry for the formatting stuff, it looks fine in the edit screen, but obviously not so fine when it’s live.) In March we purchased 4 Rhode Island Red day-olds and 2 Americauna day-olds. So the… Read More Meat chickens are in the freezer – cost analysis
It is NOT easy to find a housesitter when you have 29 animals to take care of. On the one hand, regular pet sitters are often overwhelmed by those numbers, and don’t wish to deal with the issues that livestock type animals can bring. On the other hand, farm sitters can charge too much, and… Read More Finding a housesitter
I am T.I.R.E.D.! I can’t seem to catch up on my sleep this week. One day I put four chickens into the freezer, and realized how out of practice I am! Took hours and got me to bed late. Another day I had to drop my hubby off at school, go to the bank, stop… Read More Tired!
I have been wondering about this a lot lately. Most of my self-sufficiency attempts are working well. I had no problem adding chickens to my lifestyle. Doing a compost heap worked almost textbook perfectly. The mealworm farm produced lots of bugs for the chickens to eat. Even after moving from Colorado to Oregon and not… Read More When to throw in the towel?
My first predator. Yuck! Thankfully it’s a small one – at least for right now. Small enough to fit inside my shoe, even. But it was inside the chicken run, and that isn’t an appropriate place for it! Opossums are omnivores. They’ll eat chicken feed and chickens. They’ll eat your garbage, dig through your compost pile,… Read More Opossum in with the chickens!
Today was a big day for the chickens. They’re six weeks old now, so we let them out of the brooder and into the whole run area. No more 8×4 walled and roofed enclosure, now they have a 12×12 fenced area, with just the roof left over the smaller brooder so they can get out… Read More Chicks are out of the brooder!
Working on a backyard farm is very different from working in an office. Yes, I have ditched being surrounded by rectangles in favor of being surrounded by nature. But in an office the most injured I ever got was the occasional paper cut or sore toes from wearing fancy shoes. On the homestead, the possible… Read More 6 things I learned this week about how to live on a homestead
One of the things that fits very nicely into my new office-less lifestyle is volunteering. I enjoy volunteering. There’s something about stepping up and doing a job for someone who needs it, who has no means to pay you back, that feels good. I guess it’s one of the things that proves to myself that… Read More I only feel old on Thursdays
My husband (yes, bloggers can be married!) had one whole margarita and blamed it for his inability to hold his camera still an hour later. But that’s not what this post is about. This post is about SNAILS. You can see a tiny fraction of the snails that hang out on my house if you… Read More Learning about garden pests – and how to make them into benefits
Ranting About Rectangles 