A Moonlit Stroll

Well today has been another lovely day, a bit warmer, but all in all real pretty. My Thursdays are usually  spent preparing for Sunday's sermon. This week a passage in John Chapter 10 caught my eye, its the good shepherd passage. Its such a beautiful picture of our relationship with Christ, There is one verse that really stands out to me; when Jesus is speaking of "laying down" His life for the sheep He says "I have the authority to lay it down, and I have the authority to take it up again". Wow, That's so rich. There was no power on earth that could have held Jesus on that cross against His will, it was not the nails that held Him, it was His love for you and I, not only did He have the authority to lay it down, He had the authority to take it up again, and that He did. Well to hear more I guess you will just have to come Sunday. After I got to a stopping point, I went outside to catch up on some mowing, and then settled down in my favorite lawn chair for some reading on my kindle while the squirrels played in the oak trees. Michelle and I went for a evening stroll around the pasture after supper. It was a great time to talk and just be together, it really doesn't matter to me what we do, as long as we do it together, I am so blessed to call her my wife. Well until next time, good night and God bless.

One thousand views!!! Thanks!

I notice as I write this post that we have reached 1007 views on our little blog. thank you so much for spending part of your day with us reading about our little adventures. Without you this blog would just be a diary so from both of us, thanks.

Beautiful Day

This afternoon was beautiful, there was a gentle breeze and a comfortable 81 degrees. As soon as I got home from work I went to buy chicken feed at our small (very small) town's hardware store. To my suprise the price had gone down about a dollar a bag. Things hardly ever go DOWN in price so it was a pleasant suprise. When I got back home and unloaded and put away the feed, the chickens where getting restless, it was as if they where saying; "Hey, food guy, your late!"Somehow they know when I make my rounds, and if I'm a little late, the natives get restless. So I fed them and  put new hay in the nest boxes. To which they responded by organizing the hay into neat little nests.
    Got the frame finished on the little chicken tractor, It didnt take long at all, and for a change it seems pretty sturdy. ( you would have to have seen my other projects to know what I mean) Whne I had finished that I stood there and admired my work. I get a strange sense of satisfaction from making something useful out of something most people would have thrown out. My mom says I get this farming, gardening, simple living from her grandmother.I remember my great grandma Bradford quite well, she died when I was eight but i remember her home quite well, in todays vernacular it would have been called a homestead, but to her it was just getting by. I remember she had every kind of fruit tree imaginable; apples, pears, plums, peaches, figs. she had all of them and she didnt waste anything. I think maybe moms right, maybe i do get this bug if you will from her. Maybe part of that strange sense of satisfaction is grandmommo looking down from heaven and saying, good job great grandson.
        I stood there enjoying the beautiful afternoon, watched the birds for a while.  I know some of you are thinking ; "This guy is out of his gourd watching chickens", and maybe some of you are right , I am a little out of my gourd, but i still love it. Maybe more people should spend their afternoons taking care of creatures other than ourselves, maybe their would be less violence and laziness in the world.
      I do love to just watch them scratch around and mingle, and cluck happy chicken sounds. I have noticed some of the birds have picked their favorite  rooster ( we have three) some hang out with big daddy ( our new Hampshire rooster) and a few others hang out with fat Albert ( rhode island red rooster) while others just Hang out by themselves. Brave, our other rhode island  rooster, we call him brave because he only has one tail feather left, tries to impress the ladies  with his rugged (if not down right funny lookin...bless his heart) good looks, and when that doesn't work he commences to chasing them around the pasture untill they get tired or he does, he is our comic relief. Well thats enough banter for today thanks for stopping by and reading the blog, Ya'll come back now, Ya hear. Good night and God bless.

Incubator Murder

I can see the headlines now; Man kills chicken babies. Ok well its not murder it was an accident so maybe its just chicken-salughter. Here is what happened, the incubator is in our utility room which gets hot during the day and cold at night, sure enough it got kinda cold in there and the incubator went down to 91 degrees. Now that may sound plenty warm bt not for hatching eggs, it needs to be 91, so we compensated and turned the thermostat up on the incubator. 10 hours later when i got home the incubator was 117! thats way too hot. So its back to the drawing board, got some new eggs and started over.
      Got some more work done on the chicken tractor these chicks are going to live in (that is if i stop killing them) I was able to get the vertical supports and two of the top side borads up, I know right, it looks like an upside down table with no top, but I'm going to be a chicken tractor some day (sung with my best Billy Joe Shaver impersonation)

Chicken Tractor

We have about 25 eggs incubating away in the Incubator, and the ones that hatch are destined to fill our freezer this winter. The bad news is I don't have a home for them yet. I cant put them with the older birds because they are just too young to be with those birds, so I have to build something that will keep them safe from predators and yet allow them to be on the pasture.The answer is a small chicken tractor in the likeness of Joel Salatins broiler pens. Just as everything else around here, cost is always an issue. I was able to salvage several 8 foot 2x4's from whats left of an old shed floor that I had torn down, they where slightly worse from wear havng several nails as well as some minor surface rot. After about an hour of removing nails and planing the board edges I  had some decent boards for building that didn't cost me a dime. Yesterday I was able to finish the base of the rectangular box, the dimensions will be 4 foot wide by 8 feet long by 3 feet high, plenty big for a few broilers.
        Today is the third day of incubation and we are hoping to be able to candle them in a few more days. Candling is the process of shining a bright light onto the egg to see whats on the inside. Chickens take 21 days to hatch. on the second day the embryo's have a tiny heart, by the third day it has a head and tiny wings and eyes, and by seven days it has all the features of a chicken only tiny and undeveloped.

I can't see anything yet, will check again in a few days

New Incubator

Incubator

We have been toying with the idea of an incubator for about a year now, and finally we where able to find a used one for a good price. I had to drive an hour to see it but it was worth it. It is a little Giant still air incubator with automatic egg turner. After letting it run for a few hour to make sure we could regulate the temperature properly, we loaded it with eggs last night. Now we play the waiting game, most say you can begin to see the embryo around 3-7 days so we wait. We are incubating 17 chicken eggs that are due to hatch in October, 21 days from today. These birds are destined for the freezer, hopefully by around thanksgiving they will be around 3.5 to 4 pounds which is the perfect size for the freezer.

New (to us anyway) Incubator

This winter, say around mid to late February, we will incubate another round of chicks to sell to the public. I found a farmer in our area that raises royal palm turkeys, as soon as i can come up with where to put them i want to buy three of them, a tom and two hens, we will also incubate turkey eggs next spring, these too will be mostly freezer fodder except for one or two to add back into the breeding program. So as you can see we have lots of plans for this piece of equipment. Thanks for reading our blog, and God Bless

Wednesday September 19

Well the past two days here have been marvelous weather wise. It's been a great two days to catch up on some of those chores I've been putting off. Took out a sumac tree that was trying to take over the shed, when I got that cleared I noticed a few more small scrub saplings that needed to come out before I knew it I had a pretty good brush pile built up.
I was reading an article today from Mother earth news online that talks about having a one acre homestead, the title kind of surprised me, could it really be possible to have a homestead on just one acre?
So I read on thinking it would pretty much just consist of a small garden, some fruit trees, some chickens and maybe a couple of raspberry bushes, but the writer had come up with a plan to have a little less than a half acre garden, a half acre pasture area for 1 milk cow and 1 sow, and a small area for a dozen chickens. I thought to myself "how ingenious".Now of course the Half acre pasture wouldn't be able to support the cow and the sow full time, so the author had it set up to where they would be in the barn part of the time with daily controlled access to the pasture. He. Also had the pasture set up on a four year rotation where once every 4 years the pasture would be the garden. Be also had as part of the garden growing fodder for the animals, as well as the sow eating the left over dairy. He even had income from selling a calf once a year and selling some of the litter or two of pigs after keeping a few back for your own sausage and bacon supply. So altogether out of This simple plan a family could haves all the milk they need, fresh eggs and chicken, meat, and plenty of vegetables to last much of the year, all on one acre. So that got me optimistic, if he could do all of that on one acre just think how much we could accomplish on three. It's got my wheels turning. Oh by the way you can read the article online by searching one acre homestead mother earth news

Monday September 17

It's been a rainy day today, we got a little over an inch between last night's and today's rain, I went out to gather eggs this afternoon expecting to only have a few, since it has been overcast all day and hens usually don't lay as well when there is not a lot of light. But to my surprise they laid 17! After I got them fed and collected, sorted, and cleansed the eggs I settled in my favorite chair with my kindle. It's a really good day to read, besides theres not much I can do in the rain. I posted another recipe on our Facebook page today(www.facebook.com/dogwoodhillfarm) you will just have to go there and check it out. Well I guess since some of you may not do the Facebook thing I can tell you it was a recipe for a "toad in a hole) I ended up making one so I could have one to post a picture of. I decided to feed it to our inside dogs; buddy and K.C. They love Cooked eggs for a treat. I guess I could have eaten it, but being so close to supper time I didn't want to spoil my appetite as my grandmother used to say. Buddy is a terrier mix (rat and something else) K.C (short for kindness and charity) is a chinpin (half chiwawa half min pin) they are both rotten but I had nothing to do with that, well maybe a little bit. Well Michelle will be home in a moment guess I better wrap this up, untill next time.

Saturday September 15

Well, we had a good night at the auction, I was able to buy some tarps, they where a little smaller than I was looking for but for $2 I will make it work. I ended up buying three. By the time I got home I had an idea of how to use them, some extra t posts, rope, scrap lumber( what i saved from tearing down the old rabbit building) and bailing wire to make my rendition of a loafing shed( a shed with no walls just a roof) except mine would have one wall. This morning michelle and I got up early and commenced to moving the chickens to a new piece of pasture, once we had the fence set up I went about constructing the loafing shed. I am happy with the way it turned out, it doesn't look like much. But hey, in farming form should always follow function. We got the chickens back in the fence and watched them go to town for a while on all that fresh grass. I guess this stuff is just in my blood. I am whipped, but I get a lot of satisfaction out of taking care of those animals, not to mention saving money in the process. Total cost of the little shed; 22.25 I only used 2 of the tarps and about a quarters worth of rope (also an auction buy)

Friday september 14

        Well it's finally Friday and I am off Saturday for a change. Didn't get much done today but we have a busy day tomorrow. We are moving the chickens to a new section of pasture in the morning, they have been in the garden for the past few weeks clearing out everything that was left and laying down plenty of fertilizer for next year. That's the neat thing about raising chickens on pasture, you get free labor, the chickens spread their own manure, they remove all the bugs, and they even till it up a little when they scratch around. This next move will be one of the last times we move them until spring, since our grass will go dormant this fall.

       We are going to build a PVC hoop house and cover it in plastic and place hay bedding to a depth of about three inches. I got this idea from Joel salatin's book "you can farm" he houses his layers in hoop houses in the winter and at the beginning of spring plants corn or other plants in the fertilizer Rich bedding. So that's what we want to do house them in there until early march and plant some vegetables in there.
     Tonight I'm on my way to a local auction with michelle and my mom, who by the way has become an auction junkie. Sometimes they have some good stuff and sometimes it's a bust. We have lucked out and got some farming items, but we will see what the have tonight. I'm hoping to find a good deal on tarps, but we will see. Thanks for reading our blog

Thursday September 13

Sorry its been so long since my last blog, we have been busy as little bees around here. The chickens are laying very well, we really didn't expect to get eggs this soon so we are ecstatic over their production level, today we had 15 eggs out of 22 hens. That's very respectable for such young birds.
To give you a good idea about our routine with the chickens; I get home around 3 in the afternoon come in and get the egg basket and the bucket of garden scraps ( mostly just okra now , we put in peelings and ends from various garden produce and feed it to the birds with their ration.) I weigh out their feed and put it in the feeding trough, and while they go to town I collect the eggs from the nests, at this point I check their waterers, inspect their overall health and head in to sort and wash the eggs. Once inside I rinse the eggs in a natural chemical free egg wash for 15 minutes; then rinse then off in cold water and dry them on a towel. Any that I find cracked or broken I make a note of how many and set them to the side for me or the dogs.( they love fried eggs.) I
then put them in cartons and mark with a date . That's pretty much it, takes about Half an hour.
The fence is coming along good, I have all the posts in place and starting on the corner braces and the gate braces I'm using a product my neighbor told me about called wedge loc, it works quite well. It makes putting in braces fairly simple.(I will include a picture) well thats all the time i have for now, untill next time

Todays haul



this is the bracing system i am using for the fence.



Corner brace up close