I can’t believe another month has already gone by! Here is a round up of the 365 pictures, A Picture a Day From The Freckled Farm, for the month of February. Enjoy!
Follow us on Instagram (@TheFreckledFarm) to see the pictures each day. Baby goats are days away and things will be blooming on the farm before too long!
So far this year all of the fun farm facts have been goat related, so I thought it was time to do a fact about one of our other farm animals. Today’s fact is about chickens!
Chickens are born with all of the eggs they will lay in their lifetime. The rate in which they lay eggs depend on the time of year. Chickens need a minimum of 14 hours of sunlight to lay an egg, so during the shorter, colder days chickens lay less eggs. Some farmers will light their hen houses in order to encourage chickens to lay more during the winter months, however this does not cause them to lay more eggs in their lifetime, it will only cause them to go through their egg supply quicker. While there is nothing wrong with this practice, it is not something we choose to do. We like our girls to have a break over the winter months.
It’s no secret that I am not a fan of the cold and snow, but even I can see the beauty around the farm after a snow storm. Everything looks so fresh and clean. A stark difference from the muddy mess we have been dealing with the last few months. This past Wednesday, the day after we received 8 inches of snow overnight, I trekked around the farm documenting some of the beautiful scenes the storms left behind.
With the storm came frigid temperatures. Friday morning it was -6 degrees! It has been a struggle to keep the house warm and get things done around the farm. At this point I am beyond ready for spring to come!
By now I am sure you know that we are doing a 365 Project on Instagram – A Photo a Day from The Freckled Farm, but aside from the “photo of the day” that we are posting each day there are others that get posted… and because they aren’t the photograph chosen to represent that day they get left out of the month’s round up. There are some great images that get left out, so instead of just letting them fall through the cracks I decided to do a round-up of the “other” pictures each month. This way if you don’t have Instagram you aren’t missing out!
If you do have Instagram consider following us (@Thefreckledfarm)
Have you been following our 365 project on Instagram (@Thefreckledfarm)? We have been posting at least one photo a day from the farm. If you aren’t following us you might want to consider it… come March there will be a ton of pictures of baby goats!
Don’t have Instagram? At the end of each month we will be posting a round-up of the pictures that we posted throughout the month. Below are all the pictures from January. Enjoy!
The last two weeks since Kevin left his “day job” have been an adjustment. For the last two years we have lived in survival mode. Kevin was pulling in at least 60 hours a week at work and every other second of the day was stacked with things that needed to be done for the businesses and farm. Late nights and extremely early mornings were how we lived. Now that the 60 hours of work outside of our businesses are gone we are trying to figure out what our new schedule looks like. We no longer have to live with the mindset that if we have a second it needs to be filled with something because who knows how much time we are going to have later. We are working on balancing everything and actually giving ourselves time to just relax… what a concept. I have actually had to set myself a set of tasks that need to be completed that day, and once I am done I am allowed to relax. Otherwise I will just move on to one of other five hundred tasks on my to do list…
One of our big projects this week is working on our new goat milk soap laundry detergent. We are officially in the research and development phase! So far so good! We plan to sell them in three sizes; a nice large reusable glass container with a wooden scoop, refill bags, and finally a sample size for 2-4 washes. We are currently planning on 4 scents; Sunrise Citrus, Lavender, Tea Tree (for strong odors caused by bacteria – body odor and stinky socks), and Unscented. Look for these detergents to join our market booths and website in the late winter or early spring.
We do have a little bit of sad news from this week. We lost one of our free ranging chickens to a hawk. Her name was Sophia and she was one of our original chickens. In fact she gave us our very first egg! We retired to her to the pasture last spring where she, and several of her sisters, had the run of both pastures and the barn. We knew this was a possibility. Chickens are very vulnerable to predators, especially when they are free ranging, but that doesn’t make it any easier when it happens. I am extremely tender-hearted and we love our animals. In the meantime we have moved the few other free rangers into the big closed coop until we can figure out a safer option for them. Our fear is now that the hawk knows where the food is he will just keep coming back.
Check back next week for even more updates!! There is so much in the works!
I’m sorry that I have been so bad with the farm updates lately. Things have been a little crazy around here. I am done edited in the pictures from Hillary’s labor, now comes the issue of finding time to write the blog post… But I promise it will be soon. The babies are doing wonderfully. They are about twice the size they were at birth. They are so much fun and the kids absolutely love spending time with them in the kid pasture. They all have such wonderful personalities and are going to make great additions to our herd.
We are so behind in our gardening this year. Anything that needed to be started inside has been done, but anything that could have been planted outside already (peas, green onions, and such) have been put off. None of our new beds have even been filled with dirt yet… schedules and weather has delayed the delivery, but it is set to come tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully the yard will be dry enough for them to drive across it!
The baby chicks are getting so big. One of the ones that we thought was a buff orpington, because it was identical to the other buff orpingtons the day they were delivered, turned out to be one of the easter eggers, and one of the ones that we thought was an easter egger we think might in fact be one of the marans. It does look like we may have gotten multiple maran roosters, but only time will tell on that one. It won’t be long and we will be moving the older chickens into the pasture so they can free range and the new chicks into the old coop. I can’t wait to see how the maran eggs turn out!
Just when you think we have enough going on…. We have some exciting news! We will soon be adding salt scrubs, sugar scrubs, and bath teas to our line!! We are currently in the research and development phase, but I expect to debut them in the next month, just as soon as our testers give our recipes a thumbs up. So keep an eye out for those!
The Wednesday market in Goochland Courthouse moved outside last week. It was so nice to be out in the sun and the children liked having the space to run, and playground to play on. We will be outside from now on so come and visit. We have some really great vendors! Today there should be a few veggies, eggs, sausage, brunswick stew, bread, goat cheese, mustard… and of course our soaps!
The chicks came yesterday afternoon!! I don’t have any good pictures yet. Only a few taken with my phone and I’m not sure they are even in sharp focus. The chicks arrived happy and healthy! We did have one little problem… one of our chicks was wrong. We ordered 4 female easter eggers and 1 male and that is what we got (as far as we know… it is still possible the chicks were sexed wrong). We also ordered 3 male buff orpingtons as filler to make our order reach the required minimum. We received these chickens and they will be used as meat bird. The issue came with our black copper marans. We ordered 7 females and 1 male and we only got 7 total marans. In it’s place was an additional buff orpington. We are hoping that the missing maran was not our rooster. If he is missing we will not be able to breed more pure bred marans as we had planned. We don’t plan to do it as a business, just for ourselves and friends who might show interest in this rare breed. So, it won’t be a huge hit if we don’t end up with a rooster, just a disappointment. I called the hatchery and they refunded me for the mistake and were very helpful.
This doesn’t compare to the drama that was involved with our last chicken order almost two years ago. Breckin was two and a half and Bryce was about a month old. I went to pick them up from the post office and was told that there was problem with my birds… that the box really stunk. So I put the box in the back of the SUV, put the kids in their car seats, rolled all of the windows down, and drove home trying to figure out how to handle this situations. I knew I had at least one dead bird. The only thing that could account for that smell was death. When I got home I put the chick box on the porch, gave Breckin a snack and put him in front of the TV, and tried to get Bryce comfortable in her chair. I brought the box into the dinning room where I had the brooder set up and opened it up. At the bottom of the box was a poor dead chick that had been squished (I will spare you the details) and another that was injured. I started to pull the live birds out of the box, dipping their beaks in water to encourage them to drink, and then putting them into the brooder. That is when I encountered our next issue. I had made the brooder out of an old dog kennel. It seemed like a good size, would be easy to clean, and would protect the baby chicks… if it could keep them from escaping. Come to find out that the spaces between the bars were too wide. I would put the chicks in and they would just squeeze right out. So here I was with a dead chick, an injured chick, healthy chicks that I couldn’t leave in the box with the other two, a brooder that the chicks could easily escape, a 2.5 year old, and a one month old. What was I going to do? Well, I called my amazing friend Ginni who happened to be off that day and begged her to come help me. She was at the house within minutes. We wrapped the outside of the lower half of the kennel with chicken wire, got the healthy chicks comfortable, and then started to tend to the injured chick. It wouldn’t move it’s legs. Ginni wasn’t sure the chick was going to make it, but showed me what I could do to help her and answered dozens of questions over the next 24 hours as I tried to nurse it back to health. The injured chick past away after a day. Our other girls grew up to be healthy beautiful chickens, but it wasn’t the best way to start off. I will take getting a wrong chick over that mess any day!
Hillary is now 6 days away from her due date and Tina is exactly a week. Hillary has been close to labor for days now. Her ligaments are almost gone and she has spent the last two days moaning none stop. She seems so incredibly uncomfortable. We put the intercom up in the barn so I could constantly monitor her. I think she will go into labor in the next few days!
Hopefully next week’s “What’s up Wednesday” includes pictures and stories about our new goat kids! It’s all so exciting! I love this time of year!
The girls are so close to having their babies! We are still two weeks from their due dates, but Hillary’s ligaments are disappearing, which is a sign that labor is on it’s way. Although, it doesn’t necessarily mean she won’t reach or exceed her due date. It just lets you know that their bodies are in preparation mode. Tina’s ligaments are still very tight. Monday night the temperatures were in the low single digits and I was convinced with our luck that Hillary would go into labor at the coldest possible time, and we would have baby goats living in our house! Luckily that didn’t happen, but I’m keeping a close eye on her. Hopefully this week’s snow storm is the last, so we don’t have to worry about having babies in the snow anymore. I am really hoping they wait until after this weekend, since we will be at the Augusta show Saturday and Sunday.
The chicks will be on their way Monday! We are hoping they will get here by Tuesday, but it will more than likely be Wednesday. Since I write these posts on Tuesday night you probably won’t hear anything about the chicks until later in the week or the week after. I promise to include pictures! Breckin is so excited. He is old enough to handle and help with the chicks this time around. Last time he was two and was really only old enough to hold them for a second, and I was so worried that he would put his hands in his mouth before washing them that I made myself a nervous wreck. I’ve lightened up a bit.
This past weekend wasn’t as productive as the weekend before, but we still got a fair amount done. The chicken coop went up in the pasture, and just as expected the goats spent a good amount of time chewing on the corners. We started working on the solar, but had some questions about the installation, so that project was stalled. Kevin built the new raised beds in the garden, and he finished the walls of the birthing pin. I cleaned up an area in the shed for the chicks and cleaned up the kennel that will be their brooder. At some point this week, when I can get out of the driveway, I need to go pick up the chick food and electrolytes.
You may have noticed that I missed the Makeover Monday this past Monday. It’s been so busy that I haven’t had a chance to test out the recipe that I did this month. I am working on it now so the post will be going up next Monday! Sorry for the delay.
So, another productive week down! Here’s hoping for another… and maybe some nice weather with it.
The countdown is on! Spring is a little over a month away, the girls only have 4 more weeks until their due dates, and we only have 3 more weeks until the baby chicks arrive in the mail. It wont be long before we have precious baby goats and chicks hopping around. I can’t wait!!
We got around 10 inches of snow, sleet, and ice last week. There is still quite a bit of it on the ground, even after several days of mild temperatures. The bad weather has halted our construction projects, but I’m hoping to get the chicken coop started (and maybe finished… who knows) this weekend. The chicken coop is going in the pasture and I was hoping to have it done by this point in the girls’ pregnancies because I don’t want to cause them any sort of stress this close to their due dates… but there is only so much that you can do. We also apparently underestimated the amount of hay we needed when ordering last August and only have about a 2-3 week supply left. So, this weekend will also be spent searching out hay.
Overall it’s been a pretty uneventful week. That’s what happens when you are trapped in your house for most of it!
We will be at the My Courthouse Market today from 3-7pm! I am really looking forward to seeing everyone.