Here we are, one of my least favorite months. I don’t like the turn towards cold. As I get older, I’m feeling the cold more and more. And I don’t like it. It’s also the month that my Cookie died. So I tend to be a wee bit…emotional. lol
BUT
As of last night, our winter hay is on the yard. So, I am over the frickin’ moon grateful for that. Our Hay Guy is a genuine Good Human. And in this day and age, those sorts of folks are becoming fewer and harder to find. But he’s a gooder, just like the people who introduced us to him. 🙂
And we have hay. So The Merry Mares get to eat.
Next up to get home, straw bales. We have 6 big rounds waiting for us with the same Farm family we bought Sir Oinks A Lot from. This weekend we’ll pick those up. Then we’ll get a couple bags of hay replacer (for those super cold days where the horses need a little extra but oats are too hard for our CinderBella to eat) and our yearly allotment of oats.
Then we’re good for feed for all the animals for a while. We still have the Loop pickups to supplement and we’re so grateful for those. A friend has a bunch of pumpkins for us too…which is gonna make the bippies (our bunch of ducklings we bought in late summer) the happiest of happy bippies. Bippies can strip a raw pumpkin down to nothing in 10.2 seconds. I *love* that I don’t have to cook the pumpkins for them!! Though, I will cook off a couple to freeze for winter for equines. Pumpkin is just as good for horse tummies as it is for dogs.
And, we have some nice weather for the next week, so I’m working on the next garden space… While working on putting the current garden to bed. It’s all happening, just slowly. This nice weather has been awesome for our heat bill…since I haven’t turned the heat on yet. Tonight is gonna be out coldest night of the week, so extra blankets and sweaters and slippers and we’ll be just fine. Even if I complain about it. 😉 Not that complaining will do any good. Winter is coming. I’ll just have to deal with it.
This weekend we’re running our first Rooster Rehab of the year. 😂😂😂
Exhausting is the correct word for it. But my first and second hatches have resulted in 28 roos currently in the bachelor pen, with a few extra wandering with the cornish meat birds…oh, it’s time for the 28 to go Camping.
Somehow, after a huge Loop pickup last week that has stuffed our 2nd fridge to bursting while the birbs, cats and Daphne have been eating like Kings and Queens all week, I have to find space to let the roosters we process rest for a day or two before parting for the freezer. Lady Bless, I think I need a 3rd fridge for birb feed!
But, I’m sure not complaining! The animals are loving this extra feed, and I’m loving keeping the food out of the landfill.
The funniest thing though, has been the turkeys with their watermelon. 😂😂😂 So after they nearly killed me for strawberries and raspberries, I really thought watermelon would be just as exciting. I mean, how could it not be, right? Well…as it turns out, watermelons are terrifying. The turkey are beyond sure that it wants to kill them. They circled it for a few days and decided “Nope, not eating that” 😂😂😂
Scroll through ^^^ so you can see how wary the turkeys were of that killer melon. OMG. I’ve never seen anything like it. I ended up shoveling it up and giving it to the chickens…who demolished it in seconds. 😂😂😂
Anyways, I still have a bunch of produce and breads to dole out to the birds, and because it’s been sooooo hot, I have it stuffed into the spare fridge…where birds need to rest after butchering. It’s a good problem to have, having more food than space. Just means that the birds will be eating more produce this weekend, so I can fit Freezer Campers in for a bit.
One of the other things we were given last pickup is honey. Honey doesn’t go bad, but, in order to sell it in stores, it does get an expiry date, and stores can’t sell it past that date. I, however, can still use the amazing containers of raw unpasteurized manuka honey we were given for our Palomino Princess. Y’see, honey is what I use for any cuts, scrapes, and booboos on our mare. See the link below for why:
It’s perfect for healing those wounds without any scarring. Thank goodness, or our Girl would be one big walking scar! 😂😂😂
The other type of honey we were given is golden paste honey, with tumeric in it. Now this…this is valuable stuff for a horse with arthritis…especially that Girl who has an arthritic tmj which makes eating difficult in some weather conditions. Golden paste is touted as excellent for treating arthritis in horses, dogs and humans. Welp, we shall see how our Blonde Girl does on it. All this honey and it’s perfect for her! Plus, it’s not in the landfill. I call that a win-win situation.
In other news, we had found 2 abandoned, don’t know where they hatched, can’t find any sign of their hatching anywhere, ducklings in the duck yard one night this week. So we brought them inside. One has since succumbed to injuries (because hens are assholes, and will happily kill baby ducks) but the 2nd is strong and loud. And kinda dumb, because he/she keeps getting their head stuck in the sides of the cage they are in. So we’ve named him/her Homer. 😂😂😂
This weekend is also “clear out all the old eggs from all the nests we know of” weekend. It’s late in the season now, and I don’t want any more surprise hatchlings. Did I tell y’all about the hen who hatched out a clutch of ducklings?? Yeah so there’s 9 week old duckling in the brooder int he Little Red Shed. *sigh* So many birbs. So much potential tastiness. And 12 the Turkey is sitting on another nest. I’m taking those away from her too… No more turkeys this year! I’ve got a brooder full that hasn’t gotten outdoor time yet because of the damn smoke from the wildfires. No. More. Poults! (she said with a quiet longing to scoop up the eggs and put them in the incubator) 😂😂😂
So there we have it…busy af, as usual. And taking eggs away from birds who want to have babies. That’s my life right now.
How are the rest of y’all doing?
Oh, plus here’s a picture for Feline Friday:
Maxamillion!
Catch more Feline Friday posts over at Sandee’s place, Comedy Plus.
With the excitement of starting up the incubators for the years comes the forgotten knowledge of what the 3 days of hatching is really like… Exhausting. Once the first chirp starts, there’s excitement. Yay, we’ve got chicks! But then…as more come out of their shells, the *loud* chirping starts. And the scrabbling, jim jamming around…at all hours. Then, throw in Daisy Mae, who has to tell me she can hear the chicks in the incubators. At 2am. *sigh* Yes cat, I am aware that there’s birds chirping in the house. Quite. Aware. Thankyouverymuch.
So here we are on day 2 of hatching, running low on sleep, just waiting for tomorrow morning when we can take aaaaaallllll da little birbs out to the brooder and start again. 😂😂😂 And so it will go, every 3 weeks from now until the beginning of July.
This…this is what my face looks like right now…”Can I just get a little quiet time for a nap??!?”
😂😂😂
Happens a lot with equines and cameras. I had a plan for a photoshoot this past weekend, because our Sable and our Kid both turned 20 on Friday. Now, keep in mind, my Kid hates having her picture taken. But I keep saying, at least 1 time a year she has to do a photoshoot of some sort with Sable. Because she ain’t getting any younger and she’s already retired with arthritis and one day, we’re gonna have to face the worst decision ever.
Until then, though… Pictures.
So I had a plan (I ain’t sharing what it is yet, because we’re gonna try again). But then the wind came up, and snowmobilers were zipping up and down the road (can’t blame ’em, it was a lovely day out and their season will be ending soon) and her herd mates were being colossal dinks…
And this is how my plan ended up…note, this was *NOT* a part of my plan. At. All.
We have emerged from the polar vortex! And I am happy about that. Boy am I happy about that! Weather sure has been challenging humans across North America this month. I feel for those caught up in patterns that they don’t normally deal with. It’s easy for those of us with cold experience to sit back and say shitty things (please don’t do that, ‘kay?) but the fact is, even we get slammed with hard-to-deal-with weather. So before you make some joke about Texas or any of the southern States dealing with cold and snow and no power and frozen pipes, remember, “there but for the grace of God go I…” We just came out of -50*c weather…imagine if we’d lost power! I can’t even. So just try to remember to be kind. That’s it. Don’t be shitty and be kind.
Today, as I type this, we’re at -13*c. After the past 2 weeks that positively t-shirt weather. And I’m thankful for it. So are the horses, the hens, the turkeys and the ducks…oh and the cats. It was so bad there for awhile we were feeding jar after jar after jar of wet food to them, just so they had enough. Normally a 1/2 pint is a good supplement to their kibble. They went through a case of 12 in 2 days! But, food keeps furnaces stoked, and wet food helps keep kitties hydrated. So I feed ’em. 🙂 But it also means we’re running low on homemade cat food, so Hubby went and bought a few big cans to have on hand, just in case. And come fall, I’ll just do a few extra jars, bigger jars, to make sure everyone has enough.
Meat birds are ordered. I added an extra 25 meat chickens, so we’ll be getting 75 chickens and 10 turkey poults. So. Many. Birds. Though chicken math means it’s really not more than 12. 😂😂😂 And I’m thinking I might fire up the incubators this weekend. If I start this weekend, I can get 2 full hatches in before the one hatch that needs to coincide with the arrival of the meat birds. I ain’t downsizing the amount of birbs I hatch, let me tell ya!! Hatching out as many as I possibly can.
Hubby brought home the first bag of potting soil yesterday. And a pouch of fava bean seeds. I’ve never grown fava beans before, so I had to read up on them. Turns out the entire plant is edible, so yay for that! And with today’s trip to the post office, I’ll have the seeds I need to get the garden going as soon as I can. Whew! It’s gonna be a lot of beans, tomatoes, carrots, peas and beets this year. Stuff we eat a lot of, stuff I can a lot of for winter. As excited as I am to get growing, I’m tired just thinking about the work too. lol
Ooooh, I told y’all I was pondering extra apple and saskatoons? Yup, those are ordered too. The Food Forest is expanding! And for the last few nights, I’ve having vivid Dreams about cutting hay. Oh, I can’t *wait* to get scythe in hand and cut hay again!
But for now, I’m just thankful for the warmer weather, that we made it through the coldest snap we’ve had in a very long time, and that Spring is coming.
Our 3 chubby monkeys, who are doing so well this year…even with record breaking cold!
Yeah, today is thankful Thursday. I’m not feeling extremely thankful today though…
It’s cold. It’s day I-don’t-even-know-any-more of extreme cold warnings. Which means it’s much colder than typical for this time of year. I guess Mother Nature is catching us up for the nice weather we had back in December and January. There’s always a cost, right?
So that hay we’ve been doing so well on? Blowing through a bale every 3ish days. But mares gotta eat, or they don’t stay warm. A cold horse in this weather dies. Not on my fucking watch, if I can help it. So eating my Merry Mares have been. And then there’s the waterer…*sigh* I feel like it’s always something, know what I mean? The winds were savage for a while, and the damn thing kept freezing over. And then it froze at the spigot. That means standing there in the freezing cold, with a hair dryer to thaw it…with 3 toddlers dying of thirst, even though I just brought them buckets of warm water from the house to drink, but they be dyin’ and I be cryin’ because my hands are cold and I’m hopin’ I can get the water running before the hair dryer conks out… *sigh* Get horses, she thought… It’ll be fun, she thought… Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. 😂😂😂
Egg production is waaaaaaay down too. Where I was getting 50-60 eggs a day, now I’m getting 8. If I’m lucky. People want eggs. I don’t have much eggs. I’m just barely making regulars and that’s because I had some stocked up from last week…but now we’re low because 8 effing eggs a day. 60ish hens. But they’re eating and drinking and trying to stay warm. Ain’t so easy even with a heat lamp and deep straw.
Today we found we’d lost a duck baby. Again it’s the cold. We can feed ’em, we can make sure there’s fresh water, and draft free coops and heat lamps and damn if some aren’t gonna just die on us anyways. But ya sure feel like shit when it happens.
And then, just to cap off the craptastic shitstorm that is February, I have to go to the dentist. While to some that’s not a big deal, for some of us it is. I have a tooth that has to come out, but need a dentist that won’t make me wear a mask (got that) and will let my Hubby in the room too (can’t do that yet…fuck the govt, because it’s their shit restrictions) because y’all….this woman does not do well without her support person… So I get to stay living with this fucking thing until the shitty restrictions open up enough that I can have my person in the room while having the dental work done. Looking at the way the hand wringing from the “experts” is going, that oughta be sometime in 2037. Think I’ll just tie a string to the tooth, tie the other end to Ruby’s halter and give my girl a big ol’ smack on the bum…that oughta yob that fucker right out of my mouth. 😂😂😂 And if I die, they can list me as a covid death.
I guess I should still be thankful… My Hubby is still working and is able to get his teeth fixed (thank goodness! he’s had problems with his mouth since I’ve known him). We have plenty of food in the house. The house is warm. We’re still able to share our bounty with those who need it. All in all, as frustrated and cold and tired as we are, we’re still grateful for all that we have.
But for this weekend, I’m just done.
Here’s a picture of cats…Hobbes in front, Trouble in back.
I wasn’t kidding when I said this weekend was gonna be cold, but I think Mother Nature done outdid herself! We are currently sitting at -31*c, feeling like -45*c at 11:30am. Yikes! And it’s looking like it’s going to last for a few more days yet. Gross.
But that’s winter on the prairies in Canada. Cold. A.F.
The horses have blazed through a bale in 3 days. Yeah, that’s normally a 8-10 day thing…but they stay warm by eating. And eating they have been! Plus they get their daily pail of yummyness…and we’re adding oats too…but of course, our poor CinderBella has problems with her jaw, right?
It ain’t easy being the horse with arthritis in her jaw…poor dear. ❤
So oats don’t really soften in the pail of beet pulp and it’s been getting hard for her to finish her pail before it freezes. Yeah, it’s that damn cold! So I’m on the hunt for a complete feed that I can add to her pail for that extra ooomph they need come cold snaps, that’s 1. easy for her to chew/breaks down in the soaking water (beet pulp has to be soaked for horses to eat) b. has no soy or alfalfa in it so I can give it to Astrid too and 3. is economical. *sigh* Dietary issues with equines. That’s my life. lol I thank Epona for my easy peasy lemon squeezy gimme beer ’cause Ima slightly alcoholic fat girl Ruby. That painted bitch is so easy to feed and I’m so grateful for that! Whatever feed I find, she’ll eat noooooo problems. 😉 ❤
So with this cold, the urge to order the seeds I need for the garden were strong. Driving me bat crap crazy strong. lol So I had a discussion with Hubby about using his credit card to place the order…he said “it’s in my wallet…do what you need to do.” So I did. But when I logged into West Coast Seeds, I found that half my shopping cart was now sold out. Which made me panic again. *sigh* My brain is so very broken some days. I grabbed my stack of seed catalogs, and used the goooooo! to find someone who had the seeds I wanted. I finally hit on McKenzie Seeds. They had everything except for the johnny-jump-ups and the ancho pepper seeds. Score! So I ordered what I needed. Then hit up a local nursery to find my rhubarb…and then made a list of plants from there I want to add to the medicinal garden areas. 😂😂😂
Oh and a friend wanted to order from the Prairie Shelterbelt Program, which give us access to a lot of trees for a lot less than local nursery costs…and she asked if I wanted in on the order so that we (along with a few others) could keep admin and shipping costs down.
Done!!
So in May I’ll have 10 Siberian Crabapple trees and 10 saskatoon bushes coming. I haven’t figured out 100% where I’m putting them yet, but since they’re in the 12″-24″ size range, I can pot them up for a year or two if I have to… Food forest, here we grow!!
Today Hubby is clearing the driveway. Hopefully with the crazy stupid winds it won’t blow back in. Ugh. The wind really is the worst. The cold you can work in, but combine the cold with 70km/hr winds? You just can’t dress warm enough for that. So he’s just doing a quick pass so that hopefully he can get out in the morning for work. 😂😂😂 We’ll just have to see what happens.
Fuck I hate winter. I understand and recognize Mother Earth’s need for all of Her seasons, but I don’t have to like this. This dog however…
This dog and her log love the cold weather…
She’s a special one, this nutcase. She likes the cold, she likes the snow, she loves her log. 😂😂😂
Welp, that escalated quickly, didn’t it? New year, then all of a sudden it’s February. And yet, it still felt like the longest January ever. We sure enjoyed the nice days we had. Didn’t care for the crazy cold ones though…of course, I never do, but I recognize that our climate needs that cold time for the Earth to reset Herself for the coming growing season.
Last month we sold 36 dozen eggs. No joke, the hens have been blasting them out. For which I’m glad because I’m sure I gave away that many eggs too. See, we’re still in “code red lockdown” here. And no matter how I feel about that, I know that for some that means putting food on their tables is that much harder to do. Not everyone is “lucky” enough to be considered “essential” by our oh-so-benevolent govt 🤦♀️🙄 and not everyone has the ability to work from home. I am always and forever a person who will hand food off to people who need it when I can…and I try to make sure it’s done in a way that it doesn’t look or feel like charity. No one wants be treated like a charity case. But I’ve had extra lately and a few people have come to my attention about needing, so Hubby and I have been porch dropping bundles of food when we can. I don’t say any of that for accolades. I don’t want that. I just want people to be able to eat. And if they can, pay it forward when they can.
Anyways, we sold a lot of eggs. And from those sales, I shared half the money we earned with Can Praxis. Now, another thing this entire pandemic thing has done is beat the crap out of fundraising for groups that rely on donations. Can Praxis uses equine therapy to help veterans, first responders and their families manage PTSD. They rely on donations a lot. I am happy to have been able to send them a little money.
Now, once I get things settled out with my credit card… Oh yeah, some douchnozzle stole my credit card number and went on a shopping spree last year and I’ve been working on getting it straightened out…in the mean time, I have no credit card to use to purchase my seeds for the garden. Joy! But thankfully the credit card company has been easy to work with and hopefully in the next couple of weeks it’ll all be sorted… But until then, this months egg money over and above feed costs is going into *MY* food security…aka my seed order. lol Once that’s done, I have another place in mind (or 2 or 3) to share our egg money with to help others. ❤
In other news… 4 weeks.
It’s 4 weeks until we start the incubators. Whew! And then the work begins. We have to build a couple more brooders. Plus we have to build a couple broody boxes for the duck hens, so that when they decide that it’s time for bebes they can do so without being bothered and are safe. We’re looking at the end of April for meat chicks and white turkey poults. And then there’s turkey eggs to hatch as soon as they start laying… So yeah, brooders to build. Thankfully the source of free building materials is still an option and Hubby has been stopping every darn chance he gets to pick things up.
Oooooh….and these 2 big boys joined our flock just over a week ago…
LemonChicken giving the 2 new boys the what fors and whys of the poultry yard…
Ain’t they handsome? 😍 They are Lavender Orpingtons. Big boys, to breed more size into our next generation of birds. Just like our Orpington/Wyandotte cross boys. Big roosters with good meat to bone ratio. Eventually I want to only be buying meat chicks to raise for sale and we eat chickens from our self sustaining flock. (We’re close to that now, just need a couple more breeding seasons to perfect my crosses.)
Yesterday was Imbolc. That means we’re officially half way through winter. Yay! It also means that the nags got them the next round straw bale to explode and enjoy. When that happens, they also get to run…because fat mares gotta get a little exercise and thy sure do know what the shakin’ of the tractor bucket means…prance, dance, run like mad whilst posing for The Food Lady to take pictures.
Running through my Capture52 “landscape” shot…brat! lolYeah.
Tell me that Palomino doesn’t know aaallllllll about performing for the camera while running around!
😂😂😂
So we’re at…waiting for seeds so I can start seeds…waiting for March 1st to rev up the incubators…waiting to collect enough building materials to build brooders…waiting for spring weather to get the first walls built on the greenhouse and the herbal/medicinal garden beds built…and rhubarb! Gotta get me a rhubarb plant…but gotta wait for spring. 😂😂😂 That’s my life folks, hurry up and wait for the busy season to start, and then the busy season hits and we don’t have time to think. It’s all good though. Don’t think I’m complaining. I’m not. The only thing I’m complaining about is the impending ass numbingly cold front headed our way this weekend…oh and the govt, because I hate those bastards. 😂😂😂
😂😂😂Worth a shot, doncha think? 😂😂😂
Sharing with Sandee at Comedy Plus for Happy Tuesday. 🙂
Huh. Seems I’ve not posted yet this year. Guess it’s time change that, right? 😉
Alright, so our Christmas was quiet. Pretty much like our Christmas has been ever since we moved out here. We don’t put up a tree (2 kittens who would climb/kill it and a dog who…well, let’s just say a tree won’t work with Daphne and leave it at that 😉 ) and we don’t really do much different. Chores still have to be done, animals have to be fed, equine excrement still has to be scraped…so yeah, we cleaned up horse crap, and did all the usual daily stuff. Then simply enjoyed family time. And we had a good time using our ever growing shooting berm. 😀
New Year’s found us fighting to stay awake. New year’s day we dealt with the upset tummy of a Palomino Princess. Colic is no fun at anytime, but it was one of the colder days and that made it even worse. Of course, the weather bouncing all over the place is what led to her colicking, so it wasn’t much of a surprise. Thankfully, it wasn’t a case where she needed veterinarian intervention. Whew!
Then the last day before Hubby had to go back to work came, and we had a massive wing BBQ. Just because we could. And then we ate wings for 3 days, because we cleaned out 2 years worth of wings from the freezers to cook up. 😂😂😂
Now we’re just going along, happily enjoying the beautifully unseasonably warm January weather. I’m loving that the chickens can be outside all day long. I’m loving that the horses aren’t stuck at the troughs eating, eating, eating to stay warm. I’m loving that a bale of hay that normally goes 7 days in winter is going 10-12 days. I’m loving that we have a nice covering of snow without being under 8 feet of it. 😂😂😂
The Princess, feeling much better after her upset tummy… ❤Ruby and KingTrouble having a moment…Poor Astrid, getting the cat’s ass in her face yet again!
😂😂😂
One of our biggest complaints about our Farm is the lack of trees. Yeah, we knew it when we bought the place, but I don’t think we realized how much we’d miss those trees. Bald assed prairie land is freakin’ c-c-cold!! Colder than bush land because of the wind. It also makes it damn near impossible to do much shooting with anything other than the shotgun or pellet guns. That’s frustrating. And so, this past month, Hubby and I discussed what would go into building a berm for practice shooting.
Some work with the tractor, some too-moldy-for-the-garden straw bales and a whole lot of horse crap. Well… Turns out this is something we can do. And we waited far too damn long to do it!
So, last week, before the snows came, Hubby got started on building the berm. And The Merry Mares have continued to keep up with their contributions. After they decided they had to “inspect” his beginnings…
The inspection crew hard at work…or, more likely, hardly working…
Goodness knows, them nosey mares have to inspect every little thing to make sure we humans are doing it right. 😂😂😂
Midnight Calico Farm 