Update on everything!

Yikes! July is already more than half done! My knee has finally improved enough that I am able to do about 80% of what I normally can do, which is really great news for me and everyone else here.

My baby daughter has flown the coop big time! Even though she had been at the University of Illinois for the past two years, that was less than two hours away. On Friday she moved all the way to Ft. Collins to begin work on her Ph.D. at Colorado State.

And here are a few pictures of things happening around the farm....

We have been teaching Tinker the yearling lady llama to lead, and she is doing splendidly! I never dreamed I would ever have a llama as friendly as her. Most are quite aloof, but Tinker is a true sweetheart, loving attention ...

We just moved the youngest batch of chickens out of the barn and into their bottomless pen (a.k.a. chicken tractor) ...

And the ducklings that hatched a month ago are growing so fast ...

Hope to get another update out before another month passes!

Updates around the farm

Life moves on around here at lightening speed this time of year, regardless of whether anyone is injured or sick or if something gets broken.

I am happy to say that Charlotte is doing very well. She came home the day I slipped and fell in the bathroom, so I have not been able to spend any time with her as it was rather challenging for me to walk more than a few steps after falling and landing on my knee. Mike and the girls took Charlotte's boys out to see her after she got back, but no one seemed to recognize anyone. The kids were only a day and a half old when Charlotte was taken to the University, and she stayed there for a week, so I knew it would be asking for a little miracle for them to recognize each other, but I wanted to at least try. So, the boys are drinking goat milk from a bottle.

Speaking of my knee, I went to the ortho doc a week after falling again, and he talked me into a cortisone injection. After the injection, he said that he would expect it to flare up and get worse for a couple of days. It did flare up, but unfortunately, it lasted for more than two or three days. It is improving a little now, a full week after the injection, but I am still unable to do anything without it swelling up even worse. Physical therapy is supposed to start next Wednesday, but I am not terribly hopeful unless the swelling goes down.

Silver fir tree tomato plant at sundown

We are still planting in the garden, and we are not being helped by a rabbit or two (or five) that is eating bedding plants or newly sprouted seeds. Something ate almost all of our lemon squash plants, as well as a few pepper plants and eggplant plants. Mike chased a rabbit out of the garden yesterday and sealed up the hole in the fence that it came through, but I'm not terribly sure that there are not more of them hiding in the garden area. There are a few places with very tall weeds where they could be living.

Yesterday, 52 baby cockerels arrived from Cackle Hatchery. They are being raised for meat. We were not able to hatch enough chicks this year, so I finally got tired of waiting and ordered some males.

Buff Orpingtons at six weeks of age

We sold the eight Delaware chickens that we hatched, and we have some buff Orpingtons that are now about six weeks old, and we have moved them into a chicken tractor. Once the pullets are big enough, we will integrate them into the laying flock, and the few males that are in there will be used for meat.

Six-week old heritage turkeys, mostly Royal Palm

We moved our turkey poults into a moveable pen also. As they get larger, we will split the group and move half of them into another pen so they are not crowded.

And last but not least, the ducks are doing a good job of reproducing this year. We only have four females, but two have hatched ducklings already! All males will become dinner while the females will be kept to lay eggs next next, as well as to make more ducklings. Yes, the mama is white while the babies are black. We have a black Cayuga drake so we're assuming these are all his babies.

The story of lunch

 by Jane Davis
Antiquity Oaks apprentice

I ate duck a l’orange for lunch the other day. It was delicious.

Friday morning the duck that I ate on Saturday was waddling around its enclosure.

Friday afternoon its head was being chopped off.

That night it was sitting in pieces in the fridge passing through the phases of rigor mortis.

Honestly, when I was watching the duck bleed out I wasn’t entirely sure that I would be able to eat it. It seemed gruesome. This was the duck that I had fed and watered every morning, and in just a second it went from very much alive to hanging headless, spilling it’s precious juices all over the ground. It was a little too real all of a sudden.

This might sound stupid, but I have never really been able connect the meat on my table to the animals it comes from. Think about the language that we use; it’s a cow when it’s alive, and at some point that we are not forced to bear witness to, it becomes beef. Poof, like magic. Nobody has to think about eating the big beautiful beast, because it’s not cow…. it’s beef.

The other day when I sat down in front of my plate I remembered that duck walking around the pen with his friends. I remembered chasing after his living, breathing body, and watching as spasms racked his headless body. To not eat this duck was to know that he had died for one less reason. So I ate consciously.

That duck tasted good because it was pasture raised and just about as fresh as it gets. It tasted good because I knew where it had come from and I had seen it grow and I was eating it deliberately. I was reminded of how much work went into that duck, and I was reminded to slow down and savor it. I was also reminded of how many slices of bacon, how many hamburgers, how many chicken wings, and how many turkeys I have eaten without reminding myself of the animal that made them. Watching that duck go, very literally, from farm to table prodded me to remember that all the meat I eat was once a living, breathing animal (as obvious as it sounds).

Duck, duck, goose

Twice I've purchased 15 ducks for our farm. Initially we were going to use them for meat and eggs, but then I discovered that I wasn't a big fan of duck eggs, and Mike was not a big fan of butchering ducks. I found the eggs too yolk-y, and Mike found the feathers and down too challenging to pluck. So the ducks have mostly been pond ornaments and coyote food. Over the winter, we found ourselves with only two male ducks.

The bigger birds are the geese.

I really didn't want another 15 ducks, which is the minimum hatchery order, so when the feed store had ducklings available this spring, I bought five. The only down side to buying them at the feed store is that our only option was white Pekins, rather than some of the prettier ducks available through hatcheries.

Fast forward to last week.

A Cayuga drake splashing in the water

Mike butchered the last two male ducks, and the two female ducks were put out on the pond to join the two remaining boys from previous flocks. The boys immediately welcomed the girls by jumping on top of them to breed as soon as they met. The two drakes have been without females in their flock for more than a year, so I suppose I understand their enthusiasm.

The two new white Pekin ducks

The geese also seemed very happy to welcome the two new ladies to the pond. The geese are also boys, but they appear to understand they are not the right species for the new ladies. Why do we have so many males? Ever heard the term "sitting duck?" I think the original term was probably "setting duck" meaning that when a duck is setting, it is very easy for a predator to get them. That is definitely what happened to all of our geese.

The ducks, on the other hand, had a bad habit of leaving the secure fenced area around our house to visit the creek. Just as goats know that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, I suppose ducks think the water is bluer on the other side. They do have a nice pond for swimming, but that's apparently not good enough. I do hope these new ladies will stay put where it's safer.

And when we took them out of their little duck house to let them loose on the pond, we discovered that they had already laid their first three eggs. Jane used two of them to make a cake.

Our previous ducks just laid eggs around the pond, making it a real egg hunt every day. Because these were raised in a little house, I am hoping that they'll continue to go back there to lay eggs.

Broiling and steamed

No, this post is not about food. "Broiling" is about temperatures in excess of 100 degrees every day for about a week now. Today is supposed to get to 111 degrees, and it was 101.3 at 10:13 this morning, which was not what I wanted to see.

Combine these temperatures with no rain for more than two weeks, and what do you get? The grass is turning brown, and on a farm, that is not a cosmetic complaint. We are going to start watering a couple areas of pasture. Of course the garden is not happy either, so we have been watering the vegetables plants for awhile already.

So far the animals are doing okay, although I did have one goat that quit eating. Earlier this week I realized she had a pretty heavy load of parasites, so I treated her for that, but she still didn't regain her appetite. I took her to the U of I vet clinic yesterday, and they couldn't find anything wrong with her, so I'm assuming that the weather is just making it harder for her to recover. We've put her in the barn office with an air conditioner until tomorrow when the heat wave is supposed to break.

"Steamed" in today's title is about how mad I am that something -- I'm assuming another raccoon (or two) -- has completely wiped out our flock of heritage turkeys. We found the remains of three, but we haven't seen a live turkey in days. We now have a trap set, but so far, nothing has been caught. The number of chickens and ducks is also decreasing. It seems that coons are bad everywhere this year. We haven't had a problem in about eight years ourselves. A friend was saying that she thinks it was due to our very mild winter and early spring, and I agree. Baby raccoons born at zero degrees are far less likely to survive than those born at 50 degrees.

It is going to be strange without turkeys roaming around. We've had breeding turkeys ever since we moved out here ten years ago. Unfortunately, the hatchery sent us almost all broad breasted turkeys in our order last month, so with only two Spanish black poults, the odds are 50/50 that it's a male and a female. But it's not a great idea to have only one female with a male anyway.

So, for now, there isn't much we can do other than wait for the heat wave to break and the raccoons to wander into the trap.

Birth and death and life goes on

The chaos has continued ever since my last post. We've had babies popping up everywhere -- lambs, kids, chicks, and "babies" hatched by a turkey! I took a quick trip to Wisconsin to talk about wool on The Morning Blend, as well as give a "Natural Home Dairy" lecture at University of Wisconsin-Parkside and a bread demonstration at the Chicago Green Festival. I'm also in the home stretch of edits for my next book, and my baby graduated from Joliet Junior College with high honors. And life has not been without its challenges as we had a brutal coyote attack, and two of our milk goats have taken ill. If you ask me anything about what I've done in the past two weeks, I have to look at my planner to tell you!

I am truly hoping I can find time in the next couple weeks to give a proper accounting of all that's been happening, but in the meantime, here's the short version. The funniest thing was when we thought the turkey hen had hatched poults. We saw her standing next to the pond, and the babies were getting into the water and getting wet, which is very bad! Baby turkeys could easily get chilled, so Mike went running out there to get them away from the pond, but the silly things just kept running farther into the water, so he backed off. Turns out the babies were ducklings! We actually thought this might work for us because whenever a duck hatches babies, she takes them into the pond, where they get eaten by turtles or big mouth bass. We hoped that the ducklings would stay close enough to shore that the pond monsters wouldn't be able to eat them, but that has not been the case. Mama Turkey started with three ducklings and is down to only one now.

She really threw a monkey wrench into our plans by sitting on duck eggs. It never occurred to us that we needed to be checking up on her to see that she was actually sitting on turkey eggs. We are not aware of any other turkeys sitting on eggs, and we have not even found any turkey eggs that we could put into the incubator, so I've just ordered some poults from a hatchery. This is especially disappointing because I kept three hens from last year, and none of them appear to be doing anything remotely related to motherhood. The turkey hen that hatched the ducklings is four or five years old, so maybe she's going through eggopause but still had the urge to be a mama and was just lucky enough to find a bunch of duck eggs. I wish I knew!

Cheyenne and two ewe lambs

We are up to eleven lambs so far, although I don't have an exact number on rams and ewes. Since the coyote attack, the sheep have been extremely high strung, so we can't even get within 20 feet of them before they freak out and just start running. And about that coyote attack -- when we were gone to my baby's graduation, a pack attacked Minerva, who was very pregnant and due at any moment. It makes me sick thinking that she might have been in labor when they attacked her, which is why she was vulnerable and couldn't get away. This is the first time we've lost a sheep since we got the llamas in 2008. And if you were reading my blog back then, you know we had a terrible problem! We lost nine of our ten lambs to coyotes in the summer and fall of 2007 and heading into 2008, so we know that once a pack thinks the buffet is open, we have to get very serious. We've moved the sheep into a pasture that is fully enclosed with woven wire. They had been in an area that was open to the creek, which is probably how the coyotes got to them.

The month actually started off with two of our goats giving birth. Jane, a yearling, gave birth to quads, and Pearl gave birth to twins. Our luck with does this year continues as there is only one buckling out of the six. Just remember that we had 29 bucklings last year, so don't think that we're that lucky! I really have to write a separate blog post about the goat births because it was utter chaos with the two of them giving birth only about ten minutes apart, but both screaming and pushing at the same time!

The two ill milk goats are doing okay. On Wednesday, Katherine came in from milking to say that Annie didn't have any milk. Huh? She was making three pounds a day (a quart and a half) the day before. I have only ever had two goats suddenly stop producing milk, and in both cases, they were dead within 12 hours, so I wasn't about to waste time with Annie. I rushed her down to the University of Illinois vet clinic. They ran every blood, poop, milk, and urine test known to veterinary medicine, and then they did an ultrasound and looked at every internal organ in her abdomen. Clearly she had some sort of infection as she had a fever of 104.5, and her white blood cell count was elevated. But beyond that, they had no idea what was really going on. She was starting to head into acidosis, probably due to the diarrhea that she'd developed, so they drenched her with a liter of water with baking soda and other things that were lacking in her blood and gave her antibiotics. Things did not look good for a couple of days as the diarrhea continued and her udder did not fill up.

Then this morning, Katherine came inside to tell me that Cicada has diarrhea and no milk. Ugh! I immediately told her to put Cicada in the other barn with Annie because it looked like whatever Annie had was contagious and now Cicada has it, but hopefully no one else gets it! I was getting really depressed, worrying about losing all of my milkers and thinking the worst. I planned to contact the vet clinic after coming back inside the house. But when we took Cicada into the other barn, Annie appeared to have a full udder! Katherine milked her and she had about two-thirds of a quart of milk, which is almost where she was before she got sick. Then I realized her poop was back to normal. So, we are really excited about her prognosis now and assuming that Cicada will follow suit!

There was one day in the past couple weeks that I thought the mama turkey had lost her babies, and I was worried about her udder filling up with milk. No, I haven't been getting a lot of sleep lately!

That's all the time I have for tonight, but I'm really hoping to post more often and keep you updated on everything that's happening around here! And as I'm typing this, thunder is clapping and lightening is streaking across the sky. The radar looks scary, so I better hit "publish" before the electricity goes out. I think I hear Bette Davis saying, "Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night."

Today

I spent most of today working on my next book. Mike took four of the spring lambs to the locker to be turned into lamb chops. And Katherine walked around the farm taking pictures.

Clare the la mancha grazing

A duck on the pond

Sheep in the pasture

Happy fall!

How many animals?

I get this question all the time, but for whatever reason, it never occurred to me to blog about it. So, here goes . . . As of today, this is how many animals we have, but remember, lots of babies are coming this spring!

Nigerian dwarf goats: 8 bucks, 21 does, and only 2 kids at the moment, but that will be changing in a couple weeks!

La mancha goats: 2 does who will be looking for a pet home this spring if they don't have kids.

Cheyenne, a Shetland ewe

Shetland sheep: 1 ram, 3 wethers, 9 ewes

Julia Child, our first guinea hog gilt

American guinea hogs: 1 gilt, 1 boar

Katy and Dolce

Llamas: 4 males, 2 females

Jaxon and the heifers play ring-around-the-roses

Irish dexter cattle: 2 heifers, 1 bull (two calves coming in early March!)

Chickens: They're hard to count, because they don't stop moving, but it's about 40 New Hampshire hens, 3 N.H. roosters, 25 Ameraucanas, and half a dozen mutts.

Turkeys: 2 gobblers (one slate, one black Spanish), 1 bourbon red hen, 4 slate hens.

Geese: 9

Ducks: 3

Horse: 1

Chicken house in winter

Photos were from the archives as our world is currently covered in snow. It sure is fun looking through all these photos when it's 6 degrees outside.

Time for ducklings

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I've been worried about not seeing three of our ducks for a month now. I've been hoping that they were setting, rather than being digested in a coyote's stomach. Thursday night, we were eating dinner on the deck, which overlooks the pond, and I shrieked, "Ducks!" and pointed towards the edge of the pond near the chicken house. Mike thought something was wrong, but I quickly corrected myself by adding, "Baby ducks!"

We now have six ducks again, and they have seven ducklings following them. I have no idea which ducklings belong to which ducks, but it doesn't really matter anyway. One thing I've learned about domesticated ducks and geese is that they fully support the idea of a village raising a child.

On a sadder note, the mama goose has finally given up. There is only one egg left on her nest. At least she is not injured. Perhaps in the goose world, she is considered a less-than-adequate mother, but I'm glad she ran when the coyote kept coming back to her nest. The last poor goose stood up to the coyote three years in a row. She was badly injured the first two years, and this year, she was eaten.

I shouldn't get too excited about the ducklings, however, because there is a giant snapping turtle in the pond, and she eats all the ducklings that swim out there. Trying to keep ducklings out of a pond is not an easy task. Two years ago, Margaret and I tried to catch ducklings. After an hour of running around, I wound up with heat exhaustion. It is not an experience I want to repeat. Unfortunately, we really didn't learn much from the experience, so I'm not terribly optimistic about our chances of trying to help.

Stuck duck

Although I've heard of ducks getting stuck in freezing ice in a pond, we've never had it happen here -- until Sunday. I looked out the window and saw a lone duck sitting on the ice near the water's edge in the morning. An hour later, he was still there. And another hour later, he was still there. I convinced Mike that he would not be there for two hours if he were not stuck, so he went out there to rescue him. He discovered that the duck's breast feathers were frozen into the ice. He took out a pitcher of hot water and poured it around the duck's breast. The duck flapped his wings and stretched out his neck, but he didn't get loose. Mike took out a second pitcher -- and a third. Finally, as he walked out there with the fourth pitcher, the duck started to flap its wings as Mike approached, and he was free.

Predator update

We haven't lost any more lambs. (knock on wood) After five nights of us sitting in the pasture all night, waiting for a coyote to show up, we finally decided that our presence is keeping them away. For the past two nights, we've had a tent out there with someone just sleeping.

The dog has barked less in this past week than in any single night in the past year. Once or twice a night, he'll make a soft little bark and trot towards the fence, but that's it. We don't even hear him in the house. Last night, we were having dinner at sunset, and he suddenly started barking viciously. Mike and Katherine both ran for the pasture. The dog was barking fiercely at the fence towards the woods, but after the humans arrived, his barking subsided and then stopped. We know from experience that he would not stop barking just because we were there, so the threat must have moved on.

I wish the news were as good for the ducks. We are down to seven -- we had 14. Yesterday morning at 6:15, we heard a duck wildly quacking, but by the time Mike got to the window, he didn't see any sign of the quacking duck or a predator. The quacking had stopped, and he counted only seven ducks. There had been eight the night before. With the ducks being completely free range, I'm afraid there is not an easy answer to keeping them safe.

Predator problem

We lost two more lambs, so two days ago, we decided to put the livestock guardian dog, Sovalye, into the pasture with the sheep. We've never been able to put him in there before, because he and one of the rams would get into a fight instantly. That ram became dog food this year after almost breaking my hand and destroying every fencepost, fence, and gate that he encountered. The idea of putting the dog with the sheep was something that I had not considered before, but then I noticed some of the sheep were getting into the goat pasture when the fence stopped working, and Sovalye was ignoring them. So, two days ago, I took him into the pasture with the sheep. I had him on lead and first walked him around the perimeter, then walked him up to the sheep. Neither he nor the sheep seemed particularly interested in each other, so I took off the lead. Sovalye laid down and closed his eyes!

He's been in there two night now, and we've lost no more lambs. We have, however, lost ducks. We got baby Cayuga ducks in July to replace the ducks we lost to predators this spring. Now we're down to only 12 ducks of the 15 we had. Tonight we are going to see if it's possible to get them into the chicken coop. I certainly hope so, because I'm sick of losing my babies!

Ducklings?

Katherine just came inside to tell me that we have nine ducklings! Our single muscovy duck has been setting -- again -- in the barn. She set a couple months ago, and we finally took her rotten, stinky eggs away from her. I'd love to know who Daddy is!

More babies!

Sunday, Margaret's white ewe, Ophelia, lambed with a single black ewe, and today, my ewe, Pocahontas, lambed with twin black ewes. The two ram lambs still appear to be sharing the two mamas. Part of me is certain that White Feather hasn't lambed yet, but today I think she looks smaller. She was quite wide last week. Then again, this morning, I really thought that White Feather had that "I 'm so sick of being pregnant" look on her face. I can't believe this is so confusing!

Since I was uploading baby pictures, I thought I'd post pictures of the new Cayuga ducklings that have been here since July 13. Earlier this year, coyotes got all of our ducks except one, and we've been watching the algae grow on our pond ever since. We had no idea that ducks ate so much algae! I hadn't seen that much algae on the pond since before we had ducks, and I recalled how the algae was all gone within a week of the ducks going onto the pond. I was really torn between Rouen ducks and Cayugas, but I finally decided on Cayugas because they are rare, and they are the only domesticated breed of duck that is native to the U.S. When they're fully grown, their feathers will have an emerald sheen.

And finally, I thought I should give an update on the pigs. They are living in the walnut grove, and although I hate having fences in pictures, it was really the only way to get a picture of them because they are constantly at my feet if I'm closer. I wish I could say it's because they're so friendly or because they like me so much, but the truth is that they just love food. I totally understand where all those cliches came from, such as "eat like a pig." The do love their food and always act like they're starving.

No goslings or ducklings this year

I can't believe I haven't posted for two weeks. I frequently think about what I want to write, but I am so busy with the farm and grad school that I can't seem to find the time. Plus, I frequently think that I'll wait until I have pictures to go with the post, and I never get around to the pictures, so nothing gets posted.

There is really no picture that needs to be posted with this sad news though. A couple days ago, Katherine called me on my cell phone to tell me that the buff goose was walking around looking very beaten up, and her nest had only one egg left in it. She started setting on Friday, April 6, so her eggs would have hatched at the end of this week. She had 17. As "they" say, don't count your chickens before they hatch. The same obviously goes for goslings. We are, of course, very sad. We were looking forward to seeing our first buff goslings. They are very rare, and we were hoping to add to their numbers.

As it turns out, we have four ganders and one goose. We really need to butcher some of these ganders, because they are now driving the poor girl crazy. She was swimming and screaming like crazy yesterday. The poor girl just lost her whole nest on Friday, and by Sunday, the ganders are chasing her like a bunch of gigolos. Considering how rare these geese are, you would think they would sell them in sexed pairs, rather than just letting you play the odds. Somewhere out there, someone got more girls than boys. Hopefully they at least got one boy to go with their girls. I know how sad that is -- our goose Lucy sat on infertile eggs that we knew would never hatch after Ricky the gander died.

To make matters even worse, we are now down to only one duck. We had four, but something happened to them. I think that somewhere in the woods is a coyote who is getting very fat! A couple weeks ago, when I first got out of bed, I was looking out the window. I had only been awake for a few minutes, and I didn't think my eyes were working right, but I saw something moving behind the pond -- too small to be a deer and too large to be a raccoon. Finally, I realized it was a coyote, and he had one of our chickens. Mike shot at him, but missed, of course. The coyote dropped the chicken and ran into the woods. Katherine went running out there and picked up the poor hen that was still alive. He hadn't quite killed her yet, but Katherine said it looked like he was plucking her feathers off. The hen died in Katherine's arms before she had walked very far.