Tuesday Micro Farm Report

This has been a pretty slow week for us here.

The Garden:

We did get some planting done. We planted Swiss chard, cantaloupe & Watermelon (which by the way were breaking through the ground today!)Today I think I'm going to get the pumpkins planted. Parker would really like to plant some sunflowers and I think it would be nice to see them as we drive up to the house.

Chickens

The new chickens have been somewhat disappointing as layers. The new 10 chickens give us only about 4 extra eggs a day. So we will be sticking with our production reds & adding some amerucanas (blue/green egg layers) as we prepare for next year.

The picture with my Parker & Pearson holding a chicken are pictures of the baby chickens we purchased in March! They will be 9 weeks this week, including our rooster Tiny! We will be ordering 15 chicks (10 layers & 5 meat birds) for June delivery.They should begin laying in December. A week before they arrive we will move Tiny and the gang to the big chicken house. They should be about 14-15 weeks old by then. Every 3 months there after we will be order 10-15 chicks or ducks until we reach our goal flock sizes.

Today we had to apply "black salve" (chicken medication) to the barred rocks bottoms to discourage the other chickens from pecking their bare spots. Parker caught the chickens and handed them to me at which time I applied their medication. It wasn't as difficult as I thought, Parker is an incredible chicken catching machine.

Now on to the chicken yard. First the chicken yard finally has a real gate, we are really coming up in the world! Second, we will be expanding their yard this month and hopefully soon we will be able to let them go free range.

Ducks

Ducks are being raised at the Bricker Homestead and we will take a trip out to see our little quackers! We will be ordering Khaki Campbell's sometime next year for their eggs which are suppose to be large and tasty!

Around the farm....We have so many projects around the farm right now. The sad thing is most of it is finishing things we started but did not finish. So as we finish stuff up and get this joint looking and working well we'll keep you posted!