Week One 2013 - new babies and everything

Okay, before you say it, I know it's been a couple of months since I posted anything. Life just seems to have a way of getting in the way of sitting down and writing things out to share. So today, for the first time in two months I have a Wednesday afternoon that I'm not tied down doing anything in particular so here's a new blog post from me.

Filling everything in since my last post would be a nightmare I think. I'm not even sure I remember what I had for breakfast yesterday let alone what all has happened since November. But I'll give it a go...

Let's see, sad thing first - we lost all but one of our ducks to an opossum. Stupid thing killed two of our male ducks but didn't even try to eat them. We were not happy. However, our surviving female has integrated well with the chickens and turkeys in the coop so alls well I guess until we can get more in the spring. Hehehe, just today as I was feeding them greens from the garden bed (broccoli plants that overwintered well in the greenhouse) I saw Silver snatch bites of food from one of the chickens beak. Every time the chicken would pick up a piece of broccoli leaf, Silver would take it away and swallow it. At least she's holding her own.

We also have raised two sets of meat birds and processed all of them. What a chore between feeding them fermented grains, cleaning their pens, processing them all, freezing, canning, making stock ... Jeepers. But now my freezer is FULL of chicken, and my pantry is FULL of chicken and stock plus I have several jars of homemade bouillon. Think we'll get tired of eating chicken soon??? Lol. After paying for the feed, the birds, the shipping, the straw, the cleaning stuff, and the electric bill I'm pretty sure it would be tons cheaper to just buy it at the store. Oh well, at least we know what they ate and how they were treated in the process of their short lives.

Christmas we spent at my parents house with my sister and nephew. Got a new Nook HD and the first session of a writing course that will start this spring that I'm really looking forward to. If I could just afford the other several months of it ... dreams I guess. At least it's a start and maybe we'll come up with the funds for another couple of the sessions if we sell enough turkey poults and eggs this year.

New Years my dad then took the whole clan of us out for dinner at Joe's Crab Shack and then we went to see MannHeim Steamroller in concert. It was awesome and a great start for a new year.

In other news this month, we hatched out 4 baby turkeys from a set of 5 eggs. All of them started out fertile but one "quit" the day before lock down. It happens I guess. Supposedly even the big hatcheries with all the fancy incubator systems only get between 70 and 80% hatch rate so I think we did pretty well in our new little incubator. I've started putting out feelers for selling eggs and baby poults in places so hopefully we'll have some buyers before too long. We set another 25 eggs yesterday that should hatch in the mid February. It would be great if we could sell ALL of them.

So here's a pic of the babies!

Pipping it's shell

Coming out, wings first

Getting his head out

It's so hard to stand up when you're first born

2 days old

And in the gardening arena, I have three 72 cell seed flats planted with various items. Over 100 cells are tomatoes (not sure where they are going to all get planted ... hmm, maybe I can sell some of those too) and almost all of the tomatoes are already up and sprouted. I also planted peppers, parsley, basil, and some squashes along with 36 cells of artichokes. Warm weather better hurry up and arrive for good! My green thumbs are itching!