My tiny u.p. farm

Farming is hard sometimes

July 30, 2016July 30, 2016Jen Powell2 Comments

We currently have a lot of roosters. We had 3 adults, and I’m not yet sure how many up-and-comers from this year’s hatches. I really wasn’t noticing the crowing, until last week my neighbor said something – he mentioned that the roosters were getting a bit annoying. His mentioning it made me notice it, of course. So I figured out who the worst offenders (at that time) were – it was mostly our older roosters Wonky Top and Splash, and one of our younger roosters from our first batch. I thought about it and realized that the only reason I had kept so many was for breeding purposes, which have now been accomplished. I have 14 chicks that were all from my chickens, so my older roos have spread their genes. We culled the three worst offenders, for now. We were planning on taking out some of the younger ones anyway, but I hadn’t planned on Wonky and Splash (since we named them), so that was a bit hard. We kept our best (and quietest) year-old rooster, General Dorko.

dorko — General Dorko, the Dorking rooster.

It has been quieter on the farm lately… or it was, until my silly little bantam roosters started crowing more. They are very small so their crows are little (it sounds like a regular rooster sucked some helium first). They are really tiny, so in terms of meat it would be a lot of work for not much payoff. I think I may sell them along with the hen. Her eggs are going to be small – the bantams were a bonus when I bought my hatching eggs anyway. They are cute, but not really what we’re trying to do here.

bantam roo 1 — Here’s one of my bantam roosters.

With all the harvesting we are having to do, I feel like I’m killing something every weekend. Actually, I literally have been lately. I need to figure out timing for future years. We did 5 rabbits a few weeks ago, then a duck (we skinned it instead of trying to mess with waxing / scalding – the meat was delicious). Then the three roosters last weekend. And I have a backlog of “animals we need to cull soon” – ducks, chickens, and rabbits. I have to do some rabbits later tonight.

Next year, we are not planning on hatching any chicks, so that will help. We won’t have ducks, since we are going to take them all out this year, and we don’t plan on having them ever again since they are ridiculously messy. The rabbits are relatively easy (no feathers to pluck) but it still sucks having to actually kill them. And they are eating a lot, or at least this batch is – I don’t know if it’s the summer heat or what. We were trying to decide whether to keep rabbits at all anymore, and I think that we will, at least one more year to see where we are at (if it’s actually saving us money or not). But I won’t breed them again this year, and I need a different schedule for next year – maybe a batch in spring, one in the fall, or something. Summer seems too hard on the does. We will be retiring Fire (our black Rex doe), because this last litter was only 3 bunnies – I don’t know if something is wrong with her or not, but we will be taking one of the younger bunnies we have and raising it up to be a breeder. I’ll probably sell her to someone as a pet.

I enjoy farming, I just need to figure out a better balance in terms of timing.

Mid July on the farm

July 16, 2016July 16, 2016Jen PowellLeave a comment

We have been very busy. Last week I went camping. While I was away, it seems that my garden has exploded. (It tends to do that when you don’t see it every day). I hatched hatch# 3 of chicks a couple days ago, and we found our first duck egg today! Here are some pictures of the latest happenings:

garden 7.16 — Here is my garden. I get to do some weeding today.

greens — Here it is, growing away. The red bits on the right are some beets.

A tiny artichoke. It’s about an inch tall.

A sunflower. This is only about 2 feet tall right now.

kohlrabi — Kohlrabi. First time growing this – we are not sure if we like it yet. We will be trying it when it’s ready.

daniels garden — My son’s garden. His corn is doing well. There is a zinnia blooming.

early girl — Our Early Girl tomato. This was a grafted plant I bought. I somehow forgot to plant seeds of my Early Girl tomatoes.

hatch 3_2 — Here are the newest chicks! We have 14, they all hatched on Thursday, and they are from my own chickens’ eggs. We now have 57 chickens all together. That total will go down once we cull the extra roosters.

barnyard — Here is the bird yard. You can see we have Pekin ducks here.

blue duck egg — We got our first egg from the ducks today. It’s about the size of a chicken egg. Not sure why it is bluish. Pekins are supposed to lay white/cream eggs.

duck egg — Here is the egg again. Like a large chicken egg – I figure its a starter eggs for the ducks, so they should get bigger soon, and probably change to the cream/white color. Not sure if we’ll eat this one since it’s a weird color. I know it was laid this morning / last night, so it’s fresh, but it’s still not the color they are supposed to be from the ducks.

Exciting times!

A cure for hot bunnies

June 26, 2016Jen PowellLeave a comment

We had some really hot days last weekend. My poor rabbits were not enjoying it – it was in the high 80s, low 90s, with high humidity. I was trying to figure out what to do for them, when I remembered – we keep old milk jugs full of water in our chest freezer when we don’t have a lot of stuff in there; it helps to keep the freezer running more efficiently if it’s full. Luckily I had enough frozen milk jugs to put one milk jug in each cage. The rabbits loved it, you could tell within a few minutes that it made them feel better. The babies were scratching at the jugs and licking them, and I noticed Fire had some frost on her mouth after she licked her milk jug. Later that night, when it had cooled off, I pulled the jugs out. I noticed they had chewed them a bit, but not enough to really hurt the rabbits. I did have to replace a few of the milk jugs. I tend to save them for different uses, so we have a lot laying around. This is a nice solution if you have rabbits that are not doing so well with the heat. Here are some pictures of my rabbits with their make-shift air conditioners:

005 — She looks a lot more content here.

002 — Here is Earth/Buddy and his milk jug.

004 — You can see the white baby bunny is kind of climbing the milk jug. The babies really liked the cooling effect.

Somehow I didn’t get any pictures of Fire with her cooler. You could probably use water bottles instead of milk jugs, although some water bottles have such thin plastic I’d be worried the rabbits would chew through it really quickly. The jugs are good because they take all day long (sometimes a couple of days) to thaw.

A Mid-June garden tour.

June 16, 2016June 15, 2016Jen PowellLeave a comment

I got a little bit of a late start this year with the gardens, but we are now planted and ready to grow. Here’s a photo tour of my gardens, and surrounding yard.

before planting 2 — Here is the garden after I weeded it. My son thought it would be a good place to stash one of his nerf guns (the green/orange thing toward the back of the garden).

Here are my artichokes from last year! They made it through our winter somehow. I’ve moved them into a better spot to leave them permanently.

Here is another view of the garden before planting.

I created some seed mats for smaller seeds like carrots. I had a problem last year where my seeds all migrated or disappeared for carrots and beets and some other things. This should help with that.

Here is the garden all planted. It doesn’t look like much here, but it will grow and be really nice eventually. I have a cardboard/mulch path in the middle. As things get bigger I’ll mulch around the plants as well. The cardboard on the sides is to keep the taller fence-line weeds from creeping in. We’ll see how well that works.

leftovers from last year — Here are my other survivors from last year’s garden. Some lemon balm and pansies.

zucchini plot — Here is my other garden plot, behind the house. I’ve put zucchini and yellow squash here. There are sunflower seeds planted against the house as well.

strawberries — Here is my strawberry patch. I’m getting lots of berries but they aren’t starting to ripen yet, just growing.

porch plants — Here are my trees and some seedlings on the porch, waiting to be planted.

This is my comfrey plant – I put three in last year and they’ve come back really nice.

tall trees — I just really like how tall our trees are – with the leaves all developed they are more imposing, and it makes the yard feel nice and private. I tried to get the full height of one of our sugar maple trees in this picture.

lambs quarters — I have a nice lamb’s quarters patch growing. Yum! I didn’t plant these, these just grow. They are delicious.

fmn — Here are some forget-me-nots. These are all over our yard. They are very nice but they end up with little picker-seeds later, so they stick to things easily.

Some buttercups and other weeds in our yard.

A walk in the woods

June 15, 2016Jen PowellLeave a comment

My son and I took a walk in our woods, across the street from our house tonight. The leaves are all developed now, and we’ve gotten a lot of rain the last few weeks so it’s very dark and dense in the forest. Here are some cool photos of our walk:

oyster tree — I saw this tree from 40 feet away and had to get closer. This tree broke somewhat recently, but it’s full of these mushrooms. Daniel is ready to defend the tree from slugs, it looks like.

Here are the mushrooms. They look so like some kind of oyster mushrooms. I don’t know for sure though, and didn’t have a mushroom book with me. I don’t know if we get oysters that grow here anyway. I’d like to find out.

oysters — You can see the bugs were loving these mushrooms too.

Here are the slugs. They were all over this mushroom tree.

whoa — We came across this crazy thing – it looks like a giant morel that is disintegrating. I thought it was a piece of foam or something till I got up close and realized it was a mushroom.

huge mushroom thing — This is how large it was. There was only one. It’s too late for morels, and this is the wrong color, but it looked like some kind of giant fake morel.

climbing trees — Daniel climbing some trees.

big tree across the street — This tree is huge, and must be very old. It is still going strong, but it has some dead branches on it. It’s at the edge of the woods near the road.

lupines — On our way out of the woods.. we have Lupines all over the place here.

Our Frizzled Chicken

June 8, 2016Jen PowellLeave a comment

One of our one month-old chicks is frizzled. I believe she’s from one of the chocolate/Maran hatching eggs I bought – when she was born she was black with a cool red/cherry colored head. Now I have no idea what kind of chicken this is – I read that the frizzle gene can show up in any breed. In the U.S. they don’t consider “Frizzle” a breed, but in Europe supposedly they do. She also has 5 toes instead of four, which I read is another genetic thing that can just happen. I used to think only Dorkings got 5 toes. I don’t know for sure that she’s a girl, but because of her uniqueness, she is safe from Freezer Camp if she turns out to be a boy. I’ll keep her around because I just love how she looks – I hope she’s a girl though. Here are some pics of my frizzled chicken:

frizzle 3 — Her coloring has changed a bit -she has a lot more red/orange in her feathers than she did when she first hatched.

She has a little mohawk. I’m not sure what is going on here – it may develop into a comb. Our rooster Wonky-top’s comb started as a feather mohawk last year.

frizzle 2 — Such a pretty little chicken.

Here you can see how the feathers on her back are. It’s a pretty cool effect.

I like having different breeds/kinds of chickens – it’s really interesting watching them change as they grow up – sometimes you get some really unusual things, as you can see here.

Bunnies growing up

May 28, 2016Jen Powell1 Comment

Our baby bunnies are about a month old. I’ve noticed they have been drinking less and less from their moms, and eating more of their mothers’ food. The moms, Wind and Fire, have been seeming like they’re starting to get a little tired of being crammed in with their children, so I moved the babies today. We have two extra hutch compartments, but one needs to have the door fixed, so I put them all in one side for now. We will fix that door soon and split them up when needed as they grow.

I was worried the two batches may not get along, but they are so young that they are pretty friendly with each other. Here is everyone in their new / non-cramped housing:

bunnies 1 — Here you can see the bunnies – Our white Californian, Wind, had white, gray, and white/gray bunnies.

bunnies 2 — The brown ones are our Rex, Fire’s babies. Everyone has the same Dad – Earth, our American Chinchilla Rabbit.

bunnies 3 — Some of the white bunnies have pink eyes like their mama.

air — Here is Wind, relaxing in her much larger space.

fire — Here is Fire, looking for some treats (grass/dandelions), which she will get to enjoy all of, since she won’t have to share anymore.

earth buddy — Here is Earth (or Buddy – my son is attempting to change his name to this, but I still like Earth).

This is the first batch of our planned three for this year. I’ll be breeding them again in the next couple days. That way the females have a little break between each litter. We won’t breed them in the wintertime.

Chicken moving day!

May 22, 2016May 21, 2016Jen PowellLeave a comment

Today we put our older batch of chicks (this year’s “teenagers”) outside, into one half of the coop. They are still a little leery – they went from a cardboard box with a screen on top (to keep them from flying out) to a large open pen and half of a building. So they are a little overwhelmed. Plus on the other side of the fence are some large creatures that look similar, but are a little scary – the adult chickens. Everyone is settling in ok though. We’ll be moving the smaller chicks in a couple weeks, when they are big enough and have all their feathers. For now, here are the teens in their new home.

001 — Here they are, meeting the neighbors

003 — They settled in a bit and started playing, jumping around and sparring with each other

004 — Here are the scary neighbors checking them out. And my husband posing in the background.

Happy dogs!

May 21, 2016May 21, 2016Jen PowellLeave a comment

For the past couple years, we’ve had a small, roughly 35×30 foot, fenced portion of our yard for the dogs. Over the last few weeks we’ve been working on expanding the dog run to encompass most of the southwest corner of our yard. Today we finished the fence. The dogs love it! They now have 3 to 4 times the space they had before. Here are some pictures of our happy dogs playing in their much larger yard.

016 — Downey running, near my son’s (currently on the ground) tire swing. Atat is peeking out from behind the tree.

happy nova — Nova running. There is enough space between the dog run and the duck pen that we can fit the lawn mower between.

035 — All of them, running. The patch of deep grass in front of them will be turning into my son’s small garden – we will be fencing that.

033 — My son Daniel having fun with the dogs

Busy Springtime

May 14, 2016May 14, 2016Jen PowellLeave a comment

There has been a lot going on lately around here. After my last post, no more chicks hatched. We ended up with 22 hatched out of 42 for that batch. I candled the remaining eggs – 10 were empty, and 10 just didn’t hatch. And then a day or so later one of the chicks who had hatched died. So we now have 21 small chicks, and 4 larger chicks. I’m done with hatching for the year – we now have 43 chickens including our adults.

Here is one of our larger chicks, Escape Artist’s daughter:

esky daughter — Looks like her mama. Also tries to jump out of the box just like mama did.

We vaccinated the chicks for Marek’s last weekend. The older chicks were given it at the same time – may be a little late but it’s better than nothing. We only had the one vial and didn’t want to try to split it up, especially since this was the first time we’ve ever given it. My chickens from last year were all vaccinated at the hatchery. I don’t know if my 2-year-old chickens were vaccinated. Either they were or we don’t have Marek’s disease here, but I have heard that it is all over the place. I’ve read that it takes 2 weeks for the chicks to build up any immunity after being vaccinated, so next weekend we might move the older chicks outside. We were going to add another little chicken house for the youngsters, but we’ve decided we will do a split coop again – we have the room in the chicken house, with two separate rooms, and fenced runs on both sides, so we can keep them separate but all safe and comfortable. The smaller chicks will have to go out later – they are still too small. I’ll have to integrate them with the larger chicks when they do get moved, but there are so many smaller ones I think they’ll be able to hold their own against the 4 larger chicks then. Here is one of the smaller chicks:

red head maran — I think she’s one of the Marans (or came out of one of those eggs), but she is black with a red head. I noticed her feathers growing in stick out a little bit, like a frizzle chicken. We’ll have to see what she ends up looking like. She’s one of my favorites from this batch.

frizzle wings — Here you can see some of the feathers on the top part of her wing stick out, away from her body. I’ve never seen that before, but hers are doing that symmetrically on both sides of her body so it must be what she is supposed to have happen.

We lost one of our ducks this week. We had a male (we think) who had some trouble with his feet – he wasn’t really able to keep up with the group when they were moving around, we had noticed. In their pen that didn’t matter so much, but earlier this week I was outside and noticed he seemed to be stuck in the pool. I don’t know if he got sick, or just got stuck in the pool and got too cold. I took him out and set him on the grass in the sunshine, and dried him off a little with a towel. I hoped he would get better, but he died a little while later. Here are our remaining 11 ducks:

The ducks always run away when you get near them. The chickens, much smarter, come running because they know people=food. Here are my chickens out today:

got snacks — “Did you bring us some snacks?”

Our trees are starting to fill in. Springtime is in full swing, except we are in the U.P. So we got snow flurries today, and it didn’t even get in the 40s. It’s supposed to warm up in the next few days though. Here is our cherry tree in bloom:

Our cherry tree. My son’s pool and Slip’n’Slide are under the tree – we really haven’t had warm enough temperatures for either of those, aside from a couple days here and there.

Since spring is here, I’ve been planning the garden. We are using the same spaces as last year, and I’m making a new space for my son. He had a little flower-bed area last year but it didn’t get enough sunshine. I gave him a big square, about 8×8 or so, that used to have weeds and asparagus, and some old rhubarb. The rhubarb and weeds were the only things that really grew there. So he’s helping me clean it up. And we started our garden plans:

garden plan 2016 — This year’s garden plan

And we started seeds last weekend:

more seedlings — Here is one of our two trays. I figured out we don’t need to start as much in the house as I used to. Last year a lot of things did great just sown directly in the ground.

My strawberry patch is doing well. I put some new plants in this year. The old ones are growing well and spreading, and the new ones are doing ok. I need to make a cover in the next few weeks or so, to keep tiny creatures from stealing my berries this year.

My son and I were taking a walk last weekend and came across something extra delicious. I have been telling him and my husband about morels since we moved up to the U.P. and have not been able to find any. We found 4 in the woods last weekend. Not many, but it’s enough to show them what I was talking about, and let them have a taste. We haven’t had much rain this year, but now we know where we might be able to find them – I have been checking in that area again but haven’t seen much else, either because of the lack of rain, or because forest creatures are finding them first. Here are the morels we found: