Archive for Farm Stuff

Vamping Up Egg Production


Jr. vamping up egg production by helping collect eggs.

It’s been nearly six weeks since our hens started laying. I can’t tell you how much we have been enjoying our farm fresh egglicious treats! Our homemade waffles, pancakes and baked goods are so much more light and fluffy. It’s amazing. And the girls have been saying they notice a difference in how the eggs cook as well.


Our original flock of hens.

I was slightly ambitious and marketed our eggs right away and quickly sold out of them! Yeah, even before we had eggs to fulfill orders….but we have a waiting list in case anyone dwindles off! Incredible, eh? We even had someone stop by the other day and asked if we have eggs – that’s with no signage whatsoever except for the farm magnet on our van which only states our farm name and phone number…no products but I guess they can see chickens when they are out. ;)

All my marketing efforts were simply via email and we have a paid listing on Eat Wild ($50/yr) and Local Harvest ($25 suggested donation/year), but only one egg customer came through Eat Wild and she’s on our waiting list. Gotta love free to low cost marketing.

So based on this experience we will be increasing our flock for 2013 and have already started. We have a broody hen setting on two eggs now. It’s kind of an experiment because we came across two fertilized eggs while candling them so I decided it won’t do any harm in letting a hen sit on them to see what happens.

Broody hen update: The hens are sitting on the eggs but they don’t seem to be sitting on them consistently so I think we will be looking to borrow or rent an egg incubator to hatch out a batch of fertilized eggs. It’s kind of disappointing not to have one devoted hen unless something went wrong with the eggs or something. We may try again…we’ll see.

Candling to those unfamiliar is simply putting a light under the egg and slowly turning the egg to see if you find a dark spot, otherwise known as the fertilized egg. Candling is also used to detect any defects or cracked eggs.

Our hens have laid up to 17 24 eggs a day, then we had that cold snap and their production trickled back down to several a day. Then we (or my hubby did with Peanut’s help) winterized our coops since we will be over-wintering 32 hens/roosters and two turkeys and today we are back up to 15 eggs in a day. So we should be able to supply our egg customers with eggs this weekend. Yay! I am so excited to finally see our hens start paying for their keep! ;)


New flock of 100 red sex-links, not a heritage breed, unfortunately.

Please Note: this was written weeks ago and just kept getting pushed back. And last week we purchased a flock of 100 one year old hens, sooner than we thought we would buy more chickens, but when the opportunity came from an area family farm we know and trust and with people waiting for local eggs we just went ahead and did it. The “new” hens are giving us 60-70 eggs a day and I really need to get marketing them as a few leads fell through from our waiting list. I have a couple of leads to follow up on and we have an event on 12/15…but I won’t be taking two week old eggs there because our slogan is “Fresh. Local. Every Time.” and I don’t want to be accused of not having fresh eggs.


Turkey egg and yes, they are a brown speckled egg.

Brownie, our turkey hen, also started laying…but bah-humbug she’s not very maternal. :( Disappointing to say the least but we have a farmer friend who asked if one of our daughters would be interested in incubating turkey eggs for her and we’d split the hatch, which will be a very cool farm, homeschooling learning experience! Farmer C has heritage breed turkeys which is what we wanted to try next year so here’s to hoping it all works out and goes well. We might even try and incubate some of Brownie’s eggs as we do want to do Midget White Turkeys again. They are very yummy! We ate one for Thanksgiving dinner!


Tom and Brownie, our Midget White turkey breeding pair.

Tom, our turkey tom, is still strutting his stuff. ;) Every day this is what our pair of turkeys looks like with Tom following Brownie around.

So we are really vamping up egg production around here!

Oh and we finally got our electric fencing, but have yet to get the solar panel up and running. Technically we aren’t suppose to use the fencing or the solar panel during the winter or with snow, but we haven’t had any heavy snow yet….so we are keeping it up until the snow flies at least.


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Christmas Shopping

It’s the beginning of November and we all know what that means, right? The retail Christmas shopping season has officially begun. As I eluded to in a post last week, I have a few more hard-to-get gifts to buy. Robert’s mom and his aunt are super hard to buy for because they have everything and to be honest I never really know what they will absolutely love. I may just opt for sending them flowers as that is something either of them buy for themselves. And then our little 6 year old niece will be easy to buy for, not to mention fun! ;)

We might be buying ourselves electric fencing and a solar panel with battery pack. A farm expense, but out-of-the pocket expense since our farm is not yet turning enough profit to cover it. Now some of you may not “get” that but we value our poultry “friends” and the food they provide for our family. Now that it’s cold outside the children are tired of always having to chase them when it’s time to bring them in after we let them free-range. The only thing is the electric fencing won’t be much help once the snow flies but we will be able to get a little use out of it if I get it ordered this week. Regardless, it will be needed in the spring anyways.

What about you? Starting your Christmas shopping? Looking for sales? K-Mart is hosting a Family and Friends sale this Sunday, November 4th. Visit Kmart.com to download coupons and get started on Christmas gifts for your family and friends.

This post is sponsored through a Mom Bloggers Club member program. All thoughts and opinions are our own.


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Enter Mike the Gardener’s Sweepstakes #Giveaway

I wrote about Mike the Gardener in the Spring and his great deal for a year worth of seeds. Well, I was just on Facebook and Mike the Gardener is having a sweepstakes to Win 5 Years worth of Vegetable Seeds! Go now and sign up!

Editor’s Note: I signed up too! ;)

Happy Health and Garden Tuesday!


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An Angora Rabbit…New Addition to Our Family – Wordless Wednesday

Yes, we have another new addition to our family…our farmyard that is…meet Daisy. She’s an angora rabbit. We aren’t quite sure what breed yet, still trying to figure it out. Another homeschooling family had posted on our homeschool loop that they were giving Daisy away…and I being the softie that I am responded saying we’d love to take her! We still had rabbit food and the children loved the bunnies and this bunny was FREE! So I had to take her. Come to find out a farm not too far from us who breed angora rabbits charge $200 for a rabbit. Whooeee! Angora rabbits provide fiber and Daisy is in need of getting clipped as you will soon see from the photos taken on September 14th, the day we got her. She came all matted and that was the biggest reason the family was giving her away because they didn’t have the time to keep up with her grooming.

So far our girls are doing wonderfully grooming her, let’s hope it continues because Daisy’s health depends on it. Since angora rabbit fur gets so long they are prone to what is called “wool block”. This is when the rabbit cannot eat due to a fur ball being stuck in their throat. This can be prevented by giving the rabbit a piece of fresh pineapple or papaya on a daily basis. We are not sure how the fruit prevents it but my daughter read about it and we’ve started giving her pineapple after noticing her BMs (bowel movements or rabbit poop) were strung together with hair, which is/or can be a sign of wool block. :(

The photo above is of the fur the girls cut off of Daisy during their first grooming session. The photo below is how she looked after the fact….mucho better.

We are looking into selling or using her fur to knit with, but have to learn how to go about doing it first. We attended a free session with a spinners guild last Thursday and plan to attend their next meeting in October, will miss November and pick it back up in December to learn more about fiber, spinning and to meet others doing the same thing.

Even Daisy gets to enjoy the fresh grass since we recycled old pieces of a mini greenhouse we had a couple of years ago and created a play yard for her.

She’s still getting acclimated to all the children but we think she’s going to be a great addition to our farm. She’s huge by the way, if you couldn’t tell from the photos. If you remember our other bunnies were just wee little things. We’ll see Daisy’s true size once we clip her fur. One of our daughters doesn’t want to clip her because then she’ll be “naked” and cold but I think now is the time before winter is here that way she has time to grow it back. On average she will need to be clipped four times a year. Definitely makes for lots of new things to learn…..


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Egglicious!

Yippee! Doing the happy dance! We got our very first farm fresh egg from one of our hens today – thus the title of this post…..egglicious! Our hens are officially 22 weeks old this week. We’ve been waiting and waiting. I was starting to get worried so I did a Google search and found a chicken forum (yes there are chicken forums too!) and some people had to wait up to 30 weeks for their first egg! To be honest that made my heart sag at the thought! That’s why this is a happy occasion!

In regards to our first egg, our oldest son asked if he could eat it! :-) Always thinking about food that one. I wonder if he remembered to eat it? He didn’t and he’s too late because our third daughter Oms named the egg and wants to keep it …slight problem(s) with that idea, but she’s cute for coming up with it. Think she named it Hammy.

Just so you know this is a very good sized egg for the first one…

Some pullet eggs can be very small and I’m sure we’ll have our share of them. I don’t know if any of you care, but I am sure we’ll be comparing sizes and trying to figure out which hens are laying the best eggs. For those will be the ones we’ll want to hatch out new chicks from! Hoping to start that in December once we figure out which hens are the broodiest (if that’s even a word), as the broodier the better they will be at hatching out eggs. If you aren’t sure what broody means, it’s simply how well a hen likes sitting on her nest of eggs.

Now, if only the other 30 hens would get “cracking”….heehee pun intended….and give us an egg, we’d be in business. Literally, because we should get about an egg a day from them, which of course may vary now that there’s less daylight. That means about 17 dozen eggs a week! Our girls want to have an egg business and I want an egg business so we will be working on rounding up not only eggs but customers too!

“I’m so excited and I just can’t hide it…” Name that song? And isn’t that an 80’s song all of you Momdotters/Brandcation attendees? ;)


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My Little Guys – Wordless Wednesday

What can I say? I love my little guys, like I do all my children. All of them are growing up way too fast. These are photos of my little guys and some of their animal pals from the past couple of weeks

I’m about as proud of my boys/children as these puffed up turkeys! ;)


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Canning and Freezing Veggies – The Labor of Love

Well, I did it! I accomplished canning and freezing veggies! My first canning season in the new place with most of my own veggies!  The other veggies that we didn’t grow I bought from a local stand.  The kitchen heats up awful fast in the middle of August, but it will be so nice in those cold months to make my family meals with vegetables from our own garden!  Here’s what I canned:  pickles, crushed tomatoes, 3 pickled beans, pickled grape tomatoes, salsa, BBQ sauce, pickled hot peppers, white peaches, and bruschetta!  In all that makes exactly 50 jars of wonderfulness!

I also blanched and froze bags of corn, cut peppers, whole red peppers, peas, beans, cucumbers, and zucchini!

I looked up most of the recipes on the internet with a few out of an old Ball Canning Book I found. I received and email from Grit Magazine awhile ago with the “Ultimate Guide to Food Preservation”, that would have been VERY handy a few weeks back!  There is a wealth of information on their site, including sweepstakes!  Go and check them out!

~ Brande


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Happy Chickens and Turkeys

I wanted to add some new photos of the chickens in their new home and of our turkeys, for those of you interested. I wish I had my phone or camera when we let all the turkeys and chickens out this morning. They loved stretching their wings, flying, puffing up and the chickens especially enjoyed foraging. While we move their coops every day or two depending, we don’t get them out enough, especially the turkeys. Electric fencing runs around $500 and we’ve been trying to hold off on that expense a bit longer…It was fun to watch the “barnyard” full of poultry. Of course we had to keep Padfoot tied up so he couldn’t cause any trouble.

Our Buff Orpington rooster went at our youngest daughter, Blondie, today because one of the hens she was holding made a noise. Blondie was more frightened than hurt. She said he pecked her on the back but there wasn’t any marks at all. He’s still alive and I am at a loss what to do because by all rights he should be on a platter, but the girls reminded me that we want to raise our own chicks and they have decided they want Buff Orpingtons. Without a rooster no baby chicks. A slight dilemma.

I was very proud of Peanut and Jumpy for catching the turkeys and getting them back into their coop. The younger children are quite adept at chicken catching too.

We have some very happy chickens and turkeys…take a look:

The turkey that is above all the rest in the photo below is our largest turkey and he’s also the one that was the hero the other night when a predator came a-callin’.

So many posts to do and so little time…


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New Home, Chickens and Turkeys

It’s been an interesting weekend. Half of our family went to Mr. C’s farm to help process his broilers (meat chickens) yesterday, while the rest of us remained at home. The crew that went to Mr. C’s had a full day of catching chickens, cleaning the innards out, plucking feathers, helping get the barn ready for a load of hay as well as helping Mr. C’s daughter with her chores. Everyone came home tired but pretty happy, had learned a lot and were excited about farming and expanding our fledgling farm.

New Home

Upon returning they also brought a new home for our laying hens. It’s bigger, can hold 25, but I think we have 27 in it. It has 8 nesting boxes, which is a blessing since our hens should start laying any day now. We are anxiously awaiting for the arrival of their yummy fresh eggs. As it was, today when Mr. C came to pick up the trailer he brought us two chickens that had not been picked up yesterday and we ate them today. I don’t think I have ever eaten meat that fresh, I mean it’s barely a day old. At least not since I was a kid when my parents bought fresh pork and beef from friends who were local farmers. That’s just how it was done. Back to the chicken, it was so moist and flavorful. The most delicious chicken I have ever tasted. Seriously. And all we did was roast it in the oven. We didn’t do anything fancy with it. All I can say is I can’t wait to raise our own broilers next year and have a freezer full for our family.

The new moveable chicken coop isn’t anything fancy. We had to clean it out a bit before putting new shavings in the nesting boxes. The coop is actually modeled after Joel Salatin’s, who is the owner of Polyface Farms in Virginia. He’s written several books that we highly recommend, even if you aren’t a farmer. He is very entertaining. Our girls love his books and have read some of them more than once.

Of course, what’s living on a farm without a trailer ride….(and yes, after the photo was taken I was on the trailer with the children)

Today we moved the hens into their new home. I did not get photos of them all moved in. I’ll try to remember to add some tomorrow. It was a little nerve wrecking to put three breeds of chickens together. They’ve been all in separate coops since they’ve been outside. Our hens are beautiful. They are healthy. They don’t have missing feathers. So to see the roosters and a couple of hens establishing pecking order was a little new to me. Thankfully it was established within seconds and not one chicken was hurt.

Chickens and Turkeys

We love our Buff Orpingtons. They are sweet hens. Though the rooster showed a different side when he charged at my oldest daughter last night. First time that’s happened and let’s just say that I let our pup to teach him a lesson. No blood, but definitely a fright. No rooster is going to attack my children. We didn’t kill him or allow the dog to kill him, though I was sorely tempted too. He has another chance because he is good to the hens but if he ever does it again, I’ll enjoy seeing him on a platter now that half the family knows how to butcher a chicken.

Our poor chickens and turkeys had quite the night last night. We went out to feed them this morning and found feathers near every coop. Then we noticed our largest turkey had blood on its neck and the chicken wired bowed out on one side of the coop. We believe a predator actually got into their coop and bless that big turkey for saving all of them. We had to staple down the chicken wire to make it more secure. We hope to sell half our turkeys, keep three to eat and keep two to mate and raise our own turkeys. That’s the plan right now. My husband actually sold one turkey yesterday to one of the other guys processing chickens…and he says he’s not a salesman!

We still have to figure out winter housing for the chickens and the two turkeys we intend to keep, thankfully we have a bit more time to do so. So many things to do and so little time…


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My First Farmers Almanac

I bought my first Farmers Almanac the other day and I can’t believe I didn’t buy it sooner!

I always thought the Farmers Almanac was all about the weather.  Boy was I surprised when I found tons of fantastic information!

Yes, it does have weather information,  BUT, on page 8 I found out how to get rid of weeds with out pulling or chemicals and it’s easy!  You pour boiling water on them or use a mixture of dish washing liquid (5 tablespoons) and water (4 cups) in a spray bottle!  I also learned how to make a “Homemade Jar Opener”, “No-Mess Baking”, ways to cut energy costs, how to save on gas, even a section on comfort foods (my favorite).

I plan on buying one every year!  They are really a wealth of information!


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