You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Pets’ tag.
Although we are not technically on summer vacation yet, we still tried to enjoy the first official weekend of summer to its fullest.
Happy Memorial Day, everyone!
We heard the puppies over at Juniper Moon Farm were getting bigger by the second so we had to rush right over and get some cuddles!
Oona is completely in love. She begged and begged to bring one home RIGHT NOW.
I can’t believe how fast they are growing! They are making adorable puppy sounds now – barking and growling as the play.
I am in love with the two biggest, fattest ones. They were totally chill, happy to be snuggled.
We’ve decided to call ours “Orzo”, once we have him picked out.
Much to Oona’s disappointment it will be quite awhile before a puppy comes home with us; he has to stay with his brothers and father as long as we can let him to learn how to be a good guard dog.
Not that Susan, Zac or Caroline are complaining. More time for puppy love for them!
Okay, you can file this in the “Better Late Than Never” category. It’s been busy around here! There’s LAND CLEARING going on!
It’s been a bit slow going, but it’s been good because our landscaper is really looking out for how the land will look and how best to use it without working against what we’ve got. The good news is there’s a lot of really good trees (read: really old, tall, straight, hardwood trees). Enough, in fact, that we can sell some to pay for clearing the land and have some left to look nice and provide shade during the heat of summer. It’s going to be great, y’all!
We did take a break from land and house work Saturday to go to Juniper Moon Farm’s Spring 2012 Shearing Party.
And I am so glad we did! We got to see so many friends that don’t live close enough and spend some time with the animals.
Maddie provided face painting fun for the kids.
The geese behaved themselves quite well.
We also got to meet Susan’s new cow, Luna!
She’s ridiculously sweet.
Our friend Michelle was there with her adorable baby. Hi Michelle!!!!
Paul and Erin. He was probably talking about buses. That’s pretty much what he does these days.
Emily got to talk about her crazy mad skills as a shearer in between working the sheep. She’s only recently back from a stint at the shearing olympics in New Zealand. (Seriously, google “Golden Shears”).
We all got some Jerry love.
Some more than others.
I’m not sure, but I think Jerry remembers Paul.
He spent a good five minutes trying to pull Paul’s shirt off. Neve thought Jerry either really liked or really hated that red shirt.
But after he spent an equal amount of time trying to tear off Paul’s ears I decided he definitely remembers Paul.
And now, instead of the “In the Garden” post I was going to do, I had to share puppy pics instead. I put them up on Facebook and realized I couldn’t not share them here as well.
For those of you who hadn’t heard, this past Saturday was Maryland Sheep & Wool. Susan, Caroline and I drive all the way up there to meet some friends and partake in the wooliness. Three hours in the car. We no sooner got there than Zac called and announced that one of Susan’s Maremmas, Lucy, had just had a litter of 7 puppies. Needless to say we did not stay in Maryland very long. Which is why I have next to no pictures of the event to post here.
Instead I have adorable puppies to show you:
Maremmas are a livestock guard dog breed that hails from the Maremma region of Tuscany in Italy. They are big, friendly working dogs that live their whole lives with the livestock they guard.
The best news?
We got to reserve one for us!!!!
I cannot tell you how absolutely thrilled I am and how excited we all are.
Especially the chickens. They’ll have a full time guardian!
PS – for more puppy pics, click here for Susan’s blog.
All of our hard work creating the chicken prison?
The foxes (or foxen, as Jenny Lawson hilariously calls them) laughed at us.
This past Tuesday we awoke to fresh carnage. Something had obviously made a grab at the chickens as they slept on the perches (which were long sticks hanging in the corner of the chicken prison). You could tell by the feathers all stuck to the wire at that spot.
Then that same something dug under the wire and crawled under the two feet it extended along the ground into the prison. This was also the point where it dragged out Prim, as evidenced by all of her feathers left behind:
Everyone else was present and accounted for, but unfortunately Fleur was badly hurt. At first I thought she was just a bit torn open under her wing, and sprayed her with Blue Kote thinking she’d be fine, since Tevye had similar wounds after his foxen encounter.
Then we noticed under neck. And down into her breast. All. Torn. Open. Her crop was even torn open. You could see her dinner still in it, dropping out in clumps whenever she’d move. Not something Blue Kote was going to fix.
I told Emily things didn’t look good and we should keep her comfortable as best we could until…..you know.
Emily didn’t take it well. SHe sat in the garage with Fleur and cried as Paul and I tried to figure out what the #$*% to do next (the chicken proceeded to poop all over Emily AND lay an egg on her).
First off: no sleeping perched in the corners. Second: secure the ground wire better.
Paul wanted to line the entire ground area with wire so nothing could tunnel in. I was worried about the chickens not being able to scratch the dirt if we did that.
While he brainstormed that, I looked up “torn hen crop”on the internet. Turns out, incredibly, it is totally survivable. With surgery.
Crap.
Because you know I had to give this hen a fighting chance at least.
In related news: can you believe most pharmacies do NOT carry dissolving sutures? In fact, every pharmacy I called acted like I was looking for contraband. I joked with the nurse at the local doctor’s office later that it’s like they thought I was doing open – heart surgery on my four year old.
I managed to get some dissolving sutures from the local dentist (shout out here to Dr. Mera – thank you for helping me save my chicken. You are my daughter’s hero!).
Then EMily and I went to work.
Blindly. Completely, “I have no idea how to do what I am doing” blindly. All I knew is her crop needed to be sewn shut, and it was now or never.
No, I did not take pictures.
Emily held her while I used a lot of saline to clean it out, sewed up what I thought needed to be sewn, stitched her breast skin back together, sprayed a shit – ton of antibacterial wound spray on her, gave her antibiotics, and set her up in a clean space in the garage.
That was Tuesday.
This is today:
She is still eating, drinking and pooping (which I hope means I didn’t actually sew her crop completely wrong, thereby preventing the food from ever leaving it) but she is not making much effort to leave the box . My guess is having your chest stitched back together without anesthetic makes you pretty damn sore and you don’t want to move much afterwards. The skin at least does not look puffy or swollen, and it looks to be healing over.
She also gets upset when she sees the neighbor’s outdoor cat wandering around (the cat has adopted us, apparently, and has no interest in chickens) and she bawks madly, puffing up and pacing around frantically. She has also started fighting me when I go to give her her antibiotics. I think she may actually make it.
As for the prison – Paul decided yes on the welded wire covering the ground, except at the very center. Where he made them a sandbox to scratch in. Then he built a frame for perches over top of it.
I am not saying nothing will get in. I will not tempt fate again. I also don’t know if I will ever be able to free – range them again either. Which is sad, because i will miss those dark orange yolks from all the grass.
They come at too steep a price, though.
We’ve been spending time on and off at Juniper Moon Farm all month to visit all the new babies, and last time we were there Neve took off with my camera. She took almost 300 photos.
The following are the best ones (and for an 8 year old with no real camera knowledge they are pretty good!!!).
I think she’s ready for some formal lessons, don’t you???
The last couple of weeks have been rough for us, chicken – wise. We lost 6 hens to either foxes and mysterious disappearances (also probably foxes). We lost 3 rare breed hens which hurt the most, since, as you can imagine, they are tough to come by.
So I had a bit of a fit over it trying to figure out how to contain the free rangers who refuse to stay safely inside either chicken pen, because it’s the free rangers we keep losing.
That’s when Paul got brilliant. And also I kind of wondered why the heck we haven’t done it this way before.
Voila. Free ranger prison. Maximum – security style. (well, unless you’re a snake. But they can get into anything, let me tell you).
The two weakest spots were at the top (Tevye flew right out before we were done) and along the bottom, where they kept trying to tunnel out. So, the top has plastic mesh all around so there are no gaps to fly through, and the bottom has extra welded wire all around to prevent tunneling out.
Those chickens are not too pleased.
BUT. They are safe, and that is priority number one when you own animals. Their safety. I don’t care that they are happier free ranging, because clearly they are also tastier to foxes that way.
Believe it or not, this is still being looked at as a temporary solution. We still have landscapers coming (any day now………seriously……any day) to clear the property and then we will see how things lay in terms of fencing and chicken territory. It may be we end up putting a coop in this prison and let that be that, but we’ll see. For now they are clucking around during the day, and sleeping either in the dog shed we put in there or roosting on the sticks I put in the corner.
As Paul said, if they break out of there, they deserve to get eaten.
Well, it’s been nearly two years since Jerry got the hackjob of a shearing I did that first summer I owned him. Since then his fleece hasn’t really grown out the way a fiber llama’s would. Those llamas you see at ag fairs and fiber festivals have fleece that falls to their knees. Jerry’s headed just south of his belly and then started to look more rasta than long and luxurious. It looked like it was beginning to felt right on his back.
With summer coming (and I am predicting a hot and awful one) it was time to lose those matted locks. So when the awesome Emily the Shearer came to Juniper Moon Farm to do a mini shearing this week, I took the chance to have Jerry done.
Emily’s not crazy about shearing llamas. And to be honest, I don’t blame her. As fiber animals go, they’re bratty and they don’t like to be touched – AND they’re rather too large to be easily controlled without a restraining “chute”, which I don’t have.
Zac did wonderfully well keeping Jerry “calm”, but despite his best efforts, Emily, Caroline and I all got spit upon. Now that’s saying something, because as llamas go, Jerry isn’t a spitter.
Thankfully Emily really knows her stuff, and she’s fast. As well she should be, freshly back from her time in New Zealand at The Golden Shears.
She can knock out a sheep in no time flat – but that’s what comes of spending six weeks shearing 200 sheep a day!
Jerry was preeeetty pissed.
For as bad mannered and upset as he was, though, he did pretty well – though I think a lot of that come down to Zac and Emily being so good at handling him.
He looks like a hobby horse on a stick, no?
Although he looks rather sad and undignified without his fleece it will make a huge difference in his comfort level this summer – llamas are better suited to colder climates – they come from the Andes, after all!
For the finishing touch? A much – needed pedicure.
I totally owe Emily big on this one. Especially since in two years I’ll need to ask her to do it again.
If you’re a farmer (even a small – scale one) you’ll know that spring is the busiest time of the year. Garden patches need tilling, seeds need to be started, coops and run – ins need to be cleaned and aired out for summer, and baby animals need to be prepared for. This year I have felt the busy-ness and anxiety more acutely because we’ve had one of the warmest Marches on record. The bugs have exploded in population and things are sprouting and blooming well in advance of normal.
One of the things keeping me busy (and exhausted) is my new vegetable garden project. I’ve mentioned before I fenced in a plot out front that’s just under 1,000 square feet. Since we have really terrible soil, and since I’ve had issues in the past with too much moisture pooling around the root systems of my plants, I’ve followed the example of Juniper Moon Farm and made raised bed rows to plant in this year. They are raised and rounded so that excess moisture flows off. I have 5 long raised beds to plant in now, thanks to weeks of digging, a load of compost, and a day of tilling.
Right now there are three kinds of onions, Rainbow Chard, two kinds of beets and little finger carrots sprouting out there.
An onion peeking through the straw mulch.
Now that it is April things are getting a little more exciting because it means it is almost our safe window for planting the seedlings we started indoors, such as our tomatoes, squash and herbs.
They’ve had a nice sunny spot in the house waiting to be garden – ready. Soon we’ll be receiving blueberry and raspberry plants that I ordered along with sweet potato and purple potato plants.
If all of this isn’t enough, we’ve got plans for a honeybee hive this spring to help pollinate our plants and increase our vegetable yields, and we have landscapers coming out next week to start clearing our woods for fencing. The goat shed is slowly being cleaned out to be ready for its once and future occupants.
The chickens are in full egg – laying mode and we are seeing about 2 dozen eggs a day now. I’ve been giving eggs away to anyone who’ll take them and even sending dozens off to two local restaurants, and I am still drowning in them. I am thinking I will make a bunch of freezable quiches and cookie doughs one of these days to use up some of the surplus.
Unfortunately we won’t have fresh goat milk this summer – Milkshakes aborted her babies. It turns out she had in fact been bred by the sheep in the fall and was therefore unable to carry the pregnancy. They were tiny, amorphous blobby things that were never meant to live. As I said, goat/sheep crosses aren’t viable.
Most likely I will try to breed her again this fall, for babies and milk next spring.
As you can see it is very busy outside right now in preparation for summer. Once the hot weather hits I hope to be able to spend some time indoors fixing the wallpaper Oona destroyed and touching up paint and other things we’ve been neglecting. But let’s hope the hot doesn’t come around too soon.
Happy first day of spring! I may not be a fan of summer or very-warm weather, but I just adore spring. My sinuses aren’t too thrilled, but that’s another story.
This first of spring is even more exciting and special for me because I am finally seeing the ideas and desires I have held for so long come to fruition. Especially with regards to the new garden.
I’d been wanting to move the vegetable patch closer to the house and make it bigger (with room for a beehive) and so a few weeks back I got outside and started making it happen. I pushed the kids’ giant wooden swingset about 15 feet from where it was (by myself! And yet I wonder why my neck and shoulder is bothering me so much lately??) and started staking out the outline for fencing.
Then I got to work digging. By hand. Again, by myself.
I’d had the idea that we really needed to move things along if I was going to get the early spring seeds and bulbs into the ground. Our only machinery with a tiller attachment is currently down (and ancient). I didn’t have the funds to hire someone to come with a big tractor, so I grabbed a shovel and went to it. The finished area is just under 1,000 square feet.
I decided I wanted rows of raised beds in this garden because I’ve lost so many plants over the years due to excessive moisture pooling at the roots. In a slightly rounded and raised bed the excess runs down the sides and away.
To do that, I started digging furrows, or trenches. I probably made them too wide and too deep (stubborn digging without a plan isn’t the best idea) but there are now 5 long raised beds out there. They still need to be tilled, since the dirt is nearly solid clay. Thankfully I still have a whole shed full of composted llama and goat poo to mix in. Still, I am concerned I may need to order up some dirt due to the extremely poor quality of the soil I dug out of our ground.
The clay is so hard I had to use a mattock to break it up.
There’s space in the shadier back – side of the garden for the bees to go so they have free access to keep our plantings pollinated.
Soon the onions will go into the ground along with the beets and once they are ready, all of the vegetable seedlings that are currently germinating in the dining room.
This is not nearly as impressive as Caroline’s seed selection! But this represents about 2/3 of what we are planting this year. I’ve ordered onions, seed potatoes, and blueberry and raspberry bushes as well. Come fall we’ll do another crop of late summer vegetables and some things to overwinter.
The biggest challenge in all of this?
This:
Keeping these insatiable scratching and digging and eating machines out of the garden. I’ve got the woven wire up: I just need a gate. Paul has a friend coming out to plan out the logistical part of clearing our wooded acres here and fencing it all in. Hopefully giving the poultry a wider ranging area will make the vegetable patch less of a lure for them.
Hopefully by fall you’ll be hearing me say how sick I am of preserving so many fresh veggies!
