March Farm Updates

The chickens are back on pasture as of this past Friday.  It's been a soggy weekend, so we were thankful to get them moved from the greenhouse area over to their first patch of fresh, spring pasture.  The chicken move typically takes 2-3 hours from start to finish.  While we try to be efficient, much depends on the chickens and their agreeing to the move.  About 42 of the chickens are less than a year old, and therefore have never been out in the pasture living in the "egg mobiles." 

They were not so sure about this!

 



 

The first 1-2 nights on pasture are a challenge for us as we train them to go inside the egg mobiles before the automatic doors close (at sunset).  That means chasing chickens, catching them, and putting them in by hand.  Many of them stand at the edge of the fence, pacing, and looking for a way to get back to the greenhouse.  Typically, 2 nights of this "training" is all it takes.  We are hopeful for a peaceful evening... with no more chicken chasing tonight!

 

 

The automatic chicken doors open at the first light and the chickens are on fresh pasture.  It is a wonderful chicken salad bar filled with a variety of grasses along with slugs, worms and grubs.  For chickens, this is a wonderful thing.

 

The egg yolks will take on a deep orange color now that the chickens are eating the fresh grasses.  The pasture is like an elixir for chickens.

In spite of the move, the egg laying did not decrease much.

A couple of chickens still find their way over the fencing and back to the greenhouse that was their home all winter.  But when dark falls, they head back to the egg mobiles and get in.  Fortunately, it only took a couple of nights of retraining.

 

This is probably the most difficult job on the farm.  Moving tons of mulch out of the greenhouse and into the compost piles on the other side of the house.  It's all manual labor since we aren't able to get equipment into the barn.  There is no need for a gym membership when you live on a farm!

Keith keeps working despite having to still wear his foot "boot" after his surgery.

 With so many farm chores to do along with homeschooling and other household needs, the areas around the house can go unchecked.  It's been said that, "Whatever you own, owns you..." and that is certainly what has happened with our back decks.  I finally decided I was going to tackle this impromptu project and lay much needed weed paper and rocks under these decks. 
Fortunately for me, the family all got involved and helped pull weeds, lay paper and haul rocks.  We were able to finish a reasonable section of it and I love how much cleaner it looks!

Before and after photos:

And for our reward .... hamburgers on the grill.

Other work happening over the past few weeks:

Greenhouse tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, lettuce, spinach, onions, and a variety of peppers are ready for sale or planting.

And outside the garlic planted in the fall is nearly ready to harvest.

Keith worked on planting red clover on several acres this winter.  We learned that red clover is a wonderful crop to put nutrients back into the soil, and it germinates best when planted in the snow.  On the first day of snow in Feb, Keith was out there spreading seed.  Then God blessed us with 3 more snow/melt days... perfect for clover to grow.  Another bonus is that chickens love clover!  The chickens will be on this part of the pasture once the clover has taken hold.

The large tarp is where part of our potato patch will be.  The tarp is just to help us keep weeds in check until we plant and lay mulch on the first section.

 Pastures getting green....

 Chicken's first patch of new grown.

 

“But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,

whose confidence is in him.
They will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit.”

 

Jeremiah 17:7-8

The Promise of Spring

The fields are showing green and the sometimes-warm days give us the promise of Spring just around the corner.

We are blessed to have both sets of grandparents living nearby, and everyone helps out in one way or another.  Here are some updates from our Spring preparations.

(I usually fail at getting a lot of photos because I am busy getting the work done along with everyone else.  But I was able to snap a few!)

We had been saving for, and finally took delivery of our 3rd "egg mobile" built by Murray at Murray's Hen Hoops - we are so grateful for his skill and talent!  And glad to meet his friends who drove it down for us from 3 hours north.  They were a delight to fellowship with. 

 

We had hoped to get them on pasture this weekend, but a couple of snags happened.  First, we were in adoption class most of Saturday.  Second, we see that the weather forecast will bring us rain for possibly 7 days in a row.  The first pasture will be far too soggy, so we decided to wait.

Now that we are on a farm, we see that the weather forecast makes many decisions for us, and teaches us flexibility.

Our new plan was to move one of the egg mobiles into the greenhouse pasture area so our newer chickens could get used to the idea of their next home.  All but 45 of our chickens have lived out on the pastures using the egg mobiles as their sleeping place, snack bar, egg laying place and shelter from extreme weather.  However, our newer Black Sexlink chickens have only lived in the greenhouse and surrounding area.

I wondered if the chickens had good memories, and it seems they do!  The older hens who have lived in pasture before, ran right over to the egg mobile, hopped in, and looked around their familiar place.

While the younger hens (the black hens above) stayed their distance away.

A side-note about avoiding pandemonium:

We are hoping that by getting the newer chickens to spend some time with the egg mobiles before moving to the larger pastures will ease the transition to the field.  Typically the first night out on a far away pasture is difficult.  All the chickens start looking over at the greenhouse and getting nervous about the darkness falling.  They panic, some fly over the electric fencing... they feel desperate to get back over to the greenhouse for sleep and protection.

This means that our whole family misses dinner in order to head out and chase and capture frightened chickens and stuff them into the egg mobile for the night.  This can take hours depending on how nervous the chickens become (they don't like the dark, and can easily panic).  We get to repeat this fun madness about 2-5 nights before they all get the idea that this is their new shelter and the greenhouse is only for winter months.  (There are usually 1-2 outliers who, even after a week of "training" just refuse to get inside before the automatic door closes!)

Why does this take hours?  You'd think placing 45-50 "untrained" fowl into an egg mobile should logically take 45-50 trips.  But our past experience has shown us this is not the case.

 The reality of their innate fear of dark means that they possess a flight instinct that is not overcome by gratitude for our tender loving care for the previous several months. In fact, last year, all of our 60 leghorns were skilled escape artists who would come out of the egg mobile as fast as we put them in, vastly increasing the amount of trips we made from the field to the door of their new home.

 Depending on the amount that escaped, this ritual has taken us anywhere from 45 minutes to 2.5 hours per night—night meaning in the dark with flapping and clucking with feathers flying through the air. That was bad enough, but some of them even bit us during transportation.

You would think these birds would have so much gratitude for our caring for their safety.  On the contrary, we had nights where it seemed that they would rather be caught by lurking predators than by their compassionate owners who were just trying to save their lives.

We would return to the house in muddy, muck-filled boots and clothes, so much so that most items needed to be left outside before we all came in to get a shower.

If you think that farm life’s routine might be boring, come visit us for an evening or two.  These nightly episodes made for very interesting nights. Our city friends say that they live in the city for the excitement it affords them. Take it from a past city dweller: if you want real excitement in your life, move to a farm!

During these times, if we had possessed any other disposition than one of great thankfulness for the farm and our new-feathered friends, each of us would have screamed, stomped the ground and espoused a few choice expletives before shooting the silly things. But as God would have it, we laughed at the irony of the situation (well, afterwards anyway). Who knew that we would be rounding up fowl each night instead of enjoying a leisurely evening eating dinner, talking, and playing games? Yes, we still do these things—occasionally—when we aren’t too tired from ending our day.

Kailyn sitting with the older hens in their egg mobile - the hens checking out their new digs. 
 Perhaps they are looking very forward to getting out on fresh pasture.  We hope!

The 5 month old chickens are not too excited about the new home.  But hopefully by next week they will be ready to move with the others, thus avoiding the aforementioned "pandemonium!"

A portion of the greenhouse is sectioned off for our early crop.  Spinach, lettuce and broccoli are all growing.

We also have starter plants both for the greenhouse and for the local Farmer's Market.  We hope to have plenty to share with others at the first day of Farmington's Farmer's Market (weather permitting) on April 2nd. 

Our egg production has been steady all through the winter.  We should have enough to supply both our Farmington and St. Louis customers throughout spring and summer, Lord willing!

 

And now for the most difficult job of the year - moving tons of mulch from the greenhouse, bucket by bucket, over to the compost pile for a season or two.  We probably put on average, 10 buckets of mulch into the greenhouse everyday throughout the winter.  To reverse 3-4 months of this work, you can do the math and see that this is a BIG job which takes many weekends of labor.  But it will make a wonderful compost for our gardens and it provided a clean, warm place for the chickens all winter.

 

Now, if we could only find a small front-loader which could get through the greenhouse doors and do the hard work for us!

 

Laughing, learning, having fun, working hard...  farm living is the life for me.

  

He made the moon to mark the seasons,

and the sun knows when to go down. - Psalms 104:19