The Catchup

Well, I really have no good excuse for you but basically, I got way behind on posting blog entries for a while. I tried to do this thing were I wrote in the past and scheduled them out and then time just got away from me and I didn’t post anything for a while. So this point is going to serve as a sort of catch up to get us to the present day status of the ranch. Up to the last post we had moved onto the property and cleaned out the old barn, cleared a ton of trees and brush, got some chickens and two pigs, and planted and harvested our garden. Since then quite a bit has happened honestly.

In regards to critters we mentioned we had the six buff Orpington, two kune kune gilts, four cats, and two dogs. Since then we have grown exponentially in the livestock world. First our cousin’s German wire hair had puppies with potentially our husky so we felt it was only right to take one of those off their hands. Thus we got Dixie, named for our aunt we mentioned in the first of these posts, and grew our canine crew to three.

The chickens grew up and started producing eggs! They waited till we went out of town of course but still finally started earning their keep. We decided to move their coop out to the hay field area though due to the smell and amount of flies that were accumulating and that turned out to be a mistake because as soon as we got them out there two of them were murdered by an unknown predator. So lesson learned there. But we still have three original hens and one ginormous rooster. Since then we invested in some broiler chicks to grow for meat. We ordered ten chicks from Tractor Supply online (who knew you could do that?) and they randomly delivered them to the post office on a Wednesday and then proceeded not to call us to inform us. Instead the mail lady let our neighbor know who did not have our number so she told our cousin who then let us know and by then the chicks had been at the post office just chilling in a box for 24 hours. Luckily our uncle was able to go pick them up since we were all at work and we got them all set up with a brooder in the mini coop. Out of the original ten we have six survive the trip.

We then had a second set of chicks come in once the first set got their feathers so we transitioned the broilers to the bottom of the coop and put the new chicks in the top with the brooder. Unfortunately their first night was during one of the coldest nights we had this winter and sweet little Dixie was so infatuated with the broilers being visible that the managed to unplug and chew up the brooder cable. All ten of the new chicks passed away before we could repair their heater. It was a very sad morning on the ranch and a literal shock when I tried to plug in the brooder before realizing the cable was chewed…

After the loss of fourteen chicks we decided we would find some older pullets to add to the famil rather than messing with heaters and such. Luckily the gent we purchased our initial Orpingtons from had some ten week old pullets for sale so we snagged ten of them. Our Chick Inn has now got fourteen orpingtons and six broiler chickens as residents. We also upgraded the Inn and got two new coops and built a bigger run with electric wire across the top. They are very much enjoying their abundance of space.

We knew we wanted to add some small livestock to our ranch in the form of goats and sheep so Jaken found a add on Craigslist selling some dairy goats as well as two Tunis sheep. We loaded up the baby, grabbed a livestock trailer from Jaken’s grandparents, and headed up to Huntsville. The lovely couple running the goat/sheep operation allowed us to go into the goat pen and meet their goats and pick out two does. We selected a gorgeous red and white Nubian we named Reba and a fawn colored Apline we named Gretchen. The Tunis sheep were much more shy but have a lovely red colored head and feet with cream wool. We were able to get them both, a ram and ewe who we named Blake Sheepton and Miranda Lambert. We are going for country music artist themed names. Once we got those four home and unloaded into their pen we built out in the hay field they were right at home.

So at this point we now have twenty chickens, two pigs, three dogs, two goats, two sheep, and four cats. The farm definitely grew exponentially in the time between these posts but guess that is a decent excuse for my absence even with some incredible content to share with y’all. At a minimum we have been working on videos. Check out our channel to see what we are up to!