I don't think we'll be doing this again...

Turkeys. Ugh.

We have lost five. These stupid things have become a ridiculous, expensive folly.

Now two I think I probably cooked. That was my own stupidity. The other three? I don't know. One died overnight. Christian found another while I was at market and I just picked up another one about five minutes ago. WTH??? Three of the five that have died are the Blue Slates - the ones I was most looking forward to raising. Sigh. Not doing this again. For real.

Here is how they looked yesterday evening. No gimps. I just don't know what is happening, but probably they are not all eating and drinking enough.

The ones that are still in there look good, but I am not counting my turkeys before the pop-up timer goes off.

Lest you think it is all Bhutan-Turkey Death March around here - we do have some new life. Molly the guest cow is here. I will post more on her soon - I need to take a few photos first.

Gobble gobble!

OMG - the poults are here. We had one DOA, but they throw in extra just in case that happens. 16 of the little turklings survived their fantastic journey.

...and they came with no label.

I have no idea what we got, but it looks like there are two breeds. ...anyone?



Edited at 1:15: It seems the dark ones are Black Spanish. The light ones may either be Blue Slate or Royal Palm. We'll see as they begin to feather out.

Oh...and we almost killed them all already. It seems that they CAN get too warm - and leaving their box in the Texas sun would be just how that would happen. They are now inside the coop. I hope they survive our stupidity.

Peeperty Update

Peep(Named by our nieces and not to be confused with peep peeps, who are guinea babies) is about half way though his transformation to manhood. Again I have included a photo of our female, Star, for comparison. Peep looked JUST like her a month ago.


Crazy. Nature is a trip.

Stupidest Job on the Farm

Ok-- really. We're out of control. The lunatics are completely in charge of the asylum.

Somehow we have gotten into the habit of protecting the barn cats' breakfast and dinner from the chickens. I suppose we should start with the fact that our barn cats get two squares a day, but I actually find that one easy to defend. These are pet barn cats. Not unlovable, aloof barn cats. They interact with us, sit in our laps, come visit in the house yard and still, despite their small meals, do a darned fine job of catching and eating varmints. They are great cats.

What I am at odds to explain is how we began the ritual of sitting on a bucket and waving a fishing rod at the chickens to keep them out of the cats' food. It is a job I take on more frequently than Christian, but it is way funnier to see C doing it in his big farmer hat.

...enjoy.







Oh - and for the record - this is what it looks like from the bucket. Scary, huh?

Hi!

Disaster Recovery

Back around the time of Ike, a lot of people asked us what a hurricane/power outage would mean to us and how catastrophic it would be. We found out today that we were exactly right in our assessment.

Because of our extremely small size, the frequency with which we process milk, and our rate of sales, our worst case - a power failure with no backup generator - would mean we would have to dispose of everything we had on hand. Which again, worst-case for us, would mean the entire contents of two refrigerators.

Breaking that down further, it would likely mean no more than 24 or so gallons of milk and no more than 50 pounds of cheese - but it would be unlikely that we would ever have that much milk and cheese both at the same time, as we sell everything we make about every three days.

Last night one of our refrigerators succumbed to the insane heat wave and froze-up while working overtime to get down to temp. This happened overnight and we came out to a fridge full of milk idling at about 55 or 60 degrees this morning. Oh noez!

We were supposed to turn 22 gallons into feta today and instead, the milk began to curdle on its own and the pigs were treated to 18 gallons - or approximately 144 pounds of soured, slightly curdled "fridge cheese". Sigh.

Due to an unusually large accumulation of milk before processing, we actually had quite a bit of milk in the other fridge (normally we keep milk in one and cheese in the other) and so did not lose our entire stock - which was at a near record 33 gallons. Fifteen gallons were fine and are culturing away in the pasteurizer now.

But we will not be going to market tomorrow.

The good news is that we defrosted the frozen parts and the fridge is working fine again. We plan to get a better A/C unit for the dairy to keep the ambient temp at 86 or so for the rest of the summer to avoid this happening again. We had just been running the A/C while we were working or while cheese was hanging, but we have learned that this does not actually work when it's 100 plus outside.

All this being said, I am proud to report that my days of crying over spilt - or in this case spoilt - milk are firmly behind me. While I was incredibly frustrated today, I was able to see that it is not REALLY catastrophic. We lost money today, to be sure...but not so much that we won't bounce back next week.

Farming. The fun never ends.

Peep-mania!

Well! Debbie came home from her broody sabbatical with three little white peeps this morning. We never did figure out where her nest was, so there is no telling how many eggs she actually hatched and how many babies she may have lost on the way back to the barn from her nest site. At this point she is three times better than Dawn on her first go and she blew out Audrey, who hatched two and came back with none.

Here are two of them with proud mama.


While I was out there, I caught a quick updated photo of Mickie and Dawn's remaining peeps. There are still five and they all fly now. That will make it exponentially harder to round them up and re-home them. :( But I think it's time for them to go. We don't need so many guineas and we have already arranged a trade for a future turkey processing.


And speaking of turkeys... We lost two of the poults. :( One, um, kind of, well...walked into our dog's mouth. Ahem. And one went completely AWOL. We quickly re-settled the other two in the coop whereupon one started to look really gimpy. To say I panicked is an understatement. I mean - one needs to make it to Thanksgiving. It was a freakin' wedding present. I briefly considered sending a photo of a dead turkey with a note, "I am sorry, but your turkey died. Take this as a lesson. If you do not properly care for your marriage, it too will die." But that seemed bad even for me. So we ordered 15 more that will be mailed out next week. Just in case.

Yes. 15.

Why, you ask? Good question. It's crazy, huh? Well, it is really the minimum order. They can't mail you just one or two - they need to fill a box to provide warmth and cushioning. That's why we get them at the feed store. They order in bulk and we can pick up as many as we want.

So anyway, the feed store is done now. I had to get serious. On 7/29 the hatchery will put 15 day-old heritage breed turkeys in a box and send them our way. I elected the "Hatchery Choice" option, meaning they can send us any kind they have on hand. We may get 15 of one kind or we may get 3-4 each of four kinds. I have no idea. I only hope they will tell us what they sent.

Our plan is to get them past the critical do or die point (6 weeks or so) and then sell all but maybe five on craigslist. And we're building a mobile coop - or turkey tractor - to avoid any more losses to our bad house dog, Max.

Ugh. Have I ever mentioned that we are NOT a poultry farm? You wouldn't really know it these days.