11

Jun

2021

February on the Farm

Here are some photos and a video from February.

February was filled with working on the tree fort, hauling lots of loads of wood chips to the garden, and freezing our buns off during the 2 weeks of extreme cold… which meant going out multiple times a day to change out the animals’ water because it would freeze so fast.

Our first full dozen eggs!

My dad made a birdhouse for us (in hopes that a tree swallow would inhabit it and control the fly population. We set it up on a wooden stick (from one of the small trees that we took down near the garden) in the middle of the pasture.

Jershon and the kids spent multiple Saturdays working on the tree fort. They built a platform, a ladder, and a couple of swings.

Merv kept growing bigger and bigger every week!

We had a couple of extremely cold weeks with temperatures (both daytime and nighttime) in the single digits and negatives. We were worried about the chickens and kittens but they both survived. We had to go outside multiple times a day to break their frozen water, dump it out, and give them fresh water.

One of the chickens started laying eggs that got lighter and lighter in color…

Until one day, Jershon brought in an egg that was practically shell-less… good thing it was frozen. …we didn’t eat it.

Birds in the chicken coop

Looking at the snowflakes on the top layer of snow.

Merv got his rabies shot in the middle of February…and then lost his appetite and started limping. At first we thought he was just sore from the shot, but then confused when it dragged on much longer than we anticipated. We finally got an appointment with the vet and the vet said that it appeared that he was experiencing growing pains. …maybe because he had had parvovirus (which kept him from growing very well for a while) and then grown so rapidly after.

The weather started warming up a bit here and there and we loved spending time in the sunshine

After that frozen shell-less egg earlier in the month, it seemed that that particular chicken stopped laying for a little while. We figured that she was calcium deficient so we started feeding the chickens their own eggshells (crushed up). That fixed the issue and the calcium deficient chicken started laying eggs again. At first they were still pretty light in color.

We got 2 loads of wood chips dumped next to our driveway and we spent many, many hours loading up wagon fulls and putting them in the garden/food forest area.

We had a campfire dinner to celebrate all of our hard work one Saturday.

End of February egg count: 65