Duke Kitty enjoying his comfy warm basket in the mud room. He is one happy little camper in there!
Otis the Ram is such a darn cutie patooty! I love how he works his little smile for the camera! What a cutie!
We have all decided that we LOVE these flags on the man shack! LOVE the way they flap in the wind and all! After all, we do get a lot of wind! I am pretty sure that Santa might be bringing a few more flags for around the homestead! They are just so neat.
Buttercup would really like to be much much better friends with Dreamy, but at the moment, he’s really playing hard to get. He just doesn’t seem to be that interested in the whole stud goat thing. I guess time will tell… We’re going to be mixing up the boys and girls this weekend… should be exciting!
A sure sign of cold weather… having to chip the ice layer off the water trough every morning!
Sigh… my garden looks so sad. I think I might do a little leaf raking tomorrow, just tidy up a wee bit. I might let the ponies in with me because they behave. The goats just jump the fence. Bad goats. The sheep… well, they watch the goats intently and I don’t want them getting any bad ideas. The section of white fence is too tall, but the rest of that line is just barely 3 foot tall and so it’s not real efficient at the moment. I’d like to refence that one section, about 70 feet or so, but it’s just not on the project list right now. And probably won’t be until next fall. I don’t want them in there when I’m planting and growing things, and there’s not that much grass in there for anyone now… Still, will be nice next fall to be able to let them in there safely. Always things on the to do list!
We found this awesome sled at the Goodwill… just $2.95!!! Maggie loves it. It’s lightweight but strong. And LONG! It’s over six foot long. That is a 50 pound bag of pig chow for Ebony and her darling daughters! She can get four hay bales on it, or 4 large bags of feed! Pretty darn cool. And with the frozen ground, it pulls along nicely. Once we get a better pulling collar, I think it will work great with the ponies, too!
Ebony and her darlings out hunting for corn kernels! We read that Joel Salatin uses his hogs as roto-tillers by sprinkling hard corn kernels in the areas that he wants turned over or in his winter cow stables and lets his hogs in there. They will turn over every single bit of compost, straw, manure, dirt or anything to get to those little candy bits! We tried it and by golly, it works perfectly! Look at all they have done in just four weeks? That was super hard packed chicken run ground with years and years and years of chicken manure and all over it. Now, it’s like fabulous rich garden dirt! In the spring I’m going to rake up a couple inches of that and put in my garden boxes!!!
And we are going to be making a couple portable hog tractors! haha… Basically 16 foot hog panels that we clip together and can move around in a few areas that are just weedy, woody, yucky. We will move the goats in first for a day or two, and then after they strip all the leaves and such, we will move in the hog families… I hope it works to help us clean that last near acre of unusable land we have. It’s way in the back and just well, unpleasant. We’ll see how that all goes in the spring!
Bridget likes to lick the ice in the water buckets! I hope we can get a few heated buckets this year. It will make things much easier!
We moved all our remaning hens and roosters into the big barn feed room. We unfortunately had a coon attack that killed a hen and horribly wounded one of my favorite roos, Pierre. He is recovering, slowly, and it was time to really change our ideas on keeping our flock safe. Coons are so smart and so relentless twice a year, it’s dreadful. We are going to be planning our own Chick-Katraz for the spring, and it will be quite the build! No More Missing Chickens… that is for sure.
Just adore this shot of Maggie and her new pony Shadow. Shadow has officially adopted Maggie as his very own human being. He and Cody are best pony pals, but Cody has me and Shadow now has Maggie. Maggie is thrilled. She can’t wait to start training him and teaching him some tricks and such! I don’t think he would mind at all!
Ratchet likes sleeping in my office now that I dragged his sleeping bag in the warm space.
Luna likes it as well…. and so does Lilly Kitty! Everyone loves my office since I hung up some curtains in the doorways and have a space heater in there! haha…. It’s like a little fort.
Well, that’s all the news that’s fit to print! Not a ton going on right now, we’re just trying to keep busy and warm and trying to get a few things done before the cray Christmas Rush!!! For rocks and minerals that is! 
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Looking forward to hearing much more about your plans for the Chick-Katraz!
I’m going to have most of the winter to plan it. I swear it’s going to be like a fortress because I am just so done with having my birds killed an traumatized! Any suggestions??
I need to plan a perfect coop this winter too. The one point that keeps coming up from happy owners is to have a raised coop, with the floor at least 18″ – 36″ off the ground. Very excited to see what you will come up with. Raccoons, owls and hawks are the most common & persistentthreats to our chickens here, with dogs, coyotes, snakes & vermin as runners-up.
Do you mean just the house part, being raised? I’d love for it to have a run, on the ground, so they can dig and scratch and be chickens… But I also like the idea of the house being raised up. I love the idea of it being wheelbarrow high… so you can just rake out the bedding into a waiting wheelbarrow… that is cool! Hmmmm…..
Yes, you raise the coop, and underneath it you have shade in summer, and a dry dusty place they can use for their dust baths. In the higher ones, they put hooks into the floor joists to hang the waterer & feeder. The Amish near here only raise theirs about 18″ and make the coop tall enough to walk into, feed & water inside, eggs boxes built through the wall and accessed from outside. I can’t decide which way to go. I would like some storage for their feed & equipment, maybe even a place to keep some of my garden tools out there. I know we need good strong hardware cloth over all the openings, including vents and windows. I know I want latches that the raccoons cannot figure out. I want a framed run attached to the coop and higher than my head, fenced across the top so the ladies can be outside all day (those nasty hawks). I think I want rocks around the run to thwart the digging predators, and then I can also plant kale & other things between them that the hens can share from inside the pen. I am more clear on the run than I am on the coop! Please share your thoughts!
How many chickens are you planning to keep?