Spring Update IV

Things have slowed down slightly now that we have the garden and orchard basically planted and most of our chicks are in one pen, but we are still very busy here at Long Creek Farm!

Goats

We got two new milking does, Philly, and her two kids a boy and a girl, and Mamie, who is giving about a half a gallon a day!

Mamie is very likely pregnant, and the kids' father would be a registered Nigerian from Southern Grace, a farm with show winning Nigerians, so if she had any girls, we would keep them to replace some of our goats that aren't giving as much milk as we would like.

Gemma had two kids Memorial Day weekend, a boy and a girl, when we start milking her on Sunday (6-9-24), we will be milking all ten of our does in the morning and seven of them at night (waiting on babies to sell) and getting about 1 1/2 gallons of milk a day.

We also ordered two hand milking machines from Premier 1 to hopefully speed up the milking process and give our hands a break!

Right now, it takes about an hour to milk the goats, and your hands get SO tired! So, we will see how well the hand milking machine works and let everyone know!

We have started leaving the goats out of the barn at night instead of bringing them back from their pasture so we can clean out the barn. We have only got a little bit done so far, and it is going to be in the 90's today and tomorrow, but it is supposed to go back down to the 70's on Monday, so we should be able to make more progress then.

The deep bedding system worked great all winter (and pretty much all spring) but with the warmer weather comes flies, so we have to clean it. As long as it's not raining, we will probably leave the goats out in their pasture at night until it starts getting cold in the fall.

Chickens

We have sold all our chicks we wanted to except for about half of the polish and a couple Amberlinks. Our Delaware rooster is sick with we don't know what, so we had to separate him.

We are giving him kelp in case it is a deficiency of some sort, and we also gave him oil of oregano in case it is some type of bacterial or viral problem. He is acting wobbly and uncoordinated, if anyone has any ideas what the problem might be we would be glad to know!

Ducks

We put 24 eggs in the incubator about two weeks ago, but it looks like only three will hatch. We think it might be either that our male was too young or that we have too many females. They are all laying now though.

One of the females was having trouble walking, and then died a few days later. We suspect it may be the same thing our rooster has, whatever that is, so we are hoping the rest of our birds don't get it!

We started digging them a pond, but it has been hard to work on it with all the rain we have been getting! This May was the fifth wettest on record!

Quail

We got our order of 100 California quail this week from McMurry, so far 58 of them have died. We will get a refund, and we would have preferred that they lived, but we also didn't really want 100 quail, that was just the order minimum. Hopefully we will have a blog out soon on them if anyone else is interested in raising them!

Pigs

Peachy (our bottle piglet) has grown a lot and is drinking around a half a gallon of milk a day!! She doesn't actually need that much but milk is cheaper than grain and she keeps demanding it from us so...

She pretty much just lives with and like our dogs. Running around with them, sleeping in their beds, playing with them and attempting to "herd" the goats with them, and following us around the farm.

At some point she will have to stay in a fence, we can't have a 100+ pound pig jumping on the door wanting food or sleeping in the garage, but for now, she has free run of the farm.

Garden

We are getting overloaded with yellow squash, and we have been harvesting some herbs, green beans, two tomatoes, and leafy greens. Most things that didn't get overrun by the squash are doing well, except we have lost two squash plants to vine borers.