All kinds of fun!

6/25/2015

We have had many new additions to the farm in the last couple of weeks which really ups the "cute" factor of the farm and makes our days more exciting! We will be expecting more baby chicks and calves very soon!

So we have about 30 new piglets. I say about because we always lose count around 27ish! And let me tell you, they are quite the handful, I don't envy those sows one bit. We have another Dalmation looking piglet, which is a gilt, so David insists on keeping it. It is impossible to figure out which piglets belong to which mother because they switch during feeding time and nurse off of all the sows. Perhaps they can't even identify their mother at this point?

We also have two calves, born days apart, both heifers. One of which disappeared for a great length of time which made us quite nervous for a while. I hope she doesn't turn out to be feisty and give her mother a hard time when she gets to be a teenager.

We are about ready to butcher our first set of chickens this Saturday, but the exciting news are the new additions to the farm. We have ducklings! We never planned on ducks, with our dogs being bird hunting dogs and such. Our chickens have learned the invisible dog fence, and our guineas have such a "don't care, I am the boss attitude" they ignore it, and sometimes when they get really obnoxious, we find them chased up onto the roof of a nearby building. One wouldn't think they could be so obnoxious, but they will often circle around Snickers, all 9 of them, within 6 inches of him while he is laying in the sun sleeping, and make the loudest warning signal they can give. Most of the time he lifts his head, looks in the sky in case they are sounding an alarm for a predator to bark at and goes back to sleep. Sometimes he either wants to play or is not in the mood, and one or more of the guineas end up flying to a high place out of reach, with Snickers close behind, and then they mock him.

But ducks are new to us, and oh so cute! We got ducks because over the winter we had a duck visit our farm for a couple of weeks. We believe it was a pet but it enjoyed eating the feed we had available for our other birds. We never fed it, it just followed our other birds around and found food. One day, it just left. We don't know if it returned to its owners, or was eaten by another animal, but David was very distraught. He had just gotten the duck to let him pick him up. So Dave decided we would get ducks! And like all of the other baby animals, they are just too cuddly. So here are some pictures of our new arrivals you can see when you visit the farm!