Day 95 of 365 blogs,
Jim got all three of his chain saw chains sharpened at our local farm store for $5.00 apiece. They work amazing now. He cut down the rest of the ornamental pear tree that fell last year. He left the stump high enough to hold a table top. I think that will be fun.
We took our company to the airport today. We had such a nice time with our son. Probably one of the nicest times we have ever had. We will miss him greatly.
Our internet provider had a problem this afternoon and we had no internet for over four hours. That is a problem when you work from home and use internet for everything you do. In this world we are just a little too dependent on technology.
Day 96 of 365 blogs
A beautiful weather day and a good day for life. Some days nothing spectacular happens. You just have a pile of little things that need to get done and when they are done you look at each other and say, “Wow, this was a good day.” That was yesterday. We even got almost 9 hours sleep.
Two days ago, we bought 6 new baby chicks. We buy new chicks every 6 months so we always have chickens laying even during the winter. We bought them from Tractor Supply and first of all they gave us a combination of yellow or golden chicks when I just wanted golden comet pullets. We did not want to chance getting a rooster. I even asked him about the change in color and he assured me they were also the same type. Clearly, they are not, so not sure what we have. We had also bought 2 Barred Rock chicks, and this morning one of our Barred Rock chicks died. We went back to the store where we shop A LOT, and met the assistant manager which we have not seen before. He was less than accommodating but I did talk him into giving me a replacement for the chick that died. His replacement was an ISA pullet. I do not know what those are but it was the exact color of three of them I got the other day. The five little chicks accepted her just fine when we placed her in the brooder. Now I am researching ISA and this is what I found.
“ISA Browns are sweet, friendly quiet mannered chickens that enjoy sharing affection with their human families. And, to top it all off, grab your egg baskets, because these beautiful copper penny-colored hens are prolific layers. Typically, a single hen will provide your family with three hundred to three hundred and fifty big brown eggs per year. How egg-citing!”
Well now we are pretty egg-cited because it looks like we got 4 of the ISA Browns and 2 Golden Comet and one Barred Rock. It is fun to try her breeds.
You might ask, why do we need more chicks? Well, besides always ensuring eggs to be available, we are also getting different flocks to go in different places around our farm. We will have some following the cows in the pasture with an electric fence around them. We will have some in a chicken chunnel or mote around both gardens.
Nutritional Education
It is potato planting time. We received 50 pounds of potatoes from Morgan Seeds, 5 different varieties. We are using container gardening this year. We have 20 different containers and will be putting them in our orchard with the elderberries. We are using a compost, peat moss, perlite, with bone meal and potash for potassium added. We are experimenting and filling some all the way full with dirt topped with pine shavings as we have seen done on YouTube. The others we will do the conventional way to add more dirt as they grow. We are excited to do this.