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- Sugar the Cow: 3/4 Holstein 1/4 Jersey
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- Sugar our cow
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- Odin our new young Billy goat
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- Odin our young Nubian/Boer cross billy
We have a couple new animals on the farm this past month. Sugar will calve in January so we’ll be having lots of milk around! We got a new billy goat for our breeding stock too and today we are going to pick up a couple more goat does in exchange for our bucklings. It’s a good thing our hay has begun to be delivered now as we had snow last week.
Tags: livestock goats cow
Looking for ways to make our household into a self-sustaining homestead is always interesting. Having a real functioning Homestead is not something most people think about in this day and age, but surprisingly enough, more and more people are beginning to take a serious 2nd look at the idea. With the economy behaving as unstable as it has been and job certainty a thing of the past, we are looking at numerous ways to get our home to evolve into a producing homestead and cut down the amount of actual dollars paid out to maintain and run it. We’ve been working on it slowly for the past number of years already, beginning while we still lived in the city.
Power & Gas Consumption: The first thing we did was to replace all our incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent ones. Since then we’ve been looking at numerous options to move into LED lighting but haven’t been able to decide on what bulbs to move to yet due to either priceyness or lack of quality in the bulbs we looked at. To further reduce our utility bills, we installed a digital programmable thermostat on our furnace, and wrapped our hot water tanks and pipes with insulation. We also insulated outdoor power outlets, water taps, re-caulked windows and doors and checked for siding gaps. More insulation in the attic always helps, especially if in snowy climates you notice the snowpack melting off your roof in mid-winter. Then you know you are losing all your heat out the roof! Read the rest of this entry »
We are making the best use of every summer day that is dry between some really intense thunderstorms, I heard on the radio that in the past month we’ve had 94mm of rain which is far too much really. Despite all the wet ground, our farm projects are cruising along and being fairly productive.
Maia has almost shed her winter coat
Currently the main focus is to get all the livestock housing and pens squared away before winter approaches. This winter is going to be different since we have no intentions of turning our natural gas back on since we had it shut off in early spring. It’s a first big step towards getting off the grid, and we decided we’d had quite enough of the entirely unreasonable charges from the gas company. Next year, we’ll work on getting rid of grid electricity, but one utility at a time to make things simpler. Already we have our own well and septic, with some upgrades planned there too.
Our baby goats in June
For the house heat, we have our woodstove and we plan to be creative and install several duct fans and a heat exchanger or two and get the warmth from the stove re-directed into our existing ductwork. Basically it’s a lovely upgrade to the original forced-air system, doing what we can with what we already have for almost no budget what-so-ever. We’re looking at various hot-water on demand systems to install, and replacing our hotwater tank with something far more efficient. We have also discovered some great power generation gadgets that function off of lost heat from one’s woodstove and chimney so we’ll be using the heat we generate twice, to warm us and to charge a battery bank for lighting and appliances. Down the road a bit, we’ll install a heat recovery unit up in the attic to capture as much heat as possible to heat our hot water in the house as well.
Read the rest of this entry »
The heat of summer is upon us, we’ve had a couple of 27C days last week which is too hot for my comfort and that of our black-furred dogs. (and yesterday, torrential rain of about 3″ total, flooded us a bit, welcome to Alberta weather!) I’m very glad our barn is a much cooler and even temperature than outside when hot so we can spend much of our time in there building things while the wort of the days’ heat passes by. I ran out of lumber last thursday which was immensely frustrating as it puts a stop to my building until payday this week and slows down moving our poultry outside.
To balance that annoyance out, I discovered the ducks made a nest hidden behind an old water tank in the corner of the barn and there was 23 eggs there! Holy quackers we might get some ducklings this year yet! They had all been too busy molting out their feathers previously. I was hoping I’d get their big pen moved before they nested but it may turn out alright in the end. Amusingly enough, they are not using the nest I made them. I suppose they don’t find it ducky enough or something. I decided to guarantee us at least some hatched ducklings, and collected the eggs then delivered them to a friend in town who has a sportsman incubator and will incubate them for us.
Update on our chickens: Read the rest of this entry »
Well things have been very busy around here lately, but in a stop and go fashion as I’ve had 2 trips to BC for several weeks at a time each. It in general has been cold and wet during the periods I’ve been at home from April till now so only half of our fence poles have been installed due to 18″ of thick mud. We are now into the summer weather patterns which bring dryness only until about mid-late afternoon whereupon thunderstorms develop and get everything either soaked, hailed on, or blown around.
Darren, Maia, and Finbhar in the back pasture by the new pens we are fencing.
We have a new purebred Flemish buck in the barn who is impressively huge, yet completely adorable at the same time! He’s about 4 months old right now and we are excited to see how well he does with our does when he comes of age. He’s the largest rabbit we have so far and he’s gotten me to adjust my hutch designs even larger now as I proceed in building them. Originally named Henri by his breeder, we have re-named him into our barn naming scheme so we can keep track of who is who and came from where and when, so now he’s named Dagda from the Celtic mythos. Here’s a pic of him in the show cage I got that he’s almost outgrown already (the cage was for our smaller rabbits):
On the way to 4H meeting for the evening, just about outgrown the brand new show cage!
I got to making some new feeders for a few of our rabbits in the barn as they appear to take great glee in dumping their bowls about 30 seconds after you refill them and put them back into the hutch. Some of our bunnies are real diggers and love to dig in their feed too which is frustrating seeing perfectly good feed flying out onto the floor to be wasted. I’m still trying to figure out a way to present their pellets so they are discouraged from digging but find it no more difficult to eat. I’m using for the new feeders to keep costs down to nothing, recycled coffee cans and curiosity tins that were lying around in the barn. It’s definitely made Davin’s Flemish/NZ rabbit Luke far more happy. That bunny always dumped his bowls after we had moved him to a different cage. He never seemed to like the new cage and was generally grumpy about the switch from wall mounted feeders to bowls, so with a coffee can feeder that seemed to do the trick. Here’s a pic of one of the heritage tin feeders I made:
Holds 2 scoops of food
When making your own equipment, it’s important to pay attention to detail and ensure there are no sharp edges your rabbits can catch themselves on, so I turned and crimped all the edges. This was easier with the heritage tins, but way more finicky with the coffee cans. It could be too that I don’t quite have the right tool for the job, but pliers, snips and a drill press make for quick fabrication. Now I’m looking for more coffee cans and smaller cans so I can make more of these things.
We also have some new muscovy ducks – a drake and 3 girls who are settling in the big pen with our chickens. Pictures to come of them, once they have figured out who is now in charge in their pen and they’ve settled in nicely. We may have also scored a free chicken coop if we can find a flatbed trailer to help get it home…It’s a nice looking one and I’ll get it home however I can!
It’s shaping up to be a busy time on the farm with the arrival of spring!
We have a new litter of 9 rabbits just born last night, and I’m excited to see 6 dark-skinned babies in with the 3 light-skinned ones. We’re trying for blue fur and it looks promising so far. The white coloured doe is one of our Flemish Giant-New Zealand hybrids and we bred her to a black coloured American blue buck. If I can get a blue buck and a doe from the babies, I plan to breed the blue colour back into our flemish line. I want to get some different flemish stock to breed these babies to as their flemish grand-doe is only 10.5 lbs or so which is too small for show weight for that breed. I’m aiming to develop a few full-sized blue flemish giants as our terminal stock of that type, we’ll see how long it takes me to achieve that goal!
This week coming, we’re expecting 2 more litters of rabbits from different combinations of breeds: hybrid Flemish/NZ doe to a NZ buck, and Flemish doe to a hybrid Flemish/NZ buck. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s kidding season here at the farm for the first time! Lisa our older Nubian doe kidded last week and had 2 buckling kids (though only 1 survived), and our other doe Aega had her buckling kid this morning. It was Aega’s first kidding so she only had one baby. I hope next time she has 2 doe babies! In the meantime, we are now getting into milking. Lisa’s baby is only nursing from one side so we need to milk the other side out so she doesn’t get too uncomfortable until the baby figures out there is another side he can drink from.
 Aega and her 2010 buckling kid |
 Lisa's 2010 buckling kid |
 Lisa and her kid |
 One tall baby, he has to lean down some to nurse. |
It’s been a busy few weeks at the farm lately! We decided to attend the Wetaskiwin Rabbit and Poultry show last weekend to see what shows were like and took a couple of our rabbits there and entered them in all the classes. Our Jr. Flemish Giant buck Argent won 2 Best of Breed ribbons and a Best of Breed: Opposite Sex ribbon! We were thrilled since we hadn’t gone there expecting anything other than to learn alot and meet new people.
Davin posing with Argent in the Youth Show w/. their Best of Breed Opposite Sex ribbon
