With our move from just alpacas to alpacas, chickens, turkeys, quails & eggs, we are now Silk Creek Farm. With that we moved to our new web page (now mostly finished) at http://www.silkcreekfarm.com.
With this, I am going to move over to a new farm blog. The new farm blog will be accessed at Silk Creek Farm Blog page.
The blog here will not be updated from here on out. Please visit us at the new Silk Creek Farm Blog.
‘ve been wanting to build a larger incubator for some time. When Lilian and I built our incubator last year, we put a post out on freecycle.com asking for a free ice chest or small fridge. We got the Omaha Steaks ice chest and a larger dorm fridge for free. We ended up using the smaller ice chest for our first incubator. The fridge has been sitting in our shop for the last year just collecting dust (something I’m learning on the farm is to not throw away everything, a lot of stuff will come in handy again).
About a month ago we were at the feed store buying quail food. There was a woman there that approached Julia. She runs a poultry coop of farmers from around the valley that raise all kinds of poultry. Chickens, geese, turkeys, ducks, etc. She had been looking to get in to quail, and asked us if we would like to join their coop and become their supplier for quail. We said we would. We will now be selling quail eggs and incubating quail and selling them through Oregon Cooperative Hatchery (I think that’s the name).
So, since we were going to be needing to incubate more than just one group of eggs at a time, we needed a larger incubator. I would like to buy one (here’s the one I want to buy if anybody is looking for a father’s day gift!!! Dickey’s Incubators, the 2X2 one would be nice!!) I decided to finally build one out of the fridge I’ve had in the shop. I’ve had the wafer thermometer and heating element for some time now, so all I needed to do was put everything together.
It took a couple of nights but it is now working and I’m trying to get it stabilized at 99.5. I had an old computer that didn’t work so I took one of the fans out and I am using the fan from there.
Here’s the fridge.
It’s not pretty but it’s solid. I took out all the workings but left the electrical hooked up.
I have the fan and heating element up where the freezer was
Since the fan doesn’t run on regular electricity, you can see the small black cord running from the top of the fan outside. On the outside of the refridgerator I put an electrical box. In this box I put a live plug, and a switch. The switch will turn on the heating element.
You can see the fan plugged in here.
The switch give power to the thermostat and that runs the heating element. Here’s a shot of the inside of the fridge:
As you can see I still haven’t cleaned up the wires (wanted to make sure it worked and all) but it is working (too well, it was up to 106°).
Now I couldn’t just put the eggs on the shelf, I needed something to put the eggs in, so I built a box last night that holds about 130 eggs.
This box will sit on the shelf, and I’ll tip the box left and right so the eggs will be moved easily. Looking forward to trying it out this weekend!
We are in the process of changing the focus of our farm from just alpacas to a more diversified farm with chickens (meat and egg), quail (meat and egg), turkeys and in the future, we hope to add goats for milk. So for this, we have decided to change our name from Silk Creek Alpacas to Silk Creek Farm.
The first thing we wanted to do before we started to make the change was to start with a logo then we could go from there. We worked with a great student from the University of Oregon School of Journalism & Communication, Liz Heidner. Liz has been great to work with. She came out to the farm, talked to us about what we were looking for, multiple changes and revisions, all while keeping up with her school work.
We are beyond pleased with what Liz has created. Here is our new logo:
Thanks to Liz, we are excited to get started with our branding change. So continue to watch as the web pages, blog, and other visual changes now start to happen. Also, we’ll soon be taking pre-orders for chickens, eggs & turkeys.
It is December 31, 2009, time to look at our 2009 Farm Goals. We did complete some and didn’t
I’ll start with the 2009 Farm Goals:
= COMPLETED
= Started but not completed
=No work done yet.
Put in a Garden – We had a great garden this year. The corn was delicious, the tomatoes did great, we had TOOOO much squash, we loved it. We have a lot of it canned in the pantry, and had some great veggies this summer. We have already started planning next years garden!
Build Layer Chicken Coop – We’re getting about 8 eggs a day now. LOVE IT!!!
Build Chicken Tractors – We built 2 chicken tractors and did almost 50 Cornish X on pasture and 4 turkeys. We have about 20 chickens still in the freezer and we canned a lot of the turkey and have many meals ready to go!
Attend/Enter 3 Alpaca Shows – Well, we didn’t go to any.
Visit 3 Fiber Mills – We didn’t go to any, maybe next year.
Neonatal Class
Get a Tractor – Yeah right! LOL
Build a Whizbang Garden Cart & Plucker – Well, we have the wood for the garden cart. I have started with some very handy friends getting what we need for the plucker. I’m sure with the help of Dan we’ll get this done soon!
Build Road to Back Pasture - Well, nope!
Run Water To Barn – Maybe this next year!!
Make Compost Bins –
Farm Days – Our farm day in September was wonderful. We had a lot of people stop by and had a great time. The news stopped by and we even made the 6:00 and 11:00 news!
Build a Fire Pit
Build a Skirting Table
Start a Monthly Movie Night- We’ve done pretty well with having a family movie night each month. It helped when we started getting Netflix!
CHICKEN & QUAIL UPDATE:
Our chickens are doing great. We have 8 laying hens & 3 three month olds out with Millie our rooster. We have 10 two month old chickens that we hatched out and 7 more chickens that just hatched out yesterday and today. So that gives us 29 chickens at this point.
We also started on quail this year. We have 6 laying hens with 2 male quail. We also have 13 three week old quail that are just about to start laying here in 2-3 weeks. That gives us 21 quail. We hope to start breeding and raising quail for meet.
ALPACA UPDATE:
We have 23 alpaca on property. 2 of them are being agisted here for our good friend Kim. We are so happy to have Brownie & Atom here with us. We also have 2 that will be leaving this week for their new home, Rogue and Zach. They were purchased by a great couple from Eugene a couple of months ago.
The rest of the alpacas are doing great. We had 5 babies this summer and we are looking forward to another great year. Thank you to all of our friends for the support they have given us this year. Look for our 2010 goals in just a few days!
It has been extremely cold the last few days. It was around 10° this morning when I went out to check on the quail, chickens & alpacas. Right now it is 13° and getting colder tonight. We got tired last year of breaking ice on the alpacas water. This year with chickens and quails, we have more water so more water to break ice on.
I broke the ice yesterday on one of the alpacas tub, and this morning the water was already 2″ thick. It was time to do something. I started looking online at water heaters for livestock. They ranged from $30-$60 for each tub. We need at least 4 so each group of animals could have unfrozen water. I didn’t feel like paying $120 – $240 for this so it was time to do some research. Where do I go when I need to find a good soultion? BackYardChickens.com!!
A quick search I found a great and somewhat cheap solution. The solution is to use cookie tins with a light bulb inside. This will heat up the tin, and that will heat the water bucket (I hope!) On my way home from work I stopped at Bi-Mart and WalMart and found everything I needed for about $50. This included brand new drill bits (didn’t have a bit large enough for what I needed). The cheapest gift tins I could find were $4 a piece, BUT, the tins with cookies in the were $2.50 a piece so I bought 3, and took the cookies out. I also bought some lamp replacement kits, and put them in the tins. I wired them up, and all works good!
Here are some pictures:
The cookie tins we are using! YUMMY cookies!
Working on putting them together. You can see the larger tin at the top of the picture that I will use for the chicken water.
Getting closer to being done!
All done with 2 of them!
What the inside looks like. That’s a 40 Watt bulb. Should be enough (I hope!)
All 4 of them completed.
We have the all out under the water buckets. I’ll try and let you know tomorrow how they do! With how cold it is going to be tonight, they may not work no matter what, but maybe next week when it’s only cold, not BRRRRR cold!
Turkey before cooking.
Breast on a full size cookie sheet.
Dark meat cooking on Kamado.
Today was the day to butcher our turkeys for Thanksgiving!! We have been waiting since April for this day! This entire week the weather has been saying that it was going to be COLD & RAINY today. We woke up and it was BEAUTIFUL!!! Cold but beautiful!! When I went out at 9:00 to start getting everything ready and there was ice on everything. BRRR!! We started setting up. Julia built a fire in the drive way with some cinder blocks around to keep it contained. I started getting everything else ready. I ran to the store and got some ice (and a soda) and when I got back everything was ready to go.
Once the fire was going we stacked up the cinder blocks and put a couple of fence posts across and the kamado grate on top, and then a metal trashcan on that. We filled the trashcan up with water and our scalder was ready to go!! Here’s Julia filling up the trash “scalder”.
My job was to go get the turkeys, and then Julia helped me do the “deed”. Here are a couple of pictures of our tom! HE WAS HUGE!!!!
We weighed each bird before hand, here are their weights:
Hen 1: 30 Pounds
Hen 2: 34 Pounds
Hen 3: 30 Pounds
Tom: 47 Pounds!!! WOW!!
We let them bleed out, took them all over and then scalded them. We then started plucking them, and with a nice scald, they plucked very easily!! I do have to say that eviscerating a turkey is a little bit harder than a chicken. I would have thought that doing a turkey with it’s size would have been easier but everything seemed to be more attached than in a chicken.
We gave one of the turkeys to Becca’s (Julia’s sister) family, one we will be putting in a brine this week for Thursday, we’ll probably do the tom, and then 2 of them we are going to can. Julia has already started the canning process!! He you can see one of the hens cooking.
We did weigh the tom after we were done and he was around 40 pounds!! Now that’s one big turkey!! The hens are right around 21 pounds.
We did everything from starting to set up to finishing in just 3.5 hours. Not bad for our first time processing turkeys.
This might be my one and only political post on this blog. I don’t get in to politics that much. I don’t follow too closely that is going on in the world of politics more than I hear on TV/Radio/Friends, and even then, I really don’t pay much attention.
This last few months I’ve been paying more attention to what has been going on in politics and it hasn’t been fun. I don’t trust many politicians and the ones I do don’t get in the limelight much. I’ve been listening to talk radio on my way home from work everyday (mainly Glenn Beck because he reminds me of a great friend in Phoenix) and I don’t like what I hear is going on in politics. I’m not a Obama lover nor am I an Obama hater. I’m concerned with where it looks like he wants to take our country and where the Democrats and Republicans want to take our country. So I started reading this last week a political book. It is good, but as I have been reading it this week, I’ve found that it doesn’t make me feel uplifted, happy, nor how I want to feel. After watching my church’s Worldwide General Conference this weekend, I’ve decided that I only want to read something that either uplifts me or is enjoyable to me.
Besides reading the Scriptures, I will choose enjoyable fiction or uplifting &/or useful non-fiction books. This will not include any political books. I had to go to the library today during my lunch to pay a late fee (I swear, the only reason the library stays open is to get payments from us!) and picked up some books that I’ve either read or have wanted to read. (Some may say that the Salatin books are political, but I skip over his political rants and get right to the farming goodness that is there.) Here are the books I picked up:
You Can Farm and Family Friendly Farming by Joel Salatin are both books I have read and enjoyed before. Like I said, he does get in to talking slightly about politics, but they mostly talk about family farming, and how to raise livestock better and how to take care of the land better.
I’ve heard about Cutting Hill by Alan Pistorius before, and I was happy to see it in the library today. This follows the life of a family that is running a dairy farm. It follows them for a year on the ups and downs of running a farm.
I saw the book “The Egg & I” today at the library, it looked interesting. I have no idea what it is about but I am looking forward to reading it.
Beekeeping for Dummies is something I’ve wanted to skim for a while. We’ve been interested in adding a couple of hives to our farm but due to not knowing anything about bees (and Julia being slightly allergic to bee stings) we have put this off, and may continue to put this off for a long time. One good thing for us here is one of the best places to learn about beekeeping is right here in Eugene, Glory Bee Foods. So, just looking to learn some more, see if it something we really want to do.
The last one is a PBS DVD that follows the life of a farming family, The Farmer’s Wife. Not sure if we’ll get through all 6 hours of this DVD, but we’ll see.
So, as you can see, this will be my last post about politics (and this one really didn’t have politics in it except for the word ‘politics’). Back to enjoyable reading!
Saturday was our 2nd annual National Alpaca Farm Day! What a great day it was! Julia and the girls had done a lot of work during the week to get the farm ready for the day. During the evenings we worked on paper work, getting everything set-up, learning how to do needlefelting, etc. This was going to be a great family event! We all had a job to do, and we were ready to go.
We had well over 100 people arrive this year. I would say about 50% more than last year. There were people almost all day from 9:00 am – 4:00 pm. We met some of our neighbors, and that was great. Found out that there is a small farm up the road that has dairy goats. She is going to bring by some goat cheese in exchange for some alpaca manure for her garden. We also met a couple that has a small greenhouse business growing vegetable starts. They are also going to come by and get some manure. There was a couple from Charleston from out at the coast. People from Eugene and some even farther North. Some of our friends from church came by, and some of the girls friends from school came over. My brother and his kids came down and Julia’s sister and her family were here and all of them helped our during the day, and we couldn’t have done it without them!
What we had for people to do:
There was a lot for everybody to do, and it seemed like everybody had a great time.
I had sent out press releases to all the newspapers and tv stations in the South Willamette valley. I was told that we had an article in the Register-Guard on Friday talking about our farm. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m looking for it (if you have a copy, let me know 
) I didn’t know if anybody would show up, or call us about NAFD but I thought I had to try and get some publicity.
At about 10:00, Jared Meyer from KMTR here in Eugene walked in to our back yard! How exciting! KMTR is the station we watch the most (when we stay up late enough to watch), and Jared is one of the anchors we enjoy the most (he went to BYU). He talked to Julia for a long time, and then shot a lot of video from around the farm.
We were expecting that this would the be the last story of the night where they talk a few seconds about the animal and then show 20 seconds of video. Well we were wrong, this was one of the top 3 lead in stories of the night!!! They showed some video during the opening of the newscast, and then during the first segment, we were the final story. It was a great story, and we are very happy with it. Here is a copy of the story (thanks to Jared Meyer for sending me a copy of the video):
In the video you see Kim Sheehan (owner of Brownie and Atom) spinning. She was spinning some of the fiber we had carded on our Big Tom carder. Kim said that it was wonderful to spin. It was spinning up great. The best part is this was Alsea’s 2nds, and not even her blanket. It was so soft, and looked great when Kim spun it!
Thanks for coming Kim! We always enjoy when you and Tim come out to the farm!!
Here are a couple of picture of the kids doing the needlefelting. They had a great time doing this.
It was just a beautiful day for Farm Day! It was in the 70’s and just a little bit of wind. The alpacas enjoyed the sun, and we enjoyed all of the people that came out! Thank you to everybody who came by. If you couldn’t make it, let us know, and we’ll have you out for a private tour!!
It was a great day! Looking forward to next year!
I started writing this last week, but with National Alpaca Farm Day preparations, I never got back to finish it. So here’s the finished product!!
Our new BIG TOM carder arrived! It is SOOOOO cool!!
We got home and this big box was on the front porch, and we knew what it was right away. We knew it was going to arrive today. On the box once again was a very nice thank you note from Ron at Fancy-Kitty.
We started opening the box outside to see what it was like, we couldn’t even wait to see what it was like to get it inside!! Once again it was packaged WONDERFULLY!!
It came right out of the box all wrapped up.
Once out in the open it was beautiful.
There had been a little movement in the motors in the shipping. One of the transformers had slipped off the other. It was easy to slip back under the zip tie. Other than that it was perfect.
Here are the controls. Very easy to read and know how to use. On/Off. Forward/Reverse. Slow/Fast. That’s it. The controls on the left control the licker-in and the controls on the right control the large drum.
Here are some final pictures of the Big Tom. It runs like a charm!
Looking forward to using it!! (we have now!)