‘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!
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:
Learn about alpacas
Needlefelting
Watch the alpacas
Watch the turkeys
Learn about Picking Fiber
Learn about Carding Fiber
Learn about Spinning Fiber
Art projects for the kids
Quiz for the kids to take about alpacas and then they won some candy when they turned it in
Fundraising for Cottage Grove Theater Department (we sold needlefelting kits, brownies and took donations)
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!!
Come and join us on Saturday, September 26th only, from 9:00 am to 4:00 pm for our 2nd annual National Alpaca Farm Day. We will be teaching people about alpacas, having fiber spinning demonstrations, picking & carding demonstrations, felt making demonstrations, fiber crafts for the kids, bottled water & farm tours. All of this is FREE!!
Here’s the Story. Julia, Lilian & Aislyn are out of town camping with Julia’s family. Georgia stayed home with me so she can go to a party on Saturday at her best friends house who is moving soon. With Julia gone, that put Georgia in charge of the animals while I have been at work this week. Georgia called me yesterday morning around 10:00 am asking if I had fed the dogs that morning. I asked her if she had checked the alpacas yet and she hadn’t. I was feeling that it was going to be yesterday since I had seen Milkyway rolling in the dirt early in the morning. This is normal for some of our alpacas, but not that normal for Milkyway. So I knew she was feeling uncomfortable. Georgia hung up and said she would go check on them.
About 90 seconds later, Georgia called back and frantically said that the baby was on the ground. She seemed a little stressed. I told her I would be right home and to go out and see if she could help the baby. It takes me about 35 min to get home from the time I leave my office. By the time I was home the baby was up walking around and nursing. All great signs. Georgia had dried him off and took good notes on times. We took his temperature and dipped his naval, and all was well. He was running around the pasture in no time.
I noticed that one of his front legs was slightly twisted out. Made a note to have the Vet look at it. Kept an eye on baby and mom the rest of the day. All went well. The other cria’s wanted him to play, and as long as he was close to his mom, he liked to play. He is a big one, 24 pounds. That is great!
Our Vet came today this afternoon to check him out. He is doing great except for the leg. He has very tight tendons in one of his front legs. Now Milkyway did NOT like that we were trying to put a splint on his leg. I was holding Oberon’s legs, and Milky freaked out. She started trying to bite my head, and the started spitting on us. Mainly got me right in the face. That is when we decided to take Oberon out of the barn near the hay to put the splint on. Gave him a couple of shots and drew some blood. We’ll get his IGg next week. I’m going to guess it’s good, but we’ll see.
Yesterday I also took a walk around the farm and took some other pictures that I thought I’d share.
Ok, it’s been a little while (a week) since I gave an update, and it’s been even longer since I gave an update on the chickens so I thought it was time to give an overall farm update!
I’ll start with the 2009 Farm Goals: = COMPLETED = Started but not completed =No work done yet.
Put in a Garden – The garden has been tilled. When Julia was in Orlando for a TSFL conference, I had a local farmer come over with his small tractor and till up the garden. It would have taken me ALL DAY to do it with a walk behind kind, it took him just a few minutes. No pictures at this time but I’m sure you know what dirt looks like!!!
Build Layer Chicken Coop - The layer coop is mostly done. It has walls, windows, doors, roosts, nest boxes, lights, and chickens. All that needs to be done to really finish it off is to put access doors on the back of the nest boxes so we won’t have to go in to the coop to collect eggs. Here are some pictures:
This first one is of the simple roosts that I built out of 2×4’s. I also had some leftover metal shelving that I hooked some large limbs to. The chickens really like the limbs.
Here are the nest boxes I built. Right now I have the 4 upper ones. On the middle shelf I am going to have a community nest box. There will be an opening at each end, and the chickens will be able to go in and lay eggs where they want.
Here are a couple of pictures of the chickens enjoying (except for me taking pictures of them) the limbs in the coop.
Build Chicken Tractors
Attend/Enter 3 Alpaca Shows – Just found out that the Alpaca show in Eugene is canceled this year. So we’ll have to find some more to go to!
Visit 3 Fiber Mills
Neonatal Class – We did attend the neonatal class at Northwest Alpacas. It was a good day and we did learn a lot. We now feel a little bit more prepared for our 4 cria this summer.
Get a Tractor – Yeah right! LOL
Build a Whizbang Garden Cart & Plucker – I’ve started collecting the wood I’ll need for this. Next thing I need to do is start getting the hardware.
Build Road to Back Pasture
Run Water To Barn
Make Compost Bins – We have a location and a lot of stuff to compost. Now we just need to put it all together.
Farm Days – We have dates!!! The first one is going to be June 27. This is just our Farm Day. The National Alpaca Farm day is going to be September 26th. We’re looking forward to these days!
Build a Fire Pit
Build a Skirting Table
Start a Monthly Movie Night- January & February Movie Nights went great. This has been harder than I thought it was going to be. We did have movie nights in March, April & May, but not all the kids were present at all nights, and we didn’t have friends at all nights but we did watch movies!!
CHICKEN UPDATE:
Well, at one point we had A LOT of chickens here on property. At one point we had 3 RIR, 3 Barred Rocks, 3 Welsummers, 3 Speckled Sussex, 3 Silver Laced Wyandottes, 1 Golden Laced Wyandotte, 6 Buff Orpingtons, 1 Cuckoo Maran, 1 Dominique, 1 Lemon Blue Game Bantam, 1 Barnyard Mutt. 26 chickens & 4 turkeys! I finally realized that we had too many. So I either gave away or sold a good number of chickens. At this point we have: 1 Barred Rock, 1 Speckled Sussex, 1 GLW, 1 SLW, 1 Welsummer, 1 Dominque & the Barnyard mutt. We also still have all the Buff Orps and the Cuckoo Maran & the 4 turkeys. Also in the incubator we have 15 eggs, so there is still a chance we’ll have TOO MANY chickens!!
We have named most of our chickens (except for the BO’s).
Goldie is our Golden Laced Wyandotte
Millie is our Dominique
Whitey is our barnyard mutt
Uncle Sam is the Barred Rock in back and Madge is the Speckled Sussex in front.
Wellie is our Welsummer
And Dott is our Silver Laced Wyandotte.
Like I said, we also have 6 Buff Orpingtons (no names yet) and one Cuckoo Maran. They are about 2 weeks old right now and are doing pretty good.
We also have 15 eggs in the incubator. 7 of them are Black Australorps. These will grow up to be beautiful irredescent black (large) chickens.
Image from Meyer Hatchery
The other 8 are Ameraucanas. I’m not sure what color they are going to be (there are multiple colors) but they will lay beautiful blue eggs. Here are some pictures from today!
We’re on day 18 with these, so no turning, and only a couple days left until they hatch!!
ALPACA UPDATE
All in all the alpacas have been doing great. No real issues with them. They are growing up wonderfully and getting along like they should. Like my last post said, we were getting ready for shearing day. It went great!!! We all had our jobs and we did them well, and we got them all sheared!
I was out getting ready for the day aroun 7:30. Kim (Brownie’s owner) showed up at 8:00 and started helping us get ready. We layed out plywood where we would be shearing and got the barn as clean as you can get a barn.
Eddie showed up right at 9:00 and started setting up his equipment (ropes & clippers). To shear the alpacas, we bring them in and lay them down on their side and then tie their feet and stretch them out so they can’t hurt themselves or us! All in all they are probably down for no more then 4-5 minutes. Most of them didn’t make much of a fuss.
Here is a picture of what it looked like just before we started. You can see the ropes stretched out ready to go. In the picture is Eddie the shearer, Kim, and Julia’s dad Terry filming.
So our jobs were as follows: Rebecca and I had the job of bringing in the alpacas, laying them down and tying them down. Georgia was in charge of sweeping between the alpacas and helping Bec and I separate the alpacas out and keep the others where they needed to go (she was a GREAT help!!!). Kim was in charge of helping Eddie with shearing and keeping the head where it needed to be during shearing. Robbin from Bailey Hill Alpacas was helping bag up the fiber. She was in charge of 2nds (fiber from the chest, belly, legs & neck). Julia was bagging up the blanket and clipping toenails while we had them down. Pattie was in charge of keeping all the bags and lables in order so we would know whos fiber was whos when we finished. Lilian was in charge of watching the kids in the house so we could all be out in the barn. She was also a great help! Without Georgia & Lilian, we could have never done this day so quickly!!
Here is a picture mid-shear! Over on the far side you can see them shearing Nola. Julia had just collected the blanket and Kim is holding the head while Eddie finishes up. Here close to the camera you can see Bec and I tying down Helena while Georgia brings us the ropes. (This was the only picture I got during shearing. I thought I had my camera to take one picture every 30 seconds, but it was really set to take one picture every 60 minutes. Next year I’ll get it set right!! Stupid camera!!)
This is the aftermath of shearing.
All in all it only took us about 75 minutes to shear all 16 alpacas. Pretty good for first timers! Julia and her mom had made a great lunch for all of us and we all went in and enjoyed a fun lunch, getting to know Eddie better and laughing about getting spit on or kicked (only Bec and I got kicked, so not too bad). I think we all had some sort of spit on us!
Here is what we are left with, 32 bags of beautiful fiber (only 30 bags are shown, Kim took Brownies fiber with her). I love all the different colors. One bag has their blanket and another bag with 2nds. We also collected a small sample to send off to get histograms (this will tell us the thickness of the fiber, the length, and all the fun stuff we want to know).
Terry was able to get some video. It didn’t upload that well, but here you can see I think Feline getting sheared.
We all had a great day. We’re looking forward to next year.
So, all in all we are having a great time on the farm! Keep watching for the update on the eggs that are getting ready to hatch!!
Well, we spent part of today loading and stacking wood. One of the men in our ward, Willie Potter, sells firewood. He brought over a truckload of madrone this afternoon and we had fun as a family stacking wood. A truckload is about 1/2 cord (that’s what Willie said, I have no idea!!). We had fun moving and stacking the wood. Georgia even said that she enjoys farm work. It was really kind of fun.
I didn’t know much about madrone so I looked it up online and found this:
“As far as quality is concerned, madrone is unquestionably the best wood! Madrone is extremely dense, HARD wood. It burns extremely HOT, and it burns for a long time.”
I guess that will do!!
Here is the wood after it is stacked.
Making some kindling
Julia happy to have the wood stacked
Very happy!!
Watch out for Georgia!!
1/2 cord of wood. The back stack is about 8 feet long and almost 4 feet high. The front one is about 1/2 the height.
We now have a nice fire going in the house. It feels sooooo good!
‘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).
= COMPLETED
= Started but not completed
=No work done yet.
) 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.
)
Next year I’ll get it set right!! Stupid camera!!)
