Garden

2009 Goals (or “How did we do?”)

Posted on December 31, 2009 at 9:40 pm

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!

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New Blog (really an addition to this one)

Posted on August 30, 2009 at 10:09 pm

We have begun planning for our garden next year, and we are going to make A LOT of changes next year. Actually we are starting now with the changes, so I thought I would start a new blog to keep track of what we are doing with just the garden.

Silk Creek’s Square Foot Garden Blog

Come on over and take a look at what we’ve done so far (not much, so don’t expect to see much!)

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Cria #4 is Here!

Posted on July 24, 2009 at 10:22 pm

Announcing Silk Creek’s Oberon (maybe )

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.