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.
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!
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!
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!)
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!!
For more information go to our Silk Creek Alpaca National Farm Day web page.
Julia and the girls went over to a friends home this morning and picked a BIG bucket of blackberries. She then brought them home and made 4 pints and 12 1/2 pints of jam today. I can’t wait to try it out! LOVE blackberry jam. There were also a lot of berries left over so we can have them as dessert tomorrow with some of our friends who are going to come over (listen for great music tomorrow night, my band will be playing).
Here’s Julia’s Blackberry Jam!
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!)
We were moving Rogue, Zach & Jett to the back pasture today since we got Endy back from Shepherd’s Pasture today and we want to start using him to breed. We needed the boys out of there so we were trying to catch them to halter them to lead them to the back pasture. We didn’t have any problems with Zach. He wastn’t too happy about going to the back pasture but he followed us easily.
Then we went to take Rogue, he did not want to go at all!! He slipped out of my hands, looked at Julia and let us know how he felt! Well, you can see the pictures above how he felt! Julia wasn’t too happy with him!! 