The Adventure Begins!

Welcome Spring!!



It is totally feeling and acting like spring, and I can't hold off any longer!
The birds are singing in the trees, everything is dripping and I have even seen some green grass!
Here are some of the fun and exciting things going on around the farm:



Riding! Little farm girl was given this amazing child sized saddle over the winter. She is just thrilled with it and for the first time can do a real posting trot! She wants to ride everyday, but its still a bit too icy.



And here is me in my natural habitat: Boots and spurs, covered in horse hair and jeans ripped from too many winter hours playing horse in the living room. But very happy.



And here is a fun experiment we did last week. I was wanting to build a hot bed, which is a planting bed built over a some active compost. The compost heats the soil so you can grow when its normally too cold to plant. We came to the conclusion that we don't really have time for extra projects, but then a friend gave me this neat idea. We dug a little pit in our compost pile and put this pot in it and planted it with spinach seeds.



Here is our view while we were planting. Definitely not springlike.



Here is the temperature of the compost, 90F.



Then we put a square of plastic over the top. I have been checking it and it is quite warm underneath. I hope I don't roast all the seeds! I will have to keep checking and see what happens, if it works I would love to do more of that next year. The compost pile has pretty much been bare at the top all winter so I know it stays warm.



SEEDS! Little farm girl and I started a chunk of our greenhouse plants today. It was really fun to do together and I was so thrilled to see that we really make a great team. I am pretty happy I spent so much time letting her help when she was little, even though it often made everything much harder.
She punched all the holes and covered the seeds up while I labeled, recorded and dropped seeds in. The job went so quickly and was so enjoyable to do together! Now we just have to be patient, and keep little farm boys curious hands away!

I am hoping he will have the self control not to get into the seeds, but I am not going to count on it! He is such a curious little man. I bought this little greenhouse mainly with the purpose of being able to zip everything in and away from little fingers.



An another reason to be patient. Eggs incubating! These are for a friends flock, but its pretty exciting still! They go into lockdown on sunday, and then only three more days until we should have some chicks making an appearance!



And here was the craft of the day. Nope, not Easter related...
Since I moved the chickens out of the greenhouse and into the barn, one of the flocks has started eating their eggs. Very frustrating! Some days I would find 5 eggs pecked clean in the nesting boxes.

I checked their calcium and diet, everything seemed alright.
I first tried filling those empty eggs with mustard and placing them back in. It seemed to work in that that chickens that I saw going after them seemed like the didn't enjoy it, but by the next time I went to collect eggs, the mustard eggs would be totally gone. I was a bit worried I was just teaching them that egg shells = treats so I stopped that.

Then I watched and removed the birds I saw pecking at the eggs. I took four out and still I would find an egg or two broken and empty. I finally put those hens back in.
Since then I have been sprinkling fresh hay around with every egg collection to keep them busy and scratching elsewhere and that seems to reduced the amount of eggs that get broken.

This is my next step and if this doesn't yield results I think I will make nesting box curtains so the eggs are out of sight and hopefully out of mind.



Today we sanded the plastic Easter eggs and painted them with a non toxic paint. It was actually pretty fun trying to match the egg colours exactly and adding speckles and texture. I am hoping this will help the problem and hopefully be a bit of prevention for future birds who peck around at the eggs.



Hopefully next post I will have some really cute chick pictures for you!