Farm Update

Our 25 mature hens are now laying an average of 20 eggs a day!  Today they set a new record of 23.  We passed our egg producer inspection last week so we will soon be getting our egg license.  If anyone is in Champaign/Urbana or Chicago and would like a steady supply of organically fed, free range eggs let me know!  We are producing 10 dozen eggs/week right now but by the end of April we will be producing as many as 40 dozen/week.  We only have 4 female ducks for the time being but they've also started to lay: about a dozen/week.

Today my mother came to visit us from Chicago and she helped us get started on our brand new greenhouse.  Hopefully it will be up by the end of the week...

Packing on a few pounds

Isabelle being friendly as always

Heimdal, all grown up

Heimdal's Famous!

Not really.  But he and the cedar waxwing are now featured in the New England Felting Supply website: http://feltingsupply.com/gallery.html  Thanks Kelty for the beautiful pictures!

These past few weeks I've been doing a lot of needle felting.  I know, big surprise.  My newest creations are a grizzly bear and a honey badger, both of which are now up for sale in my Etsy shop.  I also just finished a memorial dog portait for a friend of my father's in Japan.  He is an architect and he named his beloved dog after one of his biggest artistic influences, Le Corbusier.

This is the honey badger.  It's pretty badass.

Le Corbusier

On the farm front, Emma and I are now drowning in eggs.  Our 25 hens are now laying at least 15 eggs a day!  We are getting our egg license next week so if anyone wants some free-range organically fed eggs, let me know!  We're going to be selling them for 5 bucks a dozen.
Recently, Emma and I have been spending a lot of money making a lot of big purchases for the farm, with the hope that someday we will make that money back...  We just bought our greenhouse, a three-point hitch adapter for our antique tractor (so it can actually use modern implements) and 2 bee packages (enough bees for 2 hives) all this past week.  So here's hoping for a successful first year!

Egg update

Alright, so we got 2 more eggs today, enough to try out with our ramen (the good stuff, not the instant kind) for lunch.  We cracked them open and the yolks were just as beautiful as we'd hoped.  Nice and deep orange from all the plants they've been eating, not like the eggs you get from the big confinement operations.  And they were very flavorful as well.

First Egg!

This morning when I went to feed the chickens I looked on the floor of their coop and found an egg!  It's our very first from our first batch of chickens.  We ended up giving it to Mr. Harms as a gift so I'll report back later once we've tasted one.

Cedar Waxwing

I finally have a sculpture up for sale on Etsy!  I've been making practically nothing but custom dog portraits for the past few months but I finally had a chance to make something just for fun this week.  And since I love birds, I decided to make this life-size Cedar Waxwing you see below.

Experimenting

This past week was a busy one for all of us on the farm.  On Friday we let the sheep in with #13 in the pasture around the barn... and #13 was not too happy about this.  He immediately charged the sheep and proceeded to chase them in circles around the whole pasture until we were able to distract him with some alfalfa and tie him up in the barn.  Later that day after we had released him #13 seemed to have become more tolerant, and since then they've all been peacefully coexisting.  Unfortunately the sheep are still terrified of #13 and are very careful not to get close to him.

#13 eying the intruders

Earlier in the week we moved all of our now 2 month old chicks out of their comfy heated kiddie pool and out into the real world.  The adult chickens we moved into their winter home: a make shift coop inside our equipment shed.  We also decided to experiment with letting our adult chickens and ducks free range.  So far it's been a great success.  We haven't lost any to predators and the birds have never looked happier.

First step into the great outdoors

Chickens in the front lawn

Our magnificent Delaware rooster