Pictured: 1 dozen Large eggs from our chickens
Wildlife
We went through the trailcam footage and caught a BOBCAT! We’ve never captured one on camera before down in our woods. Incredible animals. A doe and her baby also were down on the creek a lot in several videos, but only uploaded the best one.
As is normal this time of year, we’ve been seeing wooly bear caterpillars everywhere. According to this one (old farmer folklore), we should get a decent winter starting up, a long stretch of mild weather, then a short cold snap before spring arrives. Not sure how much you believe, but since several of these guys all look different, I’m betting the weather is just going to be all over the place haha.
Garden Abundance
Our garden has been producing pretty well lately! This lingering warmth and lack of rain is really helping things along. The snow peas are being harvested as our newest crop. Millions of cherry tomatoes and even a large bowl full of larger tomatoes too. Getting cucumbers, still zucchini too. The Nasturtiums are starting to bloom which adds to the flowers of the marigolds and sunflowers out there. The snow peas are also still blooming so I imagine they will produce for quite some time yet. Morganna and I will be planting some beets, where the Radishes were, and spinach, where the lettuce didn’t come up, soon too. I was going to add some cabbage but the Kale that grew overcame what was eating it and is doing pretty well in it’s spot. The beet and spinach seeds are old kids meal prizes from Burgerville!
Here’s some garden pictures (excuse the mess haha):
Chicken Adventures
We are having a bit of a dilema with the Swedish Flower Roosters out in the orchard. We want to either sell a few to folks interested in the breed or raise some up to butcher. The issue is they all want to be top rooster and breed the hens. The poor hens are taking a beating from all the attention. We are putting together a run to put them in, but that means no more free ranging and a much smaller area for them to live in. I’m sure they will do fine in the smaller run, but this is going to be something we need to figure out for the future of raising chickens too. Things to ponder!
As you can see in the cover photo, we are getting more medium and large eggs to sell and fewer of the extra small and small ones. We eat the oddball sizes and try to sell the medium and large. If you live near the homestead, you can go to the Birds/Eggs Available page to see what we have. Pictured are examples of what the medium egg cartons look like as we sell them in 18 packs. Large eggs get sold by the dozen.
Sheep News
Not too much to report on the sheep front. This is the time of year where everyone is enjoying pasture, nothing is going on, and it’s rather peaceful. Ewes are down in the middle pasture with the horse and a llama, February lambs are in the lean-to pasture with a llama, Summer lambs are in the back barnyard with access to the barn and grain, and the rams are in the front barnyard. Next blog post the older ewes and Feb lambs will be rotating pastures.
Next blog post will be Sunday, Oct 9th.
See you then!
The Oak, Ash, & Thorn Homestead 