Pictured: autumn at the creek on Saturday during our brief woods walk.
Sheep News
Not too much to report on the sheep front. The ewes, horse, llamas, and February ewe lambs rotate to new pastures today. Only one more pasture rotation until pasture shutdown. Crazy how fast winter is coming! Only 2 1/2 months and lambs will be here!
Might have some cull Feb lambs sold too so Shane and I will be out weighing them to get an idea what to charge. The more we can sell before going to the auction in November, the better! Auction prices are still abysmal!
Chicken Adventures
Also, not a huge amount to report with the chickens. We’re getting fewer small and extra small eggs and more and more large and medium eggs. As of today, we have 2, 18 packs of large eggs available for sale.
We also still have a rooster problem in the coop. The chicken run is being added to Dorothy in the near future to get some of those boys separated from the main flock. It’s tough to decide who we want to keep as a Swedish Flower rooster. Part of it is what colors we like as well as who is the lesser jerk to the hens.
Garden Musings
We’re still swimming in tomatoes and some zucchini. Today I’m thinking of grating all that I have in the kitchen and putting in the freezer. Might make a couple loaves of zucchini bread before it’s all in there though. Amazing how many we are able to get off of one plant! I wish we could can some of the tomatoes but with a glass top stove we’re at a disadvantage since we do water bath canning. Our foresight was lacking when we bought it 12 years ago. We weren’t aware it couldn’t handle the weight!
Home News
We finally have a new generator for any potential power outages this winter! It’s dual fuel and powerful enough to handle everything! We bought dual fuel because this summer during our planned area outage from fire danger, the gas station actually was running out of gas! Also propane stores a lot better than gasoline so we can start collecting the 5 gallon containers and storing them (yes a long way from the house or barn).
Woods Walk
Shane and I went down to the woods on Saturday to see the status of the deer blocks we put down there and to get the trail-cam video footage. Those animals loved those blocks! We had the same doe and fawn there night after night and day after day. There were Stellar Jays, Squirrels, and even managed to see a young buck down there. That last video shows the fog moving through and what I believe is a deer blowing. Super creepy though!
Also, the water in the creek is moving again. No more dry creek-bed, though it has a long way to go to make creek noises. It’s a very small and slow trickle (see picture at the top of the blog).
Next blog post will be Monday, October 17th.
See you then!
The Oak, Ash, & Thorn Homestead 