Spring Has Sprung...

First, I must start by saying thank you to all you wonderful blog readers for entertaining my joy of having my goat have kids yesterday. You are all too kind.

So, Spring has sprung. Nevermind the fact it is freezing out and we may get snow tonight. Don't look at the weather, look at the animals, they know. Paul made a nesting box for our first supposedly pregnant meat rabbit. He asked me to check it to see if it had taken, as last time it did not.

I barely got her in my arms and goodness that rabbit is packed full! So now we have bunnies coming anytime between now and Thursday, not to mention a litter of ShihPoos and our first Labradoodles on their way.

We also got a roo off Craigslist last weekend who quickly found his new home here with 13 hens was worth the ride in the box from Everson.

He knows his purpose and he already has them obeying him. If you have ever owned a rooster and flock of hens, you know what I'm talking about. They listen to him. He protects them, talks to them and they respond. I could(and do) plop my lawn chair in the middle of my chicken pen, with a book and just watch my flock. Is that too much detail? You all are going to think I am nuts, aren't you?

The kids and I anxiously crack eggs every morning waiting to see the signs of fertility in the eggs. Once we do we will go back to store bought eggs and throw everthing we can in the incubator.

Quick home schooling side note, wanna know if your chickens' eggs are fertile and incubatable(is that a word?). Crack your eggs, look at the yolk and find the white dot.

If it is just that, a milkish white dot, it is infertile.

Infertile - shown above

If that white dot has a ring around it, like Saturn, it is fertile. It may appear to be a dot within a dot within a dot. Most just have a white ring around the dot though.

Fertile - shown above

So there, a bunch of useless info!

I priced out this years batch of meat birds and turkeys from Ideal Poultry...I could reeeeeally go crazy at that place! Barred Rocks and pheasants and guineas...Oh my!!

Turkeys are so dumb. Did you know someone told me once that you have to force your turkey undercover during a rain storm or they will drown from looking up at the sky,

fascinated by the rain?

I laughed...yeah, funny.

Then we lost one to exactly that. Dumb, dumb birds.

You really have to coddle them.

We are tentitively hoping to do about 70 meat birds, almost double what we have always done in past years. I love my 6-8lb fryers and my 40-60lb turkeys. We learned to butcher early and freeze for Thanksgiving so they WILL fit in the oven. FYI, you can half a 50lb turkey(quarter >60lbs) to fit it in the oven. We are optimistic of doing so many birds(for us) because we have two new butchers to employ, Jacob and Daniel! Yippee, Paul said if all goes well, he will retire me this year. I DETEST butchering...only because it

ALWAYS rains and is cold on the day we have to butcher.

There, don't ask me why I wrote all that.

I am excited for Spring.

What can I say?