2010 wrap up

It has been a year since I took over our little farm. We have had lots of fun and sadness. I was thinking about the hens that hatched chicks and I came up with... we had 8 hatching's alone just with my hens. That comes to about 50 chicks, add the 6 I hatched in our incubator and the 24 that hatched in a friends and that's a total of 80 chicks! That is not counting the ones we brought home from the feed store! I have seen a whole life cycle happen before my very eyes and it amazes me. Last year in January I bought 11 chicks and only 3 of them ended up being hens. Each of those hens started laying in July, just barely 6 months old! Then they all hatched their first chicks by August! Amazing!

The quails I feel were a failure. They needed a better pen to be in. They have all died or got out of their cages. The heat in summer and cold in winter was just to much for them. They were fun, but I don't think I will do them again unless I have a nice atrium built for them.

Ducks are sooo much fun! We started this year with 7 Muscovies. again only ending up with 2 girls out of the bunch. We also bought 2 Indian Runners, 2 Khaki Campbells, and pair of Geese. We lost 2 of the Muscovie boys, 1 Runner and Khaki, then the female goose. We also bought 3 black runners, 4 gray (I still don't know what they are?) and 3 black Cayugas. Lost 3 of the gray ones but we still have all the others. They are all loving all this rain, at least something is!

We started the year of with 5 new baby bunnies. A mix between or Chocolate Dutch boy and our Holland Lop girl. They were the cutest thing in the world, and so fun to have. I thought we would have no trouble selling them but we did and ended up keeping them all. It took me months to sex them, Phill kept saying "quit looking down there!". How did I finally know what they were you may ask??? Their little testes came in and it was obvious that they were all boys!!!! When they came into adulthood they would try to mate to each other then they started fighting. I've always had 1 or 2 in the house with some kind of something that needed to be cleaned every day. We are now down to 3, One got hurt outside somewhere and died in my arms, one got out of the pen and made it all the way to the road and got hit by a car. Our fave of the babies that we were gonna keep was named Spot and he has been missing for a couple weeks now. I'm still hoping I find him ok but my hopes are not very high. We still have 2 of the babies left and their daddy Benny who we will be keeping forever.

Phill has said that he has never buried so many animals in his life than he has done this past year. We've had cats die on the road too. That is farm life, both new life and death happen. I think it's been good for the kids to see it happen, help them understand that life has a beginning and an end. It's been really hard for me and I have decided that I am pretty much done. I have started to downsize the chickens and have no plans to buy any more ducks this spring. I had my year to experiment and now I'm just ready for it to be simple again.