Monday, August 26, 2013

13AUG26

Greetings from Baker Heritage Farms:

Summer is back ... our nice weather is gone (for now).

We are still in the learning phase of our farming venture. We have now learned that turkey's are not easy animals to control, especially when you have chickens as well.

Our chickens are truly "free range" chickens. While they are in a pen, they are free to come and go, and come and go they do. They are now flying in and out of the pen and we essentially let them come and go as they please. This makes keeping turkeys a problem. They want to, and do, get out. Unfortunately, turkeys and chickens do not mix.

Every night we have several turkeys get out several times before they finally nest in the trees. And every morning, we have to conduct a turkey round-up, again, several times.

Chickens are doing great. We are getting over 20 eggs each day now. We are not selling them as we are not candling them so we cannot grade them. We have not decided if we will or not. We are comfortable knowing that they are not fertilized as they do not get near Red (he won't let them even if they wanted to, they are not his girls). Still waiting for the eggs to get to full sized, then we may start grading and selling them.

Sometime in the past several weeks we lost a chicken. We think she got down into the woods. We cannot count them at night as some are in the hen house and some are not. The one that got away probably did not get put to bed one night and was dinner for one of our wild neighbors, or a hawk or eagle got her.

We have a turkey in isolation. Tiny was either born with, or acquired a defect shortly after arrival, and her legs are deformed. She apparently injured a foot the other day and was being picked on by the other turkeys, so we have her isolated. She is in the pen but is in a separate cage where, hopefully, she will recover.

Donald brought more hay up for the chickens. Saturday he put two loads in the chicken pen and today we all went out and changed their nests. They are now keeping their nests clean so we probably will only add hay every couple of weeks rather than changing it out. He also gave the turkeys some of the old hay as well as some of the new hay. It is a distinct advantage being able to go down and cut hay when we need it (though it was still wet this time). Of course, the disadvantage is that it has to be manually raked, which is a chore.

We are still working on the future of the farm. It was suggested that we work on getting some fruit trees planted. This appears to be the next logical step. Donald has essentially decided that we will not be able to run a full farm operation next year due to a lack of manpower and work requirements; however, we will have a kitchen garden. This actually works well into our education process. It will give us an idea of what we can do with proper soil preparation and time planning, using time saving techniques as much as possible.

Still need to get the tiller repaired. We have not been able to bring it up from the production field due to the amount of water still on the field. Hopefully we can get the truck and trailer down there to get it picked up, otherwise we will strip it where it is and try to get the parts we need and repair it where it sits.

Nothing else new down on the farm. Things will be slow for the next month or so as Donald has several work deadlines he needs to meet.

Until next time, blessings from Baker Heritage Farms.

"A ruler who oppresses the poor is like a driving rain that leaves no crops." Proverbs 28:3

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