Baby Chicks

Hello family and friends;


I hope everyone has survived the winter. We feel like we have endured and are finally coming into more daylight, fewer icy roads, fewer armloads of pellets for the stove, warmer temperatures, more walks and, inevitably, more work coming up. Ray got good use out of the new snow blower this winter. We were grateful for studded tires several times. We are happy that winter knows when it's not welcome anymore and finally it will give way to spring (I hope).

So, Ray is lying on the sofa with two baby turkeys on his chest and a heating pad on top. Why? I think it's just an excuse to rest his sore back but he says they were cold. The three of them look pretty cute, sleeping peacefully. The thirteen baby chicks under the heat lamp on the dining room table also seem to have gone to sleep. At least the incessant cheeping has stopped.

Yesterday we bought these babies and they are so cute! We have 6 different kinds of chickens and two turkeys, also different kinds. We hope to get different colours of eggs and maybe also some delicious meat in the fall. We have certainly enjoyed the chickens we butchered last fall (though the killing and cleaning was pretty awful). The two roosters survived the winter but the white one got frost bite on his comb and wattles. The edges are very black instead of red, but otherwise he seems happy.


We think we lost one of our five bee hives. Probably starved and/or froze to death. Actually we are fine with that because we have too many hives. Last year, two turned into 5, not counting the two swarms we couldn't catch. So, if 5 turn into 12 or so, it's just too much to handle. We would like to keep it at about 5 hives and sell any above that.


For the past five weeks, we have been boarding 8 female goats for some neighbours, on top of the three boys we still keep for other neighbours and the one Nigerian dwarf buck that Ray found from Craig's List that is ours. So 12 goats eat a lot and poop a lot and require a lot of unfrozen water. I am going to hire a strong teenager to clean out the sheds and put all this good manure on the garden. We are done with all this back-breaking labour! Paying kids who want to work makes pretty good sense.


So that is an update from the farm. Still hoping to see as many of you as possible out here sometime.


Bye for now.


Love, Fern and Ray.