have not forgotten

Hey all, I promise, I have not forgotten you all!!! I've been a bad blogger lately, but only because this summer has been insane. I've been working on uploading some pictures to share with you all. Between the garden stuff, the chickens, the rabbits, the dogs, the vehicle breakdowns, and the family functions it's been quite the busy summer. I'm hoping for a slowdown though now that we are halfway through September already. (wow, where has this year gone already????) I'm planning on sitting down tonight and finishing up with my pictures so that I can share some of the farm pictures I've been taking.

Just a little bit of farm news, I'm on day 10 of egg incubation. I started out with 33, but on day 7 when I did my egg candle, I had to take out 6, but not because they died along the way, but because those 6 just weren't fertile. That means we need to look at what's going on with the roosters in that run. I don't think its that we have too many hens for our 3 Rhode Island Red roosters, I think it's more that we only have 1 rooster who is really working, and that would be Martin. Sinatra seems to have retired. Every time I see him he is either eating, or hanging out on the roost in the house napping. The other young, un named rooster that we have in the run doesn't seem to be doing anything at all. We are planning on doing a Rhode Island chick order here soon, and have decided that we are going to go ahead and order 2 rooster chicks when we make that order. This spring, we are going to have to do a huge butcher of our older hens. Right now, we are getting about 40 eggs a day, which is good because I have a lot of egg customers. In fact right now, we are planning on keeping all of the hens that hatch out. We are currently hatching out Tetra Tints.

We are still working with the Americana chicks that we hatched out. Although they aren't really chicks so much anymore. They are close to 4 months old. We've been butchering the males so that we can see what we have female wise. We thought that we only had 9 roosters, but I'm thinking it may be more as they are growing. That's the one thing I really don't like about that breed, they are so slow to mature that unless you are an expert at sexing them as newborns, you really don't know what you have until they are mature. As we are not experts, we just let them grow up and decide what they are.  As soon as we finish butchering everything male, we will get those hens sold off. We are going to need the space for the chicks that we are working on hatching out right now.

Well, I'd better stop rambling on for the moment. I need to get myself on the move.