Growing the barnyard...

So, it's nearly spring...  this brings warmer weather (which is nice, since we didn't get much snow this year...  if it's not going to snow, it may as well warm up, right??!).  Warmer weather brings new life...  and our place is abounding with new life these days!

Aside from the animals we already had (1 rooster, 8 laying hens, and 2 horses) we have just added (in the last week) 11 new babies (not counting the babe growing within me... more on that in another post!  I need to have my husband scan the ultrasound picture so I can post it here...  we got a great profile pic, but I don't know how to put it on the computer...  but I'm rabbit trailing...)

No, rabbit trailing wasn't a play on words...  the only rabbits here are the wild ones ;)

We've added:

6 baby chicks...  we bought black star and red star chicks this year, since they are "sex linked" (meaning you can tell their gender based upon their coloring) and we are assured that we won't get another surprise rooster (one is fun and I enjoy his crowing, but more than one would just be too much...) and we know from the chickens we already have that these two breeds are great egg layers of very large brown eggs!  Right now, these chicks don't have names...  but we're watching them to see how they distinguish themselves, so we can name them (and tell them apart!)

 

4 piglets...  right now they weigh about 50 pounds each - by slaughtering time, they should weigh around 200 pounds or more - when they are a bit bigger, they are GREAT composters!!  We can feed them kitchen scraps and garden scraps, which helps minimize our trash going to the dump and helps with our feed bill!  We'll keep two for our own freezer, and sell the other two at butchering time.  We have one barrow (female) whom we have named Petunia and three gilts (males) named Porky, Hamlet, and Sausage.

 

1 calf... he's 2 weeks old and weighs about 200 pounds.  Next fall, when it will be slaughtering time, he should weigh between 800 and 1,000 pounds - and he's a smaller breed!  We bought him from a dairy farm, since they sell their steers but keep their heifers for future breeders and milk producers.  His name is George, and we had intended to bottle feed him, but he simply will not take to the bottle, so I'm feeding him milk replacer from a bucket, which works just fine, too!  Actually, it might even be a tad bit easier, because I can mix the milk right in the bucket, which I could not do in a bottle. 

They have been such fun to have on our little "hobby farm"!