When Nature and Farm life collide...

    On Saturday evening, one of our chickens was attacked by a raccoon. I was at work, Tim was watching the game, it was getting dark out and he let his guard down. He's knows better than this and felt really bad. We know that we have a mom raccoon up in back with a litter and she is a hungry girl.

   She went into our coop, grabbed this girl and gave her a few good injuries. We are giving her anti-biotics, cleaning the wounds and giving her a lot of TLC. She also has a ruptured air sac but that will re-absorb. I think she will be fine, just a tincture of time to heal. All her wounds are surface wounds and some loss of feathers.

    When the commotion started our two hero's, "Jesse" our shepherd mix and "Autumn" our terrier mix were both up to the coop in 3.5 seconds. Dogs are wonderful tools for thwarting such attacks and keeping wildlife at bay. These two are always on high alert and do their jobs well.
   So, Ms Raccoon has got to be watched very carefully and "Jesse" and "Autumn" are watching and working!
   We can live with wildlife, but always have to be on our toes, they have a right to this earth as we do...

Update on our hatching...

    Here is an update on our incubation of our Rhode Island Red eggs. We put 25 eggs into the incubator over the course of three days. Each was dated and numbered. The left row netted no embryos at all. We had some that formed half way and then had died in their egg at different stages of  development. I called my neighbor and he said he as well as our neighbor up the road was having the same issue. These two guys have been doing this for years and have never had issues like this. We all spoke and tried to find a common denominator. We found that we were feeding different feeds and had nothing that seemed to link our problems except the weather. The weather here in Connecticut has been rainy and the barometric pressure has been up and down.
We did however have two chicks hatch but one lived...

and she will be going to a friend who has 4 other chicks in her brooder and we will try again next week to hatch some new chicks!

Pollen Trap and our first pollen harvest!

    As I learn more about beekeeping, I have been researching the benefits of bee pollen or "bee bread", so I decided to purchase a pollen trap to put under my bees..

It took them a while to learn how to get into the new entrance, but within a few hours they figured it out...

The pollen trap has a slide out tray on the side of the hive that catches the pollen they drop... 

and here is our first harvest of bee pollen, not bad for two days. The picture doesn't do it justice but there are so many different colors of pollen, it was quite a beautiful show of natural colors.

Incubating baby chicks, one week and counting!

    Two weeks ago, after a failed attempt, I loaded 25 Rhode Island eggs into the incubator. I now have the proper liner, two thermometers and a humidity gauge. My first failed attempt was the lack of participating people putting water into the incubator and "cooking" the eggs. My mom bought the incubator...

and I bought this rocker which gently turns the eggs 4 times a day. At the 18 day mark I will take out the rocker and place the eggs on the "O", marked on each egg. They have to be in the incubator for 21 days. The chicks should hatch in 7 more days. The eggs have the date, the number of the egg (up to 25) and an "X" on the other side to help me track them. I will also "candle" the eggs to see which ones have chicks growing in them. Our egg business is doing so well we need more chickens! We can't keep up with the demand and I have also promised some of the chicks to a friend. I will update in a week what our success was!

Greenhouse Planted and ready to go!

   Happy official beginning of the summer and Memorial Day weekend as we remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice so we can enjoy our freedom. It also kicks off the official planting season! Our greenhouse is planted and did rather well with everything growing nice and healthy. It is bursting at the seams with everything from vegetables to flowers and herbs.
   So today I began the task of locating things where they will be planted in our new raised beds made of re-purposed lumber. We took a trip to the dump today and got more lumber for more raised beds. It always amazes me what people throw away!
   Happy Birthday to Tim who is outside swearing at the new grill we bought him as he is putting it together!  So enjoy this holiday weekend and remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice...

Here we re-purpose again!!!

A few weeks ago a friend called and had some wood he was getting rid of. He took down a deck so Tim went to see what he had. He had plywood as well as some larger pieces too. We have been in need to build a new hay storage...

also available was some other wood elsewhere, so I brought it home and we went to work building small raised beds for our garden...

We made 35" x 35" small boxes, filled them with
some compost soil and alpaca manure...the boxes will be used to contain strawberries, mints, horseradish and other various invasives...

and another shot of our new hay area which will hold over 100 bales of hay! I just love knowing that we re-purposed and did our part to recycle and help the earth!

1. 

Making Milk Baths

   Now that all the lambs have been born, it's time to get busy around here and prepare to open the farm stand for the summer. Last night I prepared a big bowl of my famous Milk Bath. Complete with dry milk, dry buttermilk and my secret fragrance.
   I use recycled bottles (seen in the picture) as well as package some of them up in zip bags. These are a great way to take a bath as well as great on the skin! So I am off to work, creating, cleaning, and planting...

The end of lambing season!

   The end of lambing season has finally come! So many trips to the barn to "check on the girls", watching the lamb cam and the stress, oh the stress! It has been an interesting lambing season at best, first with "Belle" having mastitis, then having to bottle feed her baby, then her baby getting trampled and having to go to the Vet and on and on.
  

Rose gave birth this morning to this healthy handsome ram lamb. If I were a betting person I would have bet the farm she had twins in there, but she had this big healthy little man. She labored straight into the night, pacing, scratching and I got worried, but all is well and we can now get some rest!
   So we have 2 ewes and 2 rams...all are healthy and well!

Our Mother's Day miracle!

 Happy Mother's Day to all the mom's out there! My Mother's Day started out awesome. Tim and I woke up at 5:15 a.m. this morning, we had a very busy day ahead so we got started early.
 When we went down to feed the animals and give "Baby Baaaa" his bottle we discovered this beautiful little white ewe, our first ever born on the farm!
Here she is about a half an hour old, so tiny and precious. We need a name for her, a white flower name, I am thinking "Daisy" but am open for suggestions!

Catching a Honeybee Swarm!

On Friday one of my hives decided to swarm. I acted quickly and set up a quick honeybee swarm trap. I first started off by putting a frame with some "swarm wipes", a special scented wipe that attracts them.

I found the swarm forming on the front lawn and took two potting containers together and placed the frame and lurer inside. The swarm quickly started to swarm around it but by the morning it was gone.

A close up of the bees starting to form on the frame which had me very encoraged but to no avail until...

I woke up this morning, opened the front door and noticed the swarm had returned to the garden bench,

and if you look very close, in the center where the bees are in a circle, there she is, The Queen! I was so excited!

(sorry for the quality of this frame, my camera went a bit nuts!), I ran up and got the frame that I was trying to attract the swarm with. I placed the queen into a queen cage, marked her and took the bees up to my nuc hive who have not been able to raise a queen, for whatever reason, whether she died while out mating, I am not really sure. I laid newspaper on top of them, added another hive body, placed some frames and the bees in, closed them up and hopefully once they eat thru the layer of newspaper, they will accept her as their new queen! Fingers crossed this works!

Hiving a Honeybee Package

 At 6:30 a.m. this morning the phone rang and it was the post office notifying us that our bee package was in, so off Tim went to pick it up.

I found this sign on the bees a little funny...aaahhh yeah! I had a hive ready and waiting for their arrival so after work today I fired up the smoker, geared up and went to work getting them out of their cramped box.

I am spraying them in this picture, weighing them down heavily with sugar water.They are too busy licking it off of each other and too heavy to worry about defending their hive...

 The can in this picture is filled with sugar water as well as holes punched into the bottom for their trip. It lifts out of the box of bees and releases them. The white tape like string is anchored to the queen cage.

 The queen cage contains a live queen and a few other bees who tend to her during the journey. A cork has to be removed and it exposes a sugar plug. I take a nail and punched a hole thru giving them an easier way to eat her out of the cage. If you look close or even blow this picture up you can see her at the top inside...

 next step is shaking the bees into the hive. It takes a little patience and time to get everyone in the hive safely...

I then add another hive body and fill it with newspaper. This is for a couple of reasons, 1) to prevent them from building burr comb, it confuses them and 2) I can leave the queen on top along with the sugar water can. I will remove this in about a week.

I then close the hive up and in a couple of days I will check to see if they have released the queen. I am so relieved they are home safely!

Preparing for the Honeybees to arrive!

Over the past couple of days we have been giving the bee yard a makeover with new paint and some new parts. I would love to paint some designs on the hives one day if I get some free time and creative inspiration.

We are awaiting just one package of bees this year. With my over wintered hive and my split hive the bees are doing great this year (knocks on wood). Now to sit by the phone and wait for the terrified phone call from the post office to come pick up my bees!

Reflecting...

This post marks our 200th blog post and has me reflecting on the past five years and our journey. I write this post on May Day Eve awaiting the birth of some lambs, and after a moon light move of the little nuc hive of bees from the front yard up to the bee yard and it is 11:00 p.m.
We began this journey 19 years ago when we bought this house with some goats, chickens and ducks. I then got the call to do wildlife work and became a rehabilitator specializing in raccoon, fox and skunks, but after 10 years I became very burned out and longed for my little farm again. So in December of 2006 I purchased 2 Alpacas to move in with our original goats from previous years and the farm has grown and grown. We then added 5 more Alpacas, rescued 2 Llamas, was lucky enough to obtain 4 Olde English "Babydoll" Southdown sheep which began my foundation herd. We then added chickens and my passion for honeybees was born and what a journey it has been.
I would like to thank all of you who read my blog and maybe learn something along the way, those who have either taught me or will teach me in the future. My goal is to learn everything I can in life.
We work very hard at it but it is such a fulfilling way of life that I would never trade. We are living a dream here and as I reflect on something I heard recently, "if you have a dream work hard to fulfill it..." I smile a little more knowing that we have done just that.

New Fencing for "my girls"

 Today Tim and I got up early and set out to complete our final fencing project. This is the end of adding fencing! It's a lot of hard work. In this picture the fence running in the front is about to come down and open this whole hill to "my girls".

Here is Lily with both lambs, hers and "Baby Baaa". She is always with both lambs who are inseparable. This is moments after they have discovered their new space... 

 The alpacas even got in on some of the action, we let a few in on the other side to check things out. Angus cannot have anything going on without his approval!

Another shoot of the lambs checking out the new space which total almost 100 new feet of fencing and a lot of vegetation. I scoured the area for any toxic plants and everything checked out fine. It makes me happy to see my sheep have more space and privacy from people who drive by, now they can get away if they want and get some much needed privacy!

Poor Baby Baaa goes to the Vet

A couple of days ago our first lamb born, our little bottle baby seemed sore all over. I assumed he got stomped on by my ewes and wanted to give him time. However, he began holding his right rear leg up, toe touching and I thought the worse. So off to the Vet we went, a small Country Vet at the advice of a friend(thank you Dave!), as my mom held him on the front seat of my Jeep. The Vet examined him and took some x-rays and of course in my head he had a million things wrong with him! Even with my worse case scenarios it ended up being a possible torn ligament or soft tissue injury, 4 x-rays concluded that we had no fractures or pelvis injuries! 

So we took "Baby Baaaaaa" as the Vet so named him home with a little pain relief and much relief for me who had visions of a cast and whatever!
As you can see him in the picture resting after his ordeal at the Vet. So much thanks to my mom, the staff at Dr Elwell's and all the folks who came in and had to pet and wish him well. This little guy has been through so much and now he is going to get much rest so he can romp and play with the others!

A swarm goes and comes right back!

 Last Friday much to my dismay while having visitors here on the farm, my bees signaled a swarm which I thought may happen and was awaiting my swarm kit to arrive in the mail. I watched this unbelievable phenomenon and hoped that they would swarm in a reachable location--not so much! In the first picture is the swarm starting to form...

and in the picture to the right you can see the swarm big and heavy. Much to my surprise the bees formed way up in this tree and as we watched they returned to the hive. I have never seen such a thing! Did they predict the bad upcoming weather? I will be in touch with some bee keeper friends and see if they have ever seen this...

A gift for a special baby...

 My newest design inspired by an old rug I saw at a friends house. It had other animals on it but gave me an idea for a gift for a very special baby. Their nursery was designed with farm animals and while sharing her pictures with me, gave me this idea...

...so to the needle board I went. The horse was inspired by another friends Palomino horse. I came up with the ideas for the animals by cuing them up on my smart phone, looking at different poses and dimensions and the rest just went with the flow from there. Tim made the frame which came out so nice. So with all my love to these two new parents, I hope they enjoy this gift from my heart and the best to them and their new son.