The cold snap and snow was VERY short lived, and we are back to t-shirt and jeans weather each day, which is just crazy for this time of year. But we are enjoying it and soaking it in before we are chased indoors for a few months by winter.
Root Cellar/Tornado Shelter
When we moved to the new property we noticed right away that we didn’t have a tornado shelter. We made it a priority to get our family a shelter since we live in an area that gets a lot of tornado activity. While we were working on it we had 3 different tornadoes come within 10-15 miles of us. Too close for comfort. It is one of those things you hope you never have to use, but want to have just in case. We also needed a root cellar to store our garden produce throughout the year. So, it made sense for it to be dual-purpose.
We finally finished it and have moved our root cellar racks into it. We have also started building shelves for the home-canned goods, though we haven’t finished those yet, they will go all the way to the ceiling. With no garden this last year, we don’t have much to put down there, but there is a small amount of stuff we were given from other’s gardens (what a blessing!), as well as the small (compared to other years) amount of canning we were able to do this fall (another blessing!).
It is going to be so nice in the coming years to be able to have a safe place to go if needed, and to have a place to put our garden produce and canning for the year.
Canning
Speaking of canning, we have been doing some pressure canning lately. We did pumpkin a few weeks ago. I was going to use a fresh pumpkin for the Thanksgiving pumpkin pie this last week, but our oven decided to act up and make Thanksgiving complicated, so I used some of the home-canned pumpkin instead. It turned out delicious! I was grateful I had it available. This week we have also been pressure canning turkey stock made from the carcass of the Thanksgiving turkey. I love homemade stock so much! And it is so healthy too. We canned 18 pints already, and I would say we have at least another 12 pints worth to can up today or tomorrow. Feels good to add more to those new root cellar shelves!
Goats
The does went to the breeder a few weeks ago and have been bred now. We are just waiting to see if they come back into heat so we can confirm they are pregnant before we bring them home. Hopefully they will be coming home very soon.
Sheep
We are doing another round of pregnancy testing this week to see who got pregnant in October. We traded the ram’s crayons last week so we would know who was getting bred again. If they already had red marks on them, and then came back into heat and got bred again with the same color then we wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell that they had been re-bred. So we traded the red and blue to opposite rams in the two different breeding pens. So the ones getting re-bred are now getting marked with a different color. We are going to continue doing the blood tests every few weeks throughout the season as well to help us confirm which ones have been bred and whether they took. After last year’s major issues with infertile rams we are doing our best to not take any chances of being surprised this year.
LGDs
One of our sweet Anatolian Shepherds was cuddling with the sheep the other day during what I call the sheep afternoon nap time, and I desperately wanted a photo, but of course if I approach she jumps up to greet me. So I ran right to her before she could get up and gave her some petting and tried to snap a photo. It only kind of worked. LOL.
Anatolians are such great Livestock Guardians. We love them and count on them to help protect our farm and stock. But there is one downfall – they love to dig. Up in the Rockies, at our previous farm, this wasn’t a big deal. We had some holes here and there, but never very deep and not really a problem. Well, we now live in the High Plains on sand. Sand, sand, sand. And we all know what that means – sand is SUPER easy to dig in. So the digging has taken on new, gigantic proportions.
Inevitably it is always done right along the edges of buildings. They generally are digging to make themselves a cool den in the summer, and the coolest spots are along the outside edges of the buildings in the shade, and some on the inside of the buildings along the walls too. This is causing some trouble for us as they take out the support of the buildings and also create ways to get out of the buildings. Our younger LGD is causing the most trouble at this point. We are trying all different methods and doing our best to repair what she is doing. But it is definitely causing some headaches and extra work for us. Hopefully, as she matures and as the cold weather moves in the digging will decrease a little.
Poultry
The guinea fowl are doing well. They continue to choose to hang out around the sheep pens, but thankfully we have not lost any more to the LGDs. We have noticed that there is a sad little outcast in the group. It is the smallest and ever since we let them out for the first time we notice that they keep him (or her) pushed out about 3-5 feet from the group at all times.
The chickens are doing fine. They are enjoying the compost we added to their run for them to work through. We continue to rake it into a pile every couple weeks for them and we add more as needed. They will be giving us a very nice pile of compost for the gardens next spring. We also integrated the 7 chicks from this last summer, that are now young adults, in with the main flock. We had hoped to maybe get them out on the barnyard to work on keeping the stalls maggot-free, but didn’t have time to build them a coop out there yet. So for now, they are living with the main flock and we are turning the stalls often. The cold weather has also helped get rid of the maggots. But we are hoping to have chickens on the barnyard by next summer, before maggots become an issue again.
All the adult hens are looking pretty be-draggled as they are molting.
The Welsh Harlequin ducks have started laying. We are not sure if it is just one, or both of them. But we are getting a duck egg almost every day. The Muscovies have not started yet. But all of them (Harlequins and Muscovies) were pretty late-season ducklings to expect them to lay before next spring anyway, so we are just surprised and happy by the eggs we are getting.
That’s the update from our little corner of the world!
Willow Creek Farm 