Storming

No news is good news around here! All animals are alive and well and we haven't seen that hawk around...and yes, we're still knocking on wood. We have almost all the maples tapped and we're doing a few more tomorrow. We probably have around 15 L frozen (sap has to be frozen or boiled down after a few days or it goes 'off'). We have learned to not buy any buckets from the dollar store. I went to pour 10 L of sap into a jug and the entire bucket cracked and the sap poured onto the ground :( Today we checked out a maple syrup farm nearby. They were so nice and helpful (we thought they might want to guard their maple syrup secrets) and we got some better ideas for how to tap the trees. We're going to put multiple taps in the bigger trees and drill smaller holes to start. Apparently after about a month the trees will heal the hole that you've drilled so you have to drill a slightly bigger hole and put a new tap in. 

Our plan for today had been to work on preparing the future veggie patch in the orchard. It has been tilled in but I'd like to try the 'lasagna' method of preparing it from now on. It's basically what we did with our little outdoor garden bed last year...but on the large scale. We'll put a layer of feed bags or cardboard or newspaper down over the whole area, and then a bunch of manure/compost/animal bedding and then a layer of mulch and straw. Apparently this does amazing things for the soil as it all decomposes. More importantly, though - less weeds!! Having less weeds than last year would be amazing. I can't even imagine tackling that many weeds in an area as big as we'll have in the orchard. It would be impossible.

The reason we didn't get out there to work was because of the big wind and rain storm last night. It continued pouring all day and the farm was a mess this morning! The path down the centre of the greenhouse was flooded with about 6" of water and most of the fields are halfway to becoming lakes. The chickens were not impressed - they look so funny with their scraggly, windblown feathers and they spent most of their day complaining from inside the coop. The goats didn't even want to come out of the barn at all. They lay on their hay stack all cuddled up ...but were still happy to eat the pine branches that I offered them. 

Some of the chickens prefer to drink out of the dish instead of their waterer.

We're starting to get more eggs again! For the last 2 months we've been down to 3-4 a day but now we seem to be up to 6 or so. 

The main man himself.

We let the girls back out of the greenhouse. They kept trying to escape - I guess they like the risky life. Just stay away from hawks, Speckles!

Nathan finished both the brooder and the chicken tractor for our future broiler chickens. We're thinking of starting in mid March, when the nights aren't as cold anymore (they'll live in the greenhouse with a heat lamp). We'll try 50 broilers and see how we do. We've had a lot of interest so far in pasture raised chickens.

We'd also like to add 6 or so more laying hens (since out of those 6 chicks we got in July we ended up with just one hen, Gus). Oh, and pigs are definitely coming - 4 Berkshires in the spring. So much planning to do! We'd better start looking through the seed catalogues...