Spring has sprung!

Wow! It's been forever since I last wrote.  Sorry about that!  It's now May 20. It's only 60 degrees here today.  We've had about 3 days of rain and cool temperatures but it is supposed to be in the 70's today and up in the 80's and sunny for the whole weekend.

The girls love to free-range!

Our hens have been busy laying, giving us 2-4 eggs daily.  I bought 3 pullets a few weeks back that were about 7 wks old at the time.  They have almost doubled in size! Right now they live in a wire dog crate.  I move the crate out into the chicken yard each morning and move them back to the shed at night.  It's good for the hens to see them and get used to them.  I do keep the little ones in the shed on rainy days but keep the light on for them.  I should be able to integrate them with the big girls in another month.  They won't be laying til this fall though.  I've named all of the chickens.  The 2 Rhode Island Reds are Rosie and Joanie.  The Americaunas are Annie and Lucy.  I've been letting the big girls free range in our yard in the afternoons on pretty days.  Their favorite place seems to be under and around the bushes in the front yard, near the porch.  It's nice to know that they will come back to the chicken yard and coop at night for roosting. See below for photos of the hens and "younguns".

The crias are growing nicely.  Fiddler will be 2 months old on the 30th of May.  He is already eating hay and mooching grain out of his mama's feed dish.  His weight is up over 32 pounds now.  Doc Watson (Doc for short) is around 34 pounds now.  He just started eating grain this week.  He's not a chow hound yet though.  The two boys are so cute together.  They play alot!

We've been busy breeding our girls in the last couple of weeks.  Ginger (the medium fawn girl) went off farm for a few weeks to be bred.  She'll be coming back in the next week or so.  We bred Bubbles 2 weeks ago back to Ace.  Hopefully Ruby will be bred tomorrow for the first try.  Her service sire is coming up to Virginia to another farm for a few months.  The Va farm's owner is bring him over tomorrow to do the breeding.  Never a dull moment!

As you can see, John and I keep quite busy around here.  Last weekend we planted the fourth tree.  We now have a shade tree planted in each of the 4 pastures.  They're not terribly big right now but over the next few years they will branch out nicely.  We planted autumn purple ash trees.

Chillin in the pasture with Opal

I have a vegetable garden started also.  I have 4 blueberry bushes, some rhubarb, herbs and the basic veggies: zucchini, yellow squash, sugar snap peas, peppers, tomatoes and watermelon in the ground.  Yum!!