Introducing the first ever chicks born here at the farm! They are a barnyard mix of chantecler and barred rock. Four are pure white and two are black and white. This one is my favourite. Loving the stripes down the back!
I came home today to discover a wonderful surprise! There were baby chicks in the garden! One of our chickens had chicks! And we had no idea she was sitting! There is one chicken in the coop who has been sitting for months now but we gave up all hope ages ago of anything hatching. Some days she'd have a few under her, the next none, and lately all the ladies in the coop have been laying their eggs in the brooding box for her to sit on. She's got about twenty under her now!!
But the chickens were all locked up in the coop today as we had to go away for a couple hours. But when we got home one of the hens was wandering around with seven little barnyard mixes outside the coop, so obviously she has been missing for a while now and I hadn't even noticed!! Funny because our Peking duck had been sitting and we waited and waited until eventually all hers turned up as duds and we had been so disappointed. So this is a happy surprise and wonderful addition to the farm. I've been wanting to send my lambs out to pasture for a while now. However, as the weeks have passed and my little lambs barely grew, I knew it was going to be an issue. Not sure why, but our little flock are slow growing. Not certain if it's the breed, or whether they were weaned too early from their mothers, or all the health issues they went through at the beginning but they don't look any bigger than they did when they arrived at our farm. Whatever the reason, they were too small to put out to pasture as the fencing out there would not be able to contain them. It got to the point in time that we needed to order a fresh stack of this year's first cut of hay. But what really nagged me was that I have field's of perfectly untouched hay flapping in the wind. And a little flock of sheep that I could not send out there. So I went to the local farm supply store and bought a portable electrical net. The store had two, which came in two different size boxes but from the same company and had nearly exactly the same description. Both the store clerk and myself could not figure out the difference other than one was a North American packaging and the other was a European packaging. I chose the European packaging simply because it had a red netting and I thought it would be more noticeable to the sheep and keep them from running into it. Next we unraveled the net in the location we wanted which was at the back of the barn. Actually we had placed it next to the barn originally, but it was such a pain in the butt trying to get the sheep in and out without a working border collie (next year I better have a working bc!!). So we set it up at the back of the barn where the sheep simply had to exit the back barn door and reenter at the end of the day with little fuss. Now the reason I`m writing this post is because one would think it is straight forward setting up this net, however, I found myself on the net looking (without success) for further instructions when it didn`t work. The lambs slipped right under the net. I new I had to get the electrical circuit going on it and train them to fear the net, but the the thing that stumped me was this was a portable net. Unlike an electrical fence I set up permanently along the pasture, this one I thought wouldn`t need anything permanent like a metal rod in the ground or a power outlet since afterall it is portable and those things wouldn`t be handy all the time. But in fact it does. You can purchase solar terminals but since we set ours up at the back of the barn, we simply used a small voltage electrical terminal. There are portable ground rods but again since we were at the back of the barn, I hammered a permanent rod into the ground next to the terminal. A ground rod is essential in completing the electrical circuit otherwise the fence will not be live. Next you must ensure no part of the horizontal wires on the net touch the ground or any grass, weeds, or any object really. Note, the very bottom horizontal wire is not live and can touch the ground. But since it is a flimsy net material and the posts are about 12 feet apart, we gave it added support between each post and stretched it taught. Then we waited and watched the lambs graze until they touched the net and got a little shock. (Don't know why but they constantly wanted to graze along the net until they realized it was hot and grazed in the middle thereafter.) Not only did it work on the lambs, but our german shepherd, Dakota, also got a good shock when she wanted to get in and chase the lambs as well as our free roaming pig who let out a yelp and went running. The goal is to train the lambs to fear the net so that I can eventually remove it from the electrical source and place it anywhere in the pasture and they will continue to respect it and stay within the net. But for now I can't tell you how pleased I am to see them finally outdoors grazing. Barn animals belong outside and not cooped up in the inside of a barn all day long. I'm just crossing my fingers that the goats also learn to respect the net as well.
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