I love spring and I hate spring. Spring use to be my least favorite holiday because it is so wet and muddy. As I get older though, I appreciate it more and more. There is nothing like a sunny spring day to boost your spirits. I love that first day that the kids get to run outside and play. Happy times.
I have spent the last couple days in chicken world. We have decided to butcher our current layer flock (wont be until early summer) and start anew. They are 2 years old and your can tell that their egg production has slowed down. Egg production certainly has it's ups and downs even in really young hens, but by 2 years old it starts to take a steady drop. It is kind of hard to think of turning them all into soup, but I do think it is the most economical way to go about things. Chicken feed is expensive, even though our birds free range a lot. No since feeding birds and get no eggs in return. Welcome to the world of livestock I guess. So, we will get new baby chicks in March (both layers and meaties) and 8 week later when we butcher all our meaties and current layers. Also, we are going to try our hand at hatching our own eggs this year (yeah!-the kids and I are really excited about this). I have been looking for an inexpensive incubator that will work for a bunch of rookies.
Leah and Logan are planning to do meat birds in 4H again and Leah really wants to show a silkie. Silkies are really sweet, cool looking bantam (mini) chickens. We have 3 in our current flock right now and they are the best (they will not be butchered, they would yield little to no meat and eat very little). So, I have been trying to find her a silkie that has a little bit of show quality to it. It needs to be born after 1-1-11, but laying by the fair (which doesn't happen for silkies until 20 plus weeks). I found a place in VA that was great. The people are incredibly nice and were willing to ship to us (which is always tricky with birds). We were thinking we would use them, when out of the blue I get a personal message (I had posted about our silkie search on a chicken board I frequent) from a guy in Dayton willing to GIVE us some show quality silkies. He's a breeder and is unexpectantly having to hatch some new birds. He only wants a certain color and said Leah could have any/all of the rest. So, yeah us!
Logan has decided that he wants to show cattle this year. He is pretty adament about it. I think this will be great for him, but we have some delimmas. Logan wants to show our White Parks (which will be here in mid February), but our White Parks are so rare there will be not specific catagory for them. I am not sure how that will be handled. Especially considering our White Parks will be grass fed and not pumped full of feed/corn. Really, they wouldn't ever do well when compared to other beef feeders (which is the category I think Logan would enter). We could get a popular beef breed for Logan pretty easily and let him show that, but that just rubs me the wrong way. I have a couple calls in to some people that know way more about such things, so I guess time will tell.
Besides livestock stuff, we are still planning to build a barn this spring. We are suppose to be "first on the docket" will a local guy we have been working with. I have always wanted a barn (or at least one that is not falling down and full of racoon poop) so this is probably the most exciting thing that will be happening this spring. We have the old barn down and the pad is ready. This will be so great for us. We are going to use about 1/2 for storage and 1/2 for livestock. Finally I can get some stuff out of our garage and we will have a place for a cow or two(and whatever else I can think of, or I mean, talk Ryan in to).
Okay, enough about spring I guess. Back to our half a foot of snow and bitter cold.......
Julie
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