All is well here at Edgwick Farm.
The turkey poults are still in a homemade brooder in the basement. One little guy keeps flying out. I can always tell when he has escaped because I hear loud peeping. Gabe visits the poults several times a day and helps me care for them. Daniel and I can imitate turkey calls and get the male chicks to strut their stuff.
The meat chicks aka meat globs will be ready for the freezer by the end of May. I had one looking peaked last week and lost it after a few days. Nine are left.
The speckled sussex chicks, housed with the meat globs, are beautifully mottled, each one a different pattern. They fly around their pen and roost as high as they can get. I can tell why they do well with hawk issues. My concern is how to train them to lay in the chicken house and go in at night. They are very attached to the meat globs who are three times their size. When the weather is good, I put the chicks all out in a fenced ring in the pasture but it is a huge pain to move them back and forth.
Willy has been sold and will go when he is six to eight weeks. I will wean him when he is thirty pounds and send him on his way. The new owner wanted him castrated so I used the elastrator for the first time tonight. I got it to work but not as smoothly as I thought. (Mom, how do you release the elastic once you have it around the testacles? I closed the tool down and pinched the poor guy. Do you roll it off the spreader?). Willy fussed a bit but it was more humane than the Burdizzo tool. The new owner, who plans to raise him to 80 pounds or so and eat him is coming to see him and my operation next weekend. He had a couple of the bucklings from the Christmas babies and is very impressed. He has expressed interest in the pending July babies as well. He is an older Italian gentleman, with a heavy accent.
I have dried off two of the pregnant does and need to dry of the remaining four. I made two batches of chevre this week and that is probably it until fall. I had my last goat share yesterday morning until next fall. The family will rely on Celia’s milk until the does freshen at the end of July. I have four or five batches of aged feta in the root cellar so I will not be totally without cheese. I also froze six gallons of milk for whitewashing the barn in June.
It has been cold and wet and we have had two frosts last week so the garden is sprouting slowly. The peas are six inches and need to be mulched but there is a ton of cleome seedlings that have free sowed next to them. I transplanted a flat this afternoon that I will plant elsewhere once they have some size in the flat. Radishes, arugala, spinach and lettuce sprouted. No beans yet. Our frost cut off date is this coming weekend. And it is the Cornwall Garden Club sale and Mother’s Day. This is the weekend that the garden really goes in.
Adam was here yesterday to rebuild the stall door that Henry broke. He reversed the swing and reinforced it. Adam is not only a talented carpenter but he has worked with my animals so he understands what I am struggling with in the barn. The new door is great!
The lilacs are at the end of their bloom and the forsythia are just losing their blossoms. Everything went at once this year. I prefer everything spread out a bit so you can enjoy each one. It was like the end of the fireworks show, everything exploding at once. Too much to handle!
And lastly, the ducks eggs that I shared with local elementary classes are hatching. The first batch of sixteen yielded six ducklings (that are already sold). Gabe and I visited them early this morning and he cuddled with them. I took pictures I hope to post tomorrow. End of the week there should be another school hatching. My hatch rate seems better with incubation.
One more thing…Henry bred some Boer crosses back in December that should be giving birth this week. I can’t wait to hear how that worked out.
