Terrastay Thymes - Chronicles of small farm life
7/25/2023 It’s been a while. I quit farming every July… (in jest, kind of)
The State of Eggs & Foxes: This season has been tough on chickens and eggs. Four fox dens with pups are located on the perimeter of our property. For the past four years we’ve had barely a problem with predators. This June, however, we lost 25% of the flock in one night to what looked like a first hunt but truly we don’t know for sure. It was a very hard morning for me. Most of the birds were too heavy to drag back to the den so several died without serving any purpose other than to feed the fire ants which covered them. We promptly retired that coop until we figured out how it had been breached. I had believed they had crawled in through the nests but later discovered the edge of the hardware cloth had been peeled back. We have since started to rebuild and use it within the fenced areas as a nesting-only coop. We have since caught 2 foxes day hunting our hens. For this reason, they will still be free-run but within the fenced area up front. You will see these changes over the next 2 weeks as we fortify the space and make the smaller area more entertaining for them.
Chicken Hospital: Our beautiful but murderous rooster, Stew, has attacked and killed a few favorites in our own flock this summer. Todd, an F2 Olive gentleman, was Stew’s most recent victim. Todd survived and is healing but he did not go unscathed and will be permanently blind in his left eye. Stew is a copper Maran and is supposed to be relatively docile. He killed his father Mickey who used to lean against me for backrubs, his brother, and my favotie hen. In other news, there may be a humane processing class, a bone broth demo, and hands-on raw pet food preparation. We will likely film the food prep and raw pet food portion. If interested in any of these items let us know.
Future Eggs: Eliza of Cane Creek and I are raising babies🐤. She has been a tremendous resource for us. Tim and I are adopting a few of her barn layers next week. This means a few more dozen eggs/week soon. We will be incubating more that should be ready to lay in January. We have a new chicken tractor in the build stage and hope to be back to solid production before next spring.
4/10/2023 Intro to mostly unedited & raw accounts of beginner farm life. The story begins with a wine rep & an officer, an online 1st date, and a rather impulsive farm purchase.
We started a wild ride - Tim and I bought a farm with no farm experience of this kind, in our mid-40s. I spent years as a corporate sales manager who was (is) terrified of bugs. Tim and I each had our own houses. We sold them both and moved into 420 sq ft. Together we went from 4300 to 420 sq ft of living space and a container for storage. I didn’t know how to farm but this place was already renting cabins for “farm-stay” guests. I did what any rational person would do and I asked my friend Suzanne if I could care for a couple of bottle lambs so that it would at least look a little “farm-y” to the guests, (it worked by the way but that’s another story). She ended up needing help with 6 lambs that first spring. Our farm story starts with 2 dogs, 3 cats, and 6 lambs in 420 sq ft.
It’s been five years and we have accumulated a lot of unexpected experiences, as well as sheep, chickens, and unlikely friendships. I keep feeling I need to do a better job of documenting our life as we now know it. Some days are really tough and frankly, unbelievable, but many others are wonderful. I find myself recounting with my husband and reminding myself, as much as him, that while it’s often not pretty, we do have some really good stories. Often the next day is as eventful as the last and we forget what happened last week.
Here’s a space I’m creating to give time and location to the little and the big in brief, raw, unedited, recounts of our experiences. Some entries may only be placeholders for stories I intend to expand on or later put into a book I might never get around to. They will be in our everyday language, written in the few minutes that we have, in the condition we’re in when we think about it - whether it’s exhausted, teary, overjoyed, or rushed. Here we’ll keep the real snippets of our day-to-day successes & failures, joys & fears in a place we can revisit and share with any of you that are interested. Follow along or simply peek in from time to time.