It's That Time of Year

Time to start making fall breeding plans (for the goats) and spring breeding plans (for the horses). Interestingly enough, I have a solid spring plan before the fall one.. tssk on me!

So for the spring, I have the two lovely ladies lined up for a breeding to an up and coming star. This year (being as it is our first year to have our own foals and not someone else's), I decided to breed for half Andalusians. I am very excited as there are a number of registries that they qualify for including the Andalusian (IALHA) Registry - where they will receive a half bred number. Also, it is my ultimate goal to get into Andalusians and this is my starting point. As this develops more, I am sure I will have lots to discuss.

For the fall breeding plans, I had a solid plan that is not as solid as I assumed. We have a small herd of dairy goats (Saanens) and were planning on having them covered by a gentleman's buck about 20 minutes away. His buck is very nice with good proven lines and would cross with our lines beautifully. I was very excited. The problem is we keep  driving the girls back and forth and they are never in that perfect moment to allow him to breed. They show every sign of being in heat, but some how it's just not right on timing. We are now a solid month past when I wanted to get them bred and many gas miles into this - so we are trying to come up with a back up plan quickly. Our back up plan include using LH to get a more perfect timing of their heat, but this will cost almost as much as buying a decent buck as our vet won't prescribe it without coming out on a farm call or breaking down and buying a buck to cover our girls.  The other option I have was to buy a cheap buck and use him as more of a tease then take the girls over to the registered buck to get the job done...Of course, we are running out of time and I need to get this worked out yesterday. So, here's to getting this worked out!

If anyone has any other suggestions, please let me know! I have a buck rag and I have been watching them for signs of heat (which they are showing) but somehow I am missing the sweet spot where she will let the buck do his job...

The Chickens at Agrestic Farms

I absolutely fail!

I said I would become a better blogger, and I am trying desperately, but it seems that I cannot commit. I need to write the topics down that I stumble upon. I need to develop an evening ritual that includes writing just a short piece to keep this blog current. I need to have exciting things to discuss!

But, to put this all behind us, and maybe inspire what very few people who have come across this blog to continue to read, I am going to write about the happenings on our farm. Today, I am going to cover our chickens...

To my beloved boyfriend's surprise, at the beginning of the summer I got him five wonderful chickens. They are the sex linked kind and are suppose to be wonderful egg layers.

For weeks we kept them in the laundry room. They were too little for being outside as it was cold and our chicken coop does not inspire confidence in its ability to house babies of any sort, but maybe the stray cat variety. About the time they developed most of their adult plumage, we decided the weather was decent, they were starting to escape their box easily, and it was just plain time for them to go out.

So we put them out in the coop. For the first two weeks, we kept them locked to the inside of the coop. Than we opened their little coop door to the chicken run area and let them explore. To our dismay, they opted to avoid the big world for another week, only looking outside longingly. Than, one day they took to the outside like stars do to the sky! They flocked, they chased bugs, they dug up the ground! They turned into quite the most beautiful brown and black chickens I ever did see (my proximity to the situation should just be over looked...).

Well, now they are at least four months old, if not older. They still haven't graced us with any eggs. We lovingly feed and water them, put a roof over their heads, and talk to them when ever we are outside. Why haven't they bothered to leave us anything in return? I thought chickens laid eggs around 16 weeks. It seems like they are taking advantage of us!

Than, to make matters worse, one of the lovely ladies has developed the most beautiful tail and cone.... That's right! We have a roster in our hen house. I realize that sexing chickens is not exactly the easiest thing to do, but isn't that why they developed sex linked chickens - to take the guess work out of it? I feel absolutely horrible about this situation. He has started to crow in the last week and we never intended to have a boy. I am just not sure what to do. There are hundreds of roosters on craigslist to be given away and I am too much of an animal lover that if it doesn't come in a package (unrecognizable) and surely not doted on by me that I cannot eat it. I just do not know what to do. As of this minute,we are letting him "fatten up," but that is just code for letting us get more attached to the little booger. So what does everyone else do with their unintended boys? If there are too many to give him away, and I can not imagine eating him, what else can I do with him?

One Day At A Time

So, after running a lot of numbers, my original plan is not going to work. It was far to expensive to take that approach and I need to come up with a less straining one.

Currently, because it makes more sense to not jump in over our heads with the farm, we are taking each day as it comes and are waiting for the perfect solution to come around. I know, crossing my fingers here to add a little luck, that our farm-break is going to come. It will turn into something that can support us, but it is going to take time. I am still exploring other alternative ideas we keep coming up with, but until the one comes around, we are just taking it one day at a time.

Here's to our Lucky Farm-Break, someday it will come!

It's beginning to look a lot like.... A Farm!

Well, we have been here for a month... I know, I realize I haven't been blogging about our new hobby farm very often, but we have been here for a whole month now!

It has been one of the most busy months I have ever had, and its been pretty centered on getting this fix me upper, fixed. First, the property is a mess. The previous tenants decided it was acceptable to not use a trash receptacle, especially out by the horse area. Second, those same tenants thought it was acceptable to never clean a stall. Third, they also decided everywhere was a burn spot and they should try to burn everything-including glass, metal, and heavy plastics.

Early in the month, we started cleaning the trash off the grounds. After multiple trash bags full, I think we have most of the garbage picked up. While cleaning up the mess, we found even more stuff to fix up around the property. One thing we noticed is how messy the place becomes in the rain. The nice hard packed ground becomes a real slip-in-slide, knee deep mud mess with the tiniest amount of rain. With that in mind, it made the rest of our improvements slow going.

On the dry days, that we could get the truck back in the horse area, we had to shovel out a years worth of horse poop from the two stalls. This was the nastiest thing I have ever encountered. I feel so bad for the previous tenant's horses. How could they let them live in that filth? It was packed solid and about a foot deep, every shovel load was saturated in urine and had an overwhelming odor. I have been told that they trained horses here. Who would leave their horse with them? Did they not check the facilities their horses would be staying at? I would have ran for the hills the horse area was so uncared for. It took us four solid days of working on the stalls to get them cleaned up.

While the stall cleaning was underway, we had a wind storm. Much to our dismay, it blew one side of a stall off. I have never encountered such high winds and I am glad this happened before we had a horse in the stall. Knowing that this has happened and could happen again, our next project is to put the stall back together and tighten/add more screws to the stalls to make sure this does not happen while a horse is in the stall.

This week we have been working on prepping the acreage for turnout. While raking the burn piles up and removing the pieces that are nonflammable (mostly large pieces of glass) the irrigation manhole started to overflow. The irrigation is not suppose to be on till tomorrow, so we called our water guy. He immediately came out and fixed the overflow, but while he was there we started discussing our pasture. Turns out our water guy is a wealth of knowledge and informed us that our pasture has been nothing but white-top weed for awhile and if we want to put horses on it, it will need to be sprayed and probably re-seeded. Of course, we only have one acre's worth of water rights, so re-seeding is going to be a bit of a challenge. Our water guy gave us some numbers to people that could spray and who would be able to recommend a pasture grass that needs limited amounts of water.

It seems this property needs more attention than some elbow grease. While it has been a lot of cleaning up after someone else and not a lot of fun, we can finally see a difference. We have a very cute place. Now that all of the trash is gone and the horse area is starting to come together we can see the outline of our farm. Still not the dream, but definitely the beginning of our hobby farm.

The Beginning

I grew up boarding my horse at a local barn. They took care of my horse well enough, but never quite the way I wanted it done. I didn't like the traffic that came and went and felt they could handle anyones horse at will. I didn't like coming to find someone had rearranged my things to make room for something else. I didn't like having to track down the things that other people borrowed without asking. That is when I started dreaming of my own farm.

At first I thought it was just this barn that had these problems, so when I moved away to college and took my horse with me, I was sad to see that the new barn had similar problems and worse care. After changing barns to one that had better care, I was still at a loss to find even more similar problems of people getting into things that did not belong to them and moving horses around to accommodate other boarders.

Becoming more and more tired of the boarding drama, I started thinking more about owning my own farm and what I wanted it to be like. Well, as in all things that consume us, I got a BS in Animal and Veterinary Science. I went on to start a Master's in Animal Science, but decided I really did not want to preform research, I wanted a life that included my horse (she went out to pasture during my Master's program and took two years off).

Putting my dream into motion, I convinced the boyfriend to move to a larger town with an even larger outlying area that had plenty of farm country for rent. After much searching and debate, we found a three and a half acre property with a cutely remodeled home and a fix me upper horse area that happened to be the ideal price range.

Now to the present, we are living on our farm, trying to turn it into the dream.