Wintertime

Posted by: Maddy 

We are in the middle of winter. I am totally ready for spring! Everything starts turning green, and the weather starts to warm up again. Summer used to be my favorite season until we moved here. Now spring is my favorite. The temperature is perfect. Not too hot, not too cold. Just right. Spring also has excitement that comes with it. The lightning shows are pretty cool! I will have to post a video of one sometime.

Since winter started we changed how we manage our animals a little bit so that it would make things easier with the cooler weather. We brought our sheep into the corral instead of having them on the pasture and moving them because we were breaking fence post stakes trying to stick them in frozen ground. We needed to give them hay anyway so we brought them closer to the house. We also expected them to lamb within the next couple of weeks as well. We moved them in sometime in January, and still no lambs. Some of us are starting to wonder if they are really pregnant at all.

We still have the pigs out in the woods to clean it up. And now we have doubled the work force with the new ones! They are more difficult to move since they still don't completely trust us like the older ones do, so it takes longer. But with time that will change. 

We left the chickens on the pasture. Though some days were so cold that we couldn't move anything because everything was frozen! Normally, with us doing the rotational grazing, we move the chickens every day. Set the fence up and push the egg mobile in (that's what we call the shelter on wheels for our laying hens).

What's funny is that when winter started, everyone's laying hens went down in egg production. I even saw an Amish guy buying eggs at the store one time, so I'm guessing that means that their chickens aren't laying much either. But for us, since winter started, our egg production has never been higher! We have been selling our eggs to a health food store in Ava. Yesterday we delivered 35 dozen eggs! It took one week to get to that number. Some of them are so big, they don't fit in the cartons! So those ones we save for ourselves.

Sometimes it seems like we have a goose mixed in with our chickens!

I'm guessing egg production will go up with the warmer weather coming. The more sun the chickens get, the more eggs they lay. The eggs that they lay are the most delicious eggs I have ever had. The yolks are a rich orange instead of yellow. We have gotten very good feedback from people who have tried our eggs. Everyone loves them! We have also gotten really good feedback from people who have tried our chicken.

Since our fields still need work in building up nutrient rich soil and vegetation, we thought we would more intensely graze our laying hens just like we did with our broilers. So instead of moving the egg mobile and the fencing everyday, we are only moving the egg mobile everyday. The bottom of the egg mobile is a wire floor, so even when they are in for the night, they are still fertilizing the grass. So we just move it a little bit each day and then move the fencing about once or twice a week. It will take longer to complete a field, but this way more gets fertilized. And the grass this spring/summer will be better for our other animals as well. Last year when we moved the egg mobile around we could tell where the egg mobile was because there was a rectangle of extremely green grass where it had been. Then later when we put our cows on that field that was the only place they wanted to eat. 

A peak inside one of the egg mobiles.

And now the chickens are cleaning up after the cows. They are spreading out their stools, making it easier for them to go into the ground. And with not moving the fencing everyday, we noticed that the chickens clean up after themselves as well! We can't tell where the egg mobile was last when we go out there to move it again because the chickens eat up all the grain that falls onto the ground and scratch in their own manure. They are pretty tidy animals!