Sunday, June 20, 2010

Early Summer fruitfulness

We have lots happening now on our 'mini-farm!'
GOATS
After setting up our garden, we started making plans for goats. We bought 3 does - a breed called Nigerian Dwarf. They stand about 21" high and don't weigh a whole lot. They are bred for both milk and meat.
We needed a buck to go with them so they could have kids and produce milk for us. We responded to an ad for young bucks for $50 and planned to pick one up. Jeff decided to ask if they were interested in trading, and the owners ended up giving the buckling to us for free!
RABBITS
We had already bought a few baby rabbits from someone, and Jeff asked if he was interested in trading for a goat - we don't really need to have 3 females being bred (6 baby goat kids?) to have 3 goats to milk next year. So we traded a doe and received an adult rabbit pair weighing about 25 pounds together. We also received a cage for them, and two turkey poults. speaking of turkeys..

TURKEYS
We had ordered 15 "heritage breed" Turkey Poults which will be full grown by Thanksgiving time. They shipped 16, since some may die, and it happened that 3 didn't make it, but they even refunded for those. Neighbors gave us some turkey eggs and two ended up hatching for us - our first ever to hatch in the incubator, after 30+ eggs.
So at one time we had 20 poults, but now have 14. Kind of takes the idealism out of ya to have that many precious commodities go underground within one week!

More to come.