This has been a month of trials and testing for us, but sometimes when you have difficult times it is because we need to stop and appreciate the blessings God gives us every day. God really laid it on my heart to work harder towards depending on Him for what we eat. In November 2009 we made the decision to not buy any meat from the grocery store in 2010. There are a couple of exceptions to this, 1) Country-style pork ribs...because I can't make this cut from our own pork. 2) Beef....we don't have enough property to grow our own beef...although we do use venison in a lot of our beef recipes.
We began breeding our own line of meat chickens last summer and have been very successful. After putting several birds in the freezer this spring, we incubated our final batch of eggs so that the birds would be ready for the freezer by the end of Summer. This would get us through until early Fall when I would begin incubating eggs again for winter meat. Or so I thought. On June 5 a stray dog got into the meat pen and killed 17 birds.
2 of the chicks managed to escape, plus we had 2 still in the brooder. These, along with what we have frozen and canned will be what chicken meat we have until we are able to hatch and raise more. This is where we have to put our faith in God that He will bless us. It is not that we can't go to the store and buy chicken...we've made this commitment and plan to abide by it, even when we are tempted to take the easy way out.
After a bout of blackhead disease in our turkeys earlier this year, we began with a fresh batch of poults and with an adult trio of bronze turkeys. We have incubated eggs and hatched several....but we are learning that raising turkeys is not for the faint of heart. We lost our big tom due to an accident, but he left behind many babies and we hope to raise a tom for breeding next year. We had a predator problem for a few days, but the issue was solved by caging the turkeys at night.
This left us with 12 poults that have fledged and are in the big turkey pen. Until yesterday. One of the turkey poults was dead in the pen. After doing a necropsy we discovered that it had blackhead. We have been very careful with these and kept them in a pen across the street on fresh ground...and have taken every precaution. Once again we are putting our faith in God that we will be able to raise some of them to make it to the freezer. As of today we have 11 poults in the clean pen with no symptoms. We have 4 newly hatched poults in the brooder, 2 fertile eggs in the incubator, and 3 adult hens...one of which is setting on 5 eggs.
Blackhead disease kills 80% of infected birds. We are praying that we caught it in time and that the remaining birds will be spared.
On June 9 it began to rain. This was a blessing because we've had a dry early summer and really needed the rain. It rained for hours and hours and in the early hours of the morning on the 10th a tiny leak in our roof turned our dining room ceiling into this!
Even this was a blessing, some of that sheetrock needed to be replaced and I was wanting to re-decorate that room. I just hadn't planned to do it this soon!
We had nearly 6 inches of rain in about 20 hours....after no rain for nearly 2 months.
My poor boxwood Basil was pummeled...but it has since recovered...
The turkey hens were soaked from foraging in the rain..
And Ellie Mae's pen flooded. Can you tell she hates to get her feet wet?!?
But the grasses and plants have flourished...providing the goats with fresh browse and saving us money towards hay.
Throughout the rain and the ceiling collapse I did manage to get some cherry pie filling canned and made a tasty batch of cherry marmalade....
And we had a couple of firsts. We had our first PINK water lilly bloom!
And we grew our very first eggplant! It's a Japanese Eggplant (which is why it's long and skinny)...
And one of our baby goats went to the National Show thanks to her sire & dam's breeder. We own Daydream and Ditto but only because of the kindness of their breeder, Sylvia Victory. We nearly lost Ditto last year due to urinary calculi but he managed to come through it and still be able to be used for breeding. Daydream had twin doe kids in January (Sylvia owns both twins) and she took one of them to the ADGA Nationals last week....Eve took 19th in her class! Not bad at all! Here is her baby picture....
And last, but not least....our biggest blessing of the year. Our aged doe Legacy gave birth to twin girls by Manny on our 24th wedding anniversary! These will probably be Legacy's last babies, and she was able to have a safe easy delivery.
Introducing Queenacres Established Edition (Bliss) and Queenacres Emerging Encore (Joy)
