The Lord has continued to be gracious in granting us broody hens, and here is the next hatching! We believe she hatched out 8 and we lost one early, but the other 7 are still going strong!
Here is a video of them a few weeks ago, and from a few days ago, in the chicken pen area where I moved them, and where the 2nd and 3rd group are as well:
We are always very grateful to God for His granting continued hatchings and healthy chickens!
It’s been a couple of months since our last garden update, and so we thought we’d show the latest from the garden!
Here is some of the first produce the Lord granted!
And here, we’ll show you around the gardens from early in July. In our 2014 wheat blog post, I mentioned that we had planted turnip seeds back last year, and that nothing had grown. Well, a couple of months ago or more, God granted somewhere around 7 1/2 inches of rain in a few day period; and lo and behold, a bunch of turnips sprouted! Here you can see them (again, early July) in Garden 2, along with the green beans on the right:
And more turnips in the raised beds. The ants started getting to those, so I have since pulled them and fed them to our pig (they were really small):
Again from early July, the zucchini:
The corn:
Tomatoes:
And in the hugelkultur bed:
The following from just yesterday. We’ve been eating the greens from our turnips in salads and sandwiches, and we hope to start to preserve them by lacto-fermentation, which would be our first attempt at that with turnips:
Also, I mentioned in the previous garden blog post that I thought I might try planting okra. I believe I planted them the next day, and none germinated. And so, I tried again, and here are a few that have started!
And here are the tomatoes:
And again, in the hugelkultur bed:
The corn:
And zucchini. We’re getting to the time with them where the inner leaves start to die and any further growth starts occurring farther from the root. We’ve had a lot of flowers, but not a lot of actual fruits, which to me is interesting (apparently other folks here have had some similar issues), but of course, we are thankful for what the Lord has granted:
And here’s another okra:
And here is a lot of the produce being lacto-preserved:
As always, we are so very grateful for the food the Lord is granting us through the gardens; the rains he has brought, with His direct watering, and allowing us to have water stored to water the gardens; and the mulch garden beds, which has allowed for a lot less watering and allowed me to water areas of the gardens without having to monitor the watering minute by minute.
I know it’s been a bit since our last post, but it’s been extraordinarily busy around here, with seasonal chores to attend to; and so, thanks for your patience!
Back in November, it was time to start the goat mating process once again (with a 150-day gestation period, this usually puts the kidding to after freezing temperatures). We have two bucks, and we separate our older does with our buck Shatner:
And lo, after 5 months, by God’s graces, many kids were born! Here are a few pictures of the lot of them. Nine does gave birth to 17 in all — 9 bucklings and 8 doelings, although we sadly lost two of the bucklings in the first few days:
Here’s a kid relaxing with a chicken in one of the sheds:
Besides the losing of the two bucklings, this goat season was also interesting in a couple of other ways. First, we lost our Nubian nanny Betsy during the winter, although not from the cold because it wasn’t cold when she died. She had had a lump on her throat for several years that sort of just sat there; but it did seem to change a couple of weeks before she died — got spongier; so maybe something happened with that. Here is Betsy and her kids from last year:
And secondly, our nanny Minnie, who was our first born on the land from Winnie, died two days after giving birth from what appeared to be complications in the birth. Here is Minnie from last year with her kids as well:
It was quite sad to lose them both, but we always pray we have the proper attitude toward the things the Lord has provided to us for our use.
And so, with Minnie dieing, we had two orphans on our hands again (here is where we had orphans the first time). That’s Pearl (in honor of Minnie — think Hee Haw) in the back, and Tiger (because he sort of has tiger-looking colors) in front:
This is Sue and Kev feeding them:
Kev also helped me move goat sheds back when we separated nannies from Shatner and Rocky:
The Lord had graciously granted a very nice gentleman to be interested in buying our entire kid herd last year, and he was interested again this year, and here we are prepping the area to load them up:
And finally, here is the kids of 2014 video. It’s a little long, but it includes introducing each of them and their sires to you, bottle feeding the orphans, letting them eat (including the smaller amount of wheat we ended up receiving this year) and roam around our inner field and barn area, and when we said goodbye to them after getting them loaded in the trailer:
As always, we are very grateful to God for granting the kid crop of this year; the health and safety He granted for them; the trials He brings in order to glorify Himself and we pray mold us in His image; and now for the provisions of the very healthy milk, which is really why we keep goats in the first place.
It’s been a while since we have recorded our Psalms singing from the psalter we use, but this past Lord’s Day/Resurrection Day, we gathered together and recorded the next set of Psalms. As always, it is our prayer that God glorify Himself and that He benefit His Church through these:
Once again, we are eternally grateful to the Lord for His Word, and this opportunity to sing it, and His praises. We thank Him for bringing circumstance in our lives so that the words have much more meaning, and we pray He hears these cries of our hearts, again for His glory and the praise of His name! Amen!
About a day after the hen from the second batch of chicks went broody, another hen, one of our Game Hen breed I believe, went broody as well, in a garbage can in the barn, if I remember correctly. And so, we moved her into the piano room with a set of eggs under her; and by God’s graces, a day after the other hen hatched out her chicks, this one did too! Nine in all, and eight are still going strong!
Here are a couple of pictures:
And below is their video. There was one chick hatched out that was cripple — it couldn’t stand up and would just lay on its side, moving its legs almost swimmingly, trying to stand up. If you got it standing, it would just fall over. I tried working with it, feeding it to try to keep it alive, making a runway for it to try to learn to walk. I called it Tiny, because it was such a small little thing:
And for a while I thought it might get it — it would walk along, eat the food I had laid down in the trough, even preen a few times, and seemed to be getting better with its balance; but in the end, sadly, about a week after hatching, it died.
Still, one thing that was interesting to me was that I would place it in its runway, come back later, and it would have crawled its way out, and slide-crawled itself through the 1-inch chicken wire around the cage area, I assume to try to get to its mommy. This happened at least twice. It was an inspiration in dedication to me, and led me to think and then pray that we strive after the Lord Christ Jesus the same way. May we be able to hide under His wings, and may He maybe grant a sense of that (see these several Psalms references).
Although I wasn’t able to capture those times with Tiny, you can still see it in this video:
We are once again very grateful to the Lord for granting us the continuation of the flock, and we pray He always glorifies Himself through these things, including in His sovereign giving and taking of anything, in accordance with His will.
Recently, my brother Kevin, whom I hadn’t seen in quite some time, graciously offered to take some time off and come out and visit! It’s the first time he’s been this way, and it was very nice to see him!
He was here for around five days, and during the time, he graciously helped around the farm. With him here, I decided the main project he and I could work on was continuing with the barn loft, which I talked about in this blog post here. And so, since the beams were in place, it was time to start adding the floor.
Given the approximated 10-foot span, and I decided to go with 2×10 joists spaced at 16-inches:
Before implementing this phase, based on costs, I decided to use 3/4-inch plywood for the floor with 2×4 blocks, instead of 3/4-inch tongue-in-groove OSB or plywood; and here are the blocks on the back side:
And then for the blocking over the second beam, I decided to use full 2×10 blocks for added stability. While this picture shows the joists extended over the beam, we eventually slide the joists back so the blocks and joists would only cover half of the 4 1/2-inch wide beam, so Lord willing when the floor is extended from beam 2 to beam 3, half of the block-joist end covers the other half of the beam:
Since there was going to be some overhang of the plywood because of the horizontal metal purlins of the barn, I added a couple of 2x4s to help support under the plywood that was going to extend over. Quite frankly, I probably didn’t need to do this, or maybe I only needed one 2×4 instead of two:
And I added one to the joist running parallel to the barn purlins:
Here are the 2×4 blocks to support under the edge of the plywood at four feet. Before we tacked down the floor joists to the beams, we squared the whole section from corner to corner:
And here is the first piece of plywood in place:
We then added more floor joists along beams 1 and 2:
And then added more plywood. Now, we need to add more floor joists to be able to continue adding plywood:
And here are Kev and I standing on the loft:
We are very thankful to the Lord for granting the resources to be able to make some progress on the barn loft, and we are very grateful to Him for allowing us the time and resources He did for Kev to come and visit!
Heb. 11:8-10 - "By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God."
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