30 Mar
Macie, our doeling, doing her best impression of a helicopter:
A bit faster, and she might get enough lift to take off!
As the snow melted in this glorious sunny day, she and her brothers ventured out of the barn to frolic. More pictures are on our facebook page.
They’re 11 days old today and growing quickly – the largest buck is 17.4 lbs, while the smallest is 14.8.
24 Mar
The baby goats are now 5 days old and growing quickly, already skipping around the barn (they’re saving their pasture skipping for when the snow melts). We’ve posted more pics on our facebook page, but here are a couple of them:
19 Mar
This is just a quick post (you can check out our Facebook page for more photos) to announce that in the middle of this huge snowstorm, we took a break from other subjects for a biology lesson. We now have four brand new baby Boer Goats – 3 bucklings and a doeling.
We’re busy making sure they are all settled for a cold night, and will post more later!
Blessings to all,
The Flying T
9 Mar
We pasture bred our two older Boer does in October, so we don’t have a tight date on when they’re due but it’s going to be soon. The girls are double-wide, their udders are filling out, and Jessie in particular has started to spend a lot of her time lying down, moaning softly. Good thing I got some time today (after the 4-H activities this morning) to finish up the kidding stalls and warming huts.
The girls were a bit nervous about the new digs, and squished into one stall together for a bit. They calmed down later.
As I wrote earlier, we made the stalls primarily out of recycled hard plastic pallets. However, I got preoccupied with other chores and projects once I got the walls up, so it wasn’t until this week I was able to get the doors completed. I made those doors out of new lumber, mostly because I wanted them to be relatively clean and nail free.
A better view of the door.
You might notice that the center “bar” is connected differently. My plan is, once the kids are older, to remove that center piece and add another one offset to the side to make a barrier for our creep feeder. The idea is to have an opening small enough for the kids to get through to free-feed on grain, but tight enough to keep the greedy adults out. The next trick is to design a feeder to put in the stall that the kids can get to, but the ducks and chickens can’t. That will be a trick.
One of the two warming huts
The warming huts are salvaged 55-gallon poly drums, cut at the 2/3 point. I cut a circular hole in the top for the warming lamps, then used sheet metal screws to mount the brooder lamp fixture. The huts are screwed into the stall divider (which is made of dimensional lumber) to keep the adults from knocking them over.
So now we wait…
6 Mar
Nothing spectacular for most folks, but the Flying T now has its own Facebook page. Please stop by!
24 Feb
Pictures of our mystery chicks at 8 weeks. Any new guesses? If so, see the original contest page!
Chick A – View 1
Chick A – View 2
Chick B – View 1
Chick B – View 2
Chick C – View 1
Chick C – View 2
16 Nov
It’s been a long time since we posted, simply because this Fall has been pretty overwhelmingly busy! To give you an idea of some of the things going on these past couple months at the Flying T…
Fall was spectacular this year, and though we got a light dusting, we didn’t have a repeat of the Halloween snowstorm of 2011. Here’s a pic of the Flying T in late fall from the air.
The beginning of Fall also brought some new additions to the Flying T. One is “Rocky,” our new black labrador puppy.
He’s growing fast, and has made friends with just about everybody except the house cat.
Fall is a wonderful time of year in New Hampshire – the temperatures are perfect for us, and get us out and moving even more than in summer. Here’s our son showing off some moves on his bike and a makeshift ramp he put together.
Our younger daughter had a “coming of age” milestone – reaching the age we have determined is the minimum to be allowed to operate the tractor solo. She’s been very proud of her newfound freedom and ability to pitch in to some of the heavier-duty chores.
The ducks hatched their last clutches of the season. They were much smaller than earlier in the year. We believe this is due of the loss of our prime drake to a predator a bit before they started setting.
With the new arrivals, we also had a few departures. Another duck to a predator, and a hen to a mishap. And then another departure due to sheer meanness. One of the roosters, “Big Daddy Rooster,” attacked the kids one too many times, so he is now at freezer camp.
Of course, the big news for the region was Hurricane Sandy. We escaped most of its wrath, though we did lose power for long enough for us to get the PTO-driven generator running. Our biggest need for power is to run the well – the horses alone go through about 30-40 gallons a day.
We found by running it only a few hours a day, we could replenish water supplies, get the family through the showers, and run a load of laundry. Thanks to all the linesmen and emergency workers who got power back up and running so quickly!
The power company also did us a huge favor this summer by cutting down some of the trees that had been threatening the lines (and thus our road and driveway also), so we had little cleanup to do post-Hurricane. However, since I was told to stay home from work, the chainsaw still got some work as we got back to clearing more of the back pasture.
I also ended up flying a few Hurricane response missions for FEMA with Civil Air Patrol. You can take a look at some of the 175,000 damage assessment photos we took at this link:
http://fema.apps.esri.com/checkyourhome/ (Zoom in about 3 clicks until you start seeing green dots around the NYC area. Each of those is a photo).
And so, as the fall winds up and the winter starts to move our way, we’re finishing up our preparations… just like this snapping turtle who two of our ducks escorted off the premises on her way to hibernation.
Hopefully it won’t be too long before we can post again! Blessings to all of you as we approach this season of Thanksgiving (though every day ought to be a time to be thankful)!
20 May
Spring is the season of new life. After the long harsh winter (well, not this year!), the ground thaws, the trees bud, and most animals begin to raise their new young. This week, a bit late in the spring, brought the first births from the livestock at the Flying T, courtesy of our flock of Muscovy Ducks. Midnight was the first of our flock to begin sitting on a clutch of about 20 eggs in the second week of April. It is quite likely that those eggs are not just hers, but those of some of the other hens, as the ducks will lay an egg over the course of a week or so before sitting on them. Other ducks often are stimulated by the sight of those eggs to lay their own in the same place. In this case, they chose to lay in one of the nesting boxes I made out of recycled pallets. The eggs don’t begin to develop until she sits on them for an extended period of time. Once she does so, she will stay on the nest for the next ~35 days straight, leaving only for a short time each day for food and water before returning to incubate and guard her clutch. Our kids often helped her to minimize this time by offering food and water to her in the nest. 
Anticipation grew at the Flying T as the time neared, and early this week the kids ran in from their morning chores to announce excitedly that the hatch had begun. “We can hear the eggs peeping!” one of our daughters exclaimed. 
The hatch took a while – duck eggs are thick and it is quite an athletic feat to break out from one – but in a bit more than a day we were rewarded by the sight of new yellow fuzz: 
Doc, our drake, was wise enough to observe from a distance while remaining wary of Midnight’s wrath and warning hisses when he got too close. Zip the quarter horse would also lean over from time to time to see what was going on. 
Muscovy Ducks are the best mothers of the domestic varieties, but after a bit over two days, Midnight decided that no more time could be spent hatching – the ducklings needed food and water. Two ducklings were still slowly pushing their way out, but life is not always fair. Midnight very purposely smashed the remaining two hatching ducklings, then pushed her brood down to the stable floor, maintaining a protective umbrella over them as they adapted to the new world.
Soon, the young ducklings braved the light and began moving a short distance away to eat and drink, and we were finally able to count them all – 17 birds in a variety of patterns. We’re very excited to see what colors they develop!
And… in a few weeks, we’re expecting the next brood from Mocha, who earlier in the month chose one of the quartered poly drums I salvaged as the site for her nest. 
A Joyful Birth
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