Weathering Isaac - Pt 1

Hurricane Isaac
Photo courtesy of NOAA

For a while we had been hearing talk about a tropical storm that might hit Florida. Nothing we here in South Louisiana were too concerned with.

Well at some point over the weekend, Isaac bypassed Florida and headed into the Gulf of Mexico. Projection maps started pointing the storm for our area and saying that it would become a hurricane before making landfall. We still weren't that concerned. A little category one storm? Please! Plus our farm is about an hour northwest from New Orleans. Surely we were far enough inland that any storm surge flooding wouldn't affect us.

By Monday evening we were pretty certain Isaac was headed our way so we battened down the hatches around the farm. More than anything, we were concerned with high winds blowing things around and knocking down trees, so we put away anything laying around and moved the ducks from the very last, very open pen into a slightly smaller, more enclosed area. BigWig, our big rabbit buck, got moved out of his ground level cage/tractor and into the raised cages of the poultry house next to his ladies. We also filled every bottle, jar, and pitcher we could find with water and put bottles of water in the chest freezer.

Tuesday we did all the normal chores of feeding and milking and whatnot. We kept the birds in their enclosures and just waited and waited. We twiddled our thumbs and looked out the window to see the occasional clam breeze and slight sprinkle. We started thinking, 'Is this it?' All this fuss over some light rain and cool breezes?

Then Tuesday night the rain started. We could hear the wind gusting by our bedroom windows. At about 5am we lost power. When daylight came, we ventured out into the storm to take care of animals.

We milked goats and fed poultry. We found that the wind and rain had been blowing right into the worst possible side of the poultry house and onto our youngest chickens, turkeys, and guineas. Big Onion grabbed an armful of feed bags and the staple gun and braved the storm to tack up some cover for the poor soggy, young birds.

The chickens and the turkeys seemed ok, but the young guineas were extremely wet and cold. A couple looked like hypothermia had set in: they were confused and barely moving. One somehow got stuck under a much larger turkey (not the brightest birds in the world) and didn't seem able to walk. We tucked the young, sodden birds into an empty food bin and moved them inside the house to dry off and warm up. Without power we couldn't even offer them the comfort of a heat lamp, so Big Onion used the gas stove to heat some water and give them a hot water bottle of sorts. We ended up losing two of the guineas just from being unable to keep their body temps up.

We watched the sheep rush out during the brief breaks in the weather to graze for a few minutes at a time before the driving rain forced them back under cover.

Since our house plumbing is hooked up to a well with a pump, no power meant no water to the house. Big Onion, being the brilliant and resourceful man that he is, had the idea of running about 200ft of hose from the barnyard, which on city water, across the backyard, and up to the house. Somehow his scheme worked and kept us in water throughout the storm. (Note from Big Onion: this is probably not the safest thing to do but it worked as a temporary fix!)

I'm proud to say that despite being hit by a hurricane that had winds gusting up to 80mph, none of our animals went hungry. It may have taken a bit of insanity on our part, but we made sure to milk both goats twice a day and get every bird and rabbit fed on their normal schedule. I took a peek at the creek that runs through the middle of our property just after we had finished evening chores on Wednesday and it was about 1 foot below our bridge. I commented to Big Onion that the bridge might wash out over night if the creek got any higher.

That night once all the animals were fed and tucked away for the evening, Big Onion and I cooked up a hearty chicken stew, played cards by candle light, and waited for the storm to pass us by.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

Walking the goat

**Blogger's note: I am woefully far behind in posting to this blog. These pictures are actually from last week. Gwenny is probably twice as big now, but I had to share the story of her first foray into being a real farm animal!

 Since we are hoping that she will someday grow up to be a dairy goat, I figured it was high time our Gwendolyn started getting used to walking on lead. We decided to go for a walk in the first pasture so that she could meet some of the animals she will someday live with and maybe get some nibbles at the grass out there. We had just wormed Josie a couple of days before, so Gwen should get some of that protection from the milk. This made it the perfect time to go on a little adventure.

 The sheep were extremely curious about the new arrival. 

 Of course Pepper was the first to come over and meet Gwen. 

Pepper is our most outgoing and inquisitive sheep. She also acts as a wonderfully caring auntie to the lambs who she will take under her wing when their mothers are not around. She walked over and stared at Gwen for a good minute before gently lowering her head to touch noses with the baby. Curiosity satisfied she wandered off to graze some more.

 Whoopie and Louise were the next to greet the tiny newcomer. They are a bit on the shy side and were satisfied with just giving her the once over from a distance before moving on.

 It was able this time that Josie took notice of all the commotion amongst the sheep.

 She came charging over, hackles up and horns down. Sacred the be-jezus out of both Gwen and me, let me tell you!

 I growled a warning at her and pulled Gwenny close to me just in a case, but Josie only gave her rear a very thorough sniffing and me a very puzzled look. It was like she sort of remembered her smell, but not that Gwen was her baby. Another low toned warning from me and Josie sauntered off to find some other way to cause trouble.

 Gwenny seemed to enjoy our little adventure. I took the leash off and she prance and bounced around, never getting too far from me. She even nibbled at some of the grass.

Our last visitors before heading in were, of course, the turkeys. Nothing can happen around our farm without them sticking their big, ugly beaks in. They seemed a little too overly interested in the little girl, so I took that as our cue to head back to the house.

I think Gwen was happy to be back in the house. She immediately curled up in her crate with her stuffed lambie for a good long nap.  

More fruits

I've said it before and I'll say it again, we were SO lucky to get a place that had so many wonderful things already in place. This week we are particularly grateful for all the fruit trees, bushes, and vines there were already in place and thriving when we moved in.

 The corner of the backyard has this massive muscadine vine that we have been keeping an impatient eye on all these months. Well, this week we finally had just a few of ripe grapes that we were quick to harvest and pop into the freezer until we have enough ripe grapes to start out own batch of muscadine wine. Yum!

The other fruit we have been keeping a close eye on is the giant cooking pear tree on the other side of the yard. It's branches have been looking heavy with fruit and the occasional rock hard pear bomb would come falling down.

 We decided to give it a good shake and see what we could get. I stood back and watched while the Big Onion all but swung from the branches, and the pears came raining down! All counted we ended up with 21 pears. Apparently pears aren't like apples in that they do not ripen while on the tree, you have to harvest them and store them for a while for them to soften and sweeten. Since we are pretty sure these are cooking pears, I'm not sure how soft or sweet they will get, but we tucked them away into our smaller refrigerator to ripen before they get juiced and turned into cider.

The ever present Josie and the turkeys were both on hand to help dispose of any damaged fruits. This series of photos just cracks me up....

New Hire

Since August 17th is apparently National Black Cat Awareness/Appreciation day, I figure today would be a good day to introduce the newest member of the HighTail farms crew....

This is Hunter Ratsbane 

Hunter has been hired to the recently created Barn Cat position. It's creation was necessary due to the recently discovered conspiracy taking place amongst the rodent population on the fram to deceive us into thinking that our large flock of otherwise healthy, happy ducks have mysteriously stopped laying altogether for the last few weeks.  In other words...

Damn rats been stealin our eggs. Hunter's (hopefully) gonna fix that.  

I had a heck of a time getting a decent picture of the little guy. He's black as night and since he's only about 3 months old, he is completely incapable of holding still long enough for the shutter to go off.

 This is the box he showed up in. His name originally was Panther, for very obvious reasons!

He took to the barnyard right away. Here he is meeting Josie for the first time. Since then these two have had a rather rocky relationship. Josie has no patience for this little upstart stalking and pouncing around her yard. Hunter, on the other hand, LOVES her fresh milk and has become my best milkin buddy always there in time to steal those first three squirts!

 See? He's already doing his job guarding the nest boxes! 

Big Onion is head over heels for the little guy. I think they bonded on the initial drive to the farm.

Hunter was completely flipping out in the car, yowling and ripping at the above pictured box until he tore his way out. Then he immediately climbed into the Big Onion's lap and fell asleep. Since then, Hunter has been his "Little Buddy" who follows him around for chores and rides on his shoulder whenever he gets the chance.

...and I guess I'm pretty fond of him too. 

The Great Incubation - 2012

It seems like lately on the farm we have spent every free weekend processing chickens and ducks and turkeys and rabbits. It had been a while since we fired up the incubators and started cookin a fresh batch of babies, so we starting collecting eggs. Lots of eggs. 

Pictured above are most of the eggs that we started incubating about a month ago. We had duck, chicken, guinea, and turkey eggs all ready to go. The cardboard slats under the eggs are my own crazy invention to keep the eggs from rolling around on the trays and to make it easier to turn them by just rolling them over the slats 3 times a day.

I should note that we threw the turkey eggs in there just for the heck of it. Right now we don't have a tom old enough to service our two remaining broad breasted white ladies. We thought what the heck, maybe we would end up with an immaculate Turk-ception! 

First to hatch were the chickens. We have kind of a nice system set up for hatching now. When we bought the farm, the previous owner left us this wonderful cabinet incubator that works great. The only problem is that it is completely enclosed, so come hatch time we cannot see what's going on. Plus, I have a completely unfounded theory that the little ones need some light to find their way out of their shells. So when hatch time comes around, all the eggs are moved to our styrofoam Hovabator where we can monitor their progress. It's also nice because we can stagger hatches if we want to and use the Hovabator just when it's time for lockdown.

We ended up with 42 mixed chicks. All these chicks were all fathered by our TSC white broiler rooster who grew up to be big as a house. Their moms were our Ameraucana and gold and silver laced Wyandotte girls. We are hoping by mixing the breeds we can get a happy medium of chicks that grow at a fast but healthy rate.

I cannot get over the color variety we got. The rooster is totally white, and we did get some little yellow chicks that will take after him, but we also got these speckle-faced chicks...

And a bunch of black chicks with just a yellow spot on their head. It'll be neat to see how they all turn out.

They very quickly outgrew our small inside brooder so we moved them out to a cage in the poultry house with plenty of space....

...and a portal to hell!! 

Just kidding, but that infrared brooding light is hell to try and take pictures with.

After another week, the duck and the guinea eggs were ready to hatch. We have never had any luck hatching off season ducks. We always get great hatch rates in the spring then next to nothing any other time of the year. That was certainly the case with this hatch. We only ended up with 3 ducklings. Two of which were male and one of those males has some crazy deformity thing going on that reminds me of spina bifida of the skull and I swear I saw part of a toe handing off the back of his head before the fluff dried. I think he'll be ok, but what the heck are we gonna do with a potentially handicapped drake?!

We did end up with 7 guinea keets. These guys will really come in handy keeping the tick population in check. We plan on setting up a coop for them in the back pasture once we finish fencing back there so they can act as pest control. That baby guinea may be cute now, but they get ugly and super noisy very quickly. In my opinion, the farther away those guineas live from the house, the better!

Meet Gwendolyn!

Sorry it has been so long since my last post, but we have been a little busy in the last week....

Josie FINALLY gave birth to a single little girl. We are calling her Gwendolyn. She was born at about 4am on the 26th. Unfortunately, despite all our efforts, we missed her actual birth. Josie went from very little indication to baby goat in the space of a couple hours. By the time we found Gwen, she was partially dried off and just barely up on her feet. We are keeping our fingers crossed that she didn't have time to nurse and potentially catch CAE from her momma before we got out there.

The first couple days were very touch and go for this little one. She had aspirated some kind of fluid, either during her birth or when we tried giving her a bottle for the first time.  She was having a lot of trouble latching on to the bottle. We were having to pry her mouth open to get the bottle in. Then she would just barely suckle.

By day two she was very lethargic, coughing a lot. Her mouth was full of mucus. She would not track and follow us when we called. She wasn't even pooping much at all. All she wanted to do was lay in her crate. I had taken her to work with me that day so I had my boss give her a quick look, and she was not very optimistic about the little girl's chances. We gave her a homeopathic and a little later an antibiotic and vitamin B shot.

Right before we were packing up to go, I took Gwenny outside and she started pooping...and pooping...and pooping. Then she started calling for me and following me down the driveway. She even gave us a couple little goaty hops. That evening, she latched onto the bottle and sucked down a giant dinner. I just about cried with relief.

Since then there is no stopping this little gal. She's already gained over a pound since she was born. She's drinking every drop we give her. She's running around the house like a fool driving all the other animals crazy. She seems to take particular pleasure in bothering poor Ajah who is closest to her size by chewing on her fur and trying to jump on her back at every opportunity. Her only problem is a little nasal congestion which gives us the opportunity to burst into choruses of "Snot Rockets in Flight" on a regular basis.

Here's a couple videos of her tearing around the front yard....

Flying turkeys

Apparently the turkeys can now get on top of the poultry house. We are starting to seriously doubt that they are broad breasted bronzes.