Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 18 September 2023…
Hey Y’all!
Good evening and happy Monday from FREE Missouri! The weather is great, 50 degrees this morning and sunny and 80 this evening. We had a bit of rain overnight Saturday night and it looks like maybe some more on Wednesday. The humidity is low and the ground is drying out quickly. The pics today are the hogs in the woods, sleeping while we prepared their new pen, and then enjoying their new paddock and meeting the piglets. The last one is the beef chicks enjoying their breakfast. We had an all-out sprint kind of farm day yesterday. We gave the dairy cows a bigger paddock first and it seems that they are going to end their slow-strike as their milk production is slowly increasing. Then we moved on to the hogs. We built them a load-out pen out of hog panels so we can contain them and get 5 of them loaded this Sunday evening. Then we built them a new paddock and moved them over. We cleaned up all of the stuff from the old paddock next. Following the hogs, we extended the training wire around the piglets’ training pen so they can get a bit more education regarding electricity. Porcine complete, we moved on to the main ewe flock. We moved them into a new paddock, really not much work there…just called them and they followed. Ovine complete, we set up a small lane and moved the beef herd into the pasture with the sheep reforming the flerd. Bovine complete, we cleaned up the poly lines and step-ins from their paddock. The final step of the day was to bush-hog the area where the layer chickens are hanging out. We took up their net and mowed their area knocking down the large ragweed plants that were dominating their space. We put their net back and then moved the small group of beef chickens that are in a pen in that area with the layers. Whew. Today we set up and then moved the lamb group into a new paddock. We still need to take down the old one, but we had friends show up for a farm tour and that’s way better than paddock clean-up! We spent a couple of hours chatting and looking at the farm. As we finished up with that, we went to the top of the hill where we have our RV (toy hauler).
On June 20, 2021, we pulled through the gates of this property pulling our toy hauler ready to start a new life. We pulled onto the pad we built the month before and stopped, never even adjusting our parking. That spot will do. We started a new life there. We built this entire farm, in our minds, while sitting on our pallet porch in the evenings after a hard day of caring for our ducks and guineas. From there, we have where we are today. Well, Rebekah (oldest daughter that has been living with us for a bit over a year as she rebuilds her life) is going to buy an RV and move it onto the hill where ours has been since we got here. We all love the idea and went to work getting everything ready to get our RV out of the way so Rebekah can move hers into the spot. What we didn’t expect were the feelings that accompanied the act of preparing to move the RV. We lived there for 14 months, enduring heat and cold, storms and great weather. Now we are adept at moving. If there’s anything a military life teaches you it’s how to move. So moving isn’t the issue. It’s just that is where this life began and we are so very happy with how it is going, it’s bitter-sweet to put an actual close to that part of this journey. We’ve been in the house now for a year, so it’s not like we’ve been living there…it’s just been a symbol of getting started in this life. Now time for feelings of happiness for Rebekah as she is ready to make this step towards her new life! We couldn’t be more excited for her.
Local Farm Report for 16 & 17 September 2023
Harvest:
40 Chicken eggs
16 Duck eggs
4 Gallons of milk
Cheers!
Psycho & Shelley
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