Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Busy? check. Overwhelmed? yep. Slowing down? not a chance!

To say life is busy here is an understatement!  With four kids, a farm and full time jobs; the husband and I are really burning the candle at both ends.  We wouldn't have it any other way though and love the life we have built together.

We have been married 11 years and have four kids ages 9, 6, 4 and 4 months.  Our oldest, Sydney is in third grade and an avid soccer player.  Big sissy loves that she is the oldest and can often be found playing mama hen to her younger siblings.  Next up is my man Jackson, he is 6 and in kindergarten.  Jack is our little farmer.  He is always the first to offer to help with the animals and never misses an opportunity to learn more about them.  Our youngest son is Anderson.  We think Andy loves the peafowl most of all but he enjoys helping all over the farm.  Andy is also our resident comedian, keeping us all laughing at every chance he gets.  Bringing up the caboose of our family is little Savannah. She was just born December 23, 2011 so we are still figuring out what she likes and doesn't. So far, she seems to like mama's milk and sleeping most of all but we are eager to show her all the fun things on our farm as she gets bigger!

We have an assortment of animals here on the farm but our main focus is on our chickens and peafowl.  We have four varieties of chickens: bantam Russian Orloff, Black Copper Marans, Blue/Black/Splash Ameraucana and Lavender Ameraucana.  We keep about 12 birds per breed, so somewhere around 50 chickens, give or take.  When it comes to our peafowl, we have sort of an addiction with over 60 adult breeders and around 20 yearlings.  We keep seven colors (blue, bronze, charcoal, opal, purple, peach and cameo) and all five patterns (barred, solid wing, pied, silver pied and white eyed).  We also have a project pen of bronze progressive pied peafowl that we are super proud of and working to gain UPA recognition for.

In addition to the chickens and pea's we have a pet pot-bellied pig named Duckie (he is Jack's pet), a mini donkey named Oswald, two nubian goats (April and Sophie), one sanaan/boer doe (the golden girl), one pygmy buck (goatie), a mini horse (Buckin Bronco-BB), a pony (Little Red) and our Maremma Sheepdog (Juno) that keeps watch over everyone.  Our golden goat had a little doeling in mid April courtesy of an unplanned rendezvous with Goatie--oops!  She's cute as can be though and according to the kids is named either Peaches or Apple.

Oh my!  I can't forget the ducks!  We have an assortment of call ducks in various colors along with a few mixed breed full sized ducks.  All our ducks free range and mostly flock together though they do form their own little clicks.  At the moment we seem to be down in our total number but there very well could be some mama's sitting on eggs now.  We expect to see some chicks any day now.  Not much cuter than a mama duck rolling up with a line of new babies!

We sell birds and hatching eggs so we almost always have eggs incubating and chicks hatching.  The breeding season just started for our peafowl so we are moving into the busiest time for our farm.  I hope you'll all join us in our adventures, laugh along with our crazy life and learn a little about how we keep it all together.  Trust me, there is never a dull moment around here!

1 comment:

  1. I had no idea you kept so many peafowl! You never cease to amaze me, Jen!

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