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| Helmut (June 2011-December 2011) |
Dec. 28, 2011
Happy New Year, everyone! Things are great here, very cold. We’ve had a dusting of snow a couple of times, and lots of wind, but it’s been beautiful. Christmas was wonderful… very low-key. Dad and D visited for a couple hours (way too short! We miss them already!) and Eric’s mom spent a few nights with us, which was great. Mom’s coming to visit soon, so we’re anxiously awaiting that…. The boys had a great Christmas… it’s the first one ever celebrated at the farm and we can’t wait to spend it next year at our new house! We ate lots of food, opened lots of wonderful gifts, celebrated Jesus’ birthday, and enjoyed great fellowship. We hope everyone had as great a Christmas with their loved ones….
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| The boys waiting to come down and check out the Christmas booty.... |
Speaking of the new house, we haven’t been able to do much this year, between weather, waiting for permits and other obstacles, but we plan on putting in the foundation come early spring. Once that goes in, it should roll along pretty quickly. We’ve got our site ready, road in and wells dug. We’ve got our 24 chickens (originally 27, as you may remember, but we’ve lost two to predators (hawks?) and our latest loss is our rooster, Helmut… more on that in a minute), and we plan on either 2-3 pigs, or mom/calf for beef (we’ve decided we’re not ready for 2 milkings a day yet!) in the spring. Haven’t decided which yet…or maybe both?! We will have the fence up and the pasture ready, so we’ll see!
About Helmut (formerly Helga until he started cock-a-doodle-doing a few times!)…. Sad, really. We were just getting used to his silly antics, like his “happy feet” dance he would do every time he got ready to do his business with one of the girls (wink, wink), or his strutting around, thinking he’s something and crowing at us all the time (it’s NOT true that they crow just in the morning, BTW… it’s all day, showing off his male-ness!) But we noticed that he was limping a couple days ago, and I mentioned it to Eric, but we really didn’t think much of it… well, Eric found him dead in the coop this cold winter morning (exactly 6 months to the day of when we got him). His foot and bottom part of his leg was cut and very swollen, and getting stiff. We figure he just ended up going into shock and died…. his body was still fairly warm so it must have happened early this morning. So we ended up performing our first butchering of our chickens this morning, much unexpectedly. It wasn’t as gross as I thought it was going to be…at least it wasn’t smelly. So I got through my first chicken preparation! The worst part was hearing the bones snap and such, but after Eric cut the meat out, I cleaned and prepared it, and we will be having chicken for dinner.
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| Helmut as dinner (along with some fresh eggs from the girls) |
The boys were sad, but not crying like I thought they might (although they did get a little teary-eyed… it might have helped that Helmut was not the Rabbit’s (7) best friend after Helmut pecked him hard the other day and scared him!), and although Rabbit doesn’t want to eat him, E’s (9) willing to give it a go! Life on a farm… hard lessons to learn! So hence the 24 chicken count instead of the original 27. We just recently enclosed them in the large garden area to hopefully protect them from other predators…we’ll see.
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