Christmas Day

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Still no pictures - I'll try to get some tomorrow morning.

Spent all of Christmas Day under the cabin insulating the addition floor with fiberglass batts. Fun.

Beautiful sunny weather today - nothing like what it should be for December. Looks like a mild winter.

A lot of things to catch up on - let me start with the birds. Have switched them over to an all-natural diet of sprouted grains and lentils which has worked out very successfully. I take a half-gallon of 7 grain scratch, 1 cup oats, 1/2 cup thistle seed and soak it overnight. It swells up tremendously, then is sprouted for 1 day. I add to this a half pound of well-sprouted lentils with good tails. The birds love it and over the course of the day polish off every morsel.

The lentils are there to raise the protein content [soaking and sprouting the grains may raise their protein content a little also, as scratch is only 8%]. Soaking and sprouting dramatically increases the volume of food, it's more digestible, a whole natural food, and there's less waste as the soaked sprouted grains are much larger and not easily scattered.

I screwed in some small metal containers in the coop and filled them with grit and oyster shell. The birds aren't consuming quite as much grit now that the grains are soaked, but they're definitely hitting the oyster shell hard [we ran out of their old eggshells which we'd roasted and ground, as production's so low], and this makes sense as now that they're off layer pellets they need additional calcium.

Since only Rosy's laying there's plenty of room to experiment with diet without affecting production much. Rosy has continued to lay dependably, a guinea is laying now and has 3 eggs in the coop [unrelated to the diet change], and we're pretty sure the ducks have started laying or are at least looking hard for places to lay and flirting with the idea. The guineas and ducks are all mating like crazy as if it's springtime - probably a combination of the light in the coop and the warm sunny weather we're getting.

I'll have to tinker with the poultry diet and see how it goes - but so far I think it's going great. One of the reasons why I think it's feasible at least for here and now is that the birds free-range add day across several acres, there's still plenty of fresh weeds and grass and grubs to dig up with the mild winter, and the grains and lentils soaked and sprouted are just more usable and energizing than the standard factory fare of layer mash/pellets. I'd always wanted to get the birds on a more natural diet but when the birds were laying well I didn't want to mess with it, and we were also concerned with cost. It's maybe an extra buck or two a week to go all natural - but I think it's worth it. And if we're ever able to get the raw ingredients cheap in huge sacks, it may actually end up cheaper than layer pellets.

Garden in the low tunnels is doing well - little warm for the brassicas, cool for the spinach and downright cold for the chard/beets. The mustard greens are doing fabulously though. Lettuce decent - usually the unheaded frilly types and red lettuces seem far more hardy and are doing best in the tunnels.

The loft ladder's been rebuilt at a steep angle against the east wall. The girls' room is finished, almost totally insulated now. We'll have a living room soon where the old kitchen was. Have a large couch and rug so far, and floor lamp. Still need an armchair, rocking chair, and small coffee table. The last bit of insulation that needs to go in is under the main floor of the cabin. The insulation has made a huge difference in heat retention.

I'm picking up Rachael and Brook on Wednesday and they'll be here for 10 days which is exciting. They haven't been up here since July. They'll be a lot of new things for them to see, the ducks, rooster, low tunnels, how far along the interior of the cabin is, the bunny, and the cow.

Remember the jersey/guernsey cross we were going out to look at in Robbins? It's out in a stall in our barn. We brought her home last Sunday.

Her name is Rita, and she's pretty small for a cow, even a dairy cow, at a little over 800 pounds. We paid $800 for her, dropped a hundred on boards for her stall, and another hundred on large animal paraphenalia as well as feed.

This last week of twice a day milkings of our semi-wild cow is a long story which I'll cover in the next post.
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