Such is farm life.

Our new batch of layers are getting well-accustomed to Teresa's legs.  Sadly Teresa's pants are getting covered in chicken poo.  Such is farm life!

Freedom Rangers

We're switching it up this year.  We typically raise Cornish Cross chickens (aka: Frankin-chickens) for our meat each year, but this year we're trying out Freedom Rangers.  This breed grows a bit slower than the Cornish crosses do, but the meat is apparently very tasty!  

We also got a little smarter and decided that instead of buying a ridiculous amount of laying hens (giving us TONS of eggs at once followed by no eggs, resorting to spying with the game camera - see "The Chicken Detective" post) that we would buy small batches of hens each year.  This year we got 2 Araucana and 2 Welsummer chicks.  Both should lay fun colorful eggs, making them distinctly different from the current hens.  Now we just have to hope that none of them are roosters!

More PIGtures

The piglets are quite excited for their dinner each night!  The goat milk poured on top gets them really squealing.

Happy little critters.

Buttah!

Teresa's been saving cream off the top of the milk for 2 weeks now and yesterday we made butter in our Kilner Butter Churn (thanks again Ryan and Nicky for the great gift!).  We managed to churn almost 1 pound of butter!!  We love the pure white color of the goat's milk butter and the taste as well.  YUM!

The Star Grazers

First off, Eric built a crate of steel.  Imagine driving 70 miles per hour down the highway when suddenly your animal crate launches from the back of the truck bed and before you can process what's happening, you're already 1/2 mile down the high way!  Yes, this was the start to our morning.

We arrived safe, however, to collect our new piglets, whom we've decided to name the Stellar-Lunar pack, aka: Star Grazers.

Here's Dipper, Cassiopeia ("Cassi" or "Ope" - depending who you ask), Star, and Cosmo ("Moe")

They are certainly called "pigs" for a reason!

Triplets...again!

You could officially say we're now on goat overload!  Abby birthed three little girls yesterday afternoon in all of about 7 minutes time.  The last two literally came out one immediately following the other at such a fast pace, that we're honestly not sure which of the two was born first!

Everyone is settling in well.  

Lola's three kids were wonderfully named this morning by the Burdine clan:  Chloe, Madison and Grover (who now happens to be the only black goat in the crew and the only boy).

Triplets!

We entered the barn this morning at 6am to find triplets!  Lola once again out did herself and birthed 3 kids and had them cleaned off and dry by the time we arrived in the barn.

The black kid is a baby boy and the two brown kids are little girls.  

Anyone in need of a pet goat?!?!