Demolition begins

This morning we woke up to -11F.  It seems strange to be starting the process of knocking out the wall to place in new windows when the high of the day is 1 degree!  Talk about bad timing!

I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas

Oh wait, not a dream.  Woke up today to snow!!!

Put on our snow shoes and took the goats out for a winter stroll.

Tree Hunting

We discovered a great "cut your own" Christmas tree farm this year following a tip from a friend.  A typical Vermont adventure, back off of a snow-covered dirt road.   

We cut our own tree, left money in the box, and home we went!

The Christmas Grinch

Harvey's calm stalking pose, right before he attacked the holiday berries on the banister!

Mark your calendars!

Abby and Lola have officially not cycled this month (as you can tell from the peaceful photo in the pasture).  What does this mean?  

KIDS...LOTS OF KIDS!!!  

The calendar is marked for March 12th.

Eric and the Giant Carrot

Anyone see a giant rabbit anywhere?

It's Finished!

Our pop-up camper renovations are complete and she is finally ready for her maiden voyage.  It's quite the transformation!

Off to VINS

While at work last week, Teresa heard a rumor that VINS (the Vermont Institute of Natural Sciences) will take roosters and old laying hens to feed to the eagles and other raptors.  Teresa called this week and, sure enough, the rumor is true!  This morning, Eric loaded up a box of 5 of the old laying hens who were no longer laying (thanks to the game camera) and off to VINS they went.  They euthanized the birds and placed them in the freezer as a future "frozen dinner". 

 

Despite our reduced number of birds, we still collected 3 eggs this evening, which has been a typical days count.  Less birds + same number of eggs = Success!

Alaska

Our Alaska trip can be summarized into three main activities:

FISHING

This proved to be a very successful venture for us.  We did fly fishing our first day.  Teresa caught 5 fish prior to Eric catching his first of the day.  We caught a mix of Dolly Varden, Rainbow Trout and Sockeye Salmon.  All were released back into the waters to swim another day.  On our second day we switched it up and trolled for silver salmon.  Teresa once again caught the first fish of the day and reached her maximum daily allowance at 3 fish.  Eric manged to catch one salmon.  We brought home 20lbs of frozen salmon for the freezer!

  

 HIKING

Our stay at Camp Denali in Denali National Park was beyond incredible.  Imagine overnight camp for adults, add on gourmet meals and there you have our stay!  Our cabin was called "40 Below" and had a beautiful view of Denali from the front window.  We managed to watch the first evening, as clouds cleared the sky, revealing Denali's enormous outline against the darkening night (all from bed!).  We had two days of great hikes/hops over tundra and through rivers (Teresa was carried across the rushing water on Eric's back so as to keep her feet dry), all the while enjoying eating the plethora of wild blueberries and cranberries.  The foliage was a mix of beautiful golds, yellows, reds and oranges.

WILDLIFE

We had theme days in Denali.  Apparently all the animals communicate and specific days they appear in mass.  Our first day hiking, we saw 4 moose grazing around the ponds.

 Day two we saw 4 grizzly bears out and about.  We also really enjoyed hearing and seeing the sandhill cranes migrating southward by the hundreds.  

Back to the farm we arrived, to screaming goats with their hormones all abuzz!

An EPIC Day

We were driving down I-89S when today's solar eclipse started to ever so slightly cover the sun.  Behind us were were pulling our newly purchased 2011 Viking Epic pop-up camper.  I wasn't sure if I was more excited to get home in time for the peak of the eclipse or to start working on the camper. 

  After a few glamour shots (both of us and of the camper), we got to work.

We like to think of ourselves as creative designers, but today's photos seem to highlight our destructive nature.  We'll update as the camper comes along.

100 bales of hay on the truck...

Eric spent most of the day yesterday cleaning out the barn to make room for 100 bales of second cut hay.  This will hopefully keep the goats plenty fed until next year!

The Chicken Detective

Back earlier in the summer, we debated whether or not to kill off our old egg hens and buy a new batch of chicks.  The egg production was low (3-5 eggs per day) from the 16 remaining hens.  Ultimately, we opted to wait until next year.  Two weeks ago, however, when we started getting 1 egg per day, we decided some of the hens had to go!

This was a difficult decision to make, as we had no idea who wasn't laying eggs.  So Eric set-up the game camera each morning and each evening, Teresa played "chicken detective" to try and deduce which birds were laying which eggs.  After almost two weeks of monitoring and some humorous photos, we can confidently say that 7 of the hens haven't laid a single egg!  

Six hens will shortly be removed from the coop.  The 7th is our barred rock from our first batch of chicks 4 years ago,   We will give the old bird a pass!

The goat formerly known as Simon.

No, it's not what you might think; our little buck is still in the herd.  We do, however, have two very indecisive people still trying to name him. 

 He's been called: Tucker, Tuck Tuck, Theodore, Teddy, Dingle and Ned...though we must admit, he responds to none of these names!

Tuck Tuck remains a very calm and sweet goat though.  We were worried about weaning him off his bottle last week as Lola and Abby screamed bloody murder when they were weaned, but he didn't even protest.  Ned loves to play with (and hump) Oscar (a promising sign)!  He's a bit taller than Oscar now, which is encouraging for the upcoming breeding season.

Oscar continues to amaze us.  He is now very comfortable around other people and regularly will allow us to scratch his head and occasionally his back.  Teresa even managed to brush him the other day, much to his delight!

Lola is still producing over 1/4 gallon a day of milk (14 months and counting).  We decided to dry her off by September to give her body a rest.  We'll miss the cheese, yogurt, caramel, ice cream and other treats we've made, but the lady needs a break!

P.S.  Eric found a snake.

Freebies! Free Bees?

As discussed earlier, our honey bees did not survive last winter due to somewhat mysterious circumstances.  The experience of losing two seemingly healthy and strong hives has created far more questions than answers.  Many of the questions that I have about keeping bees are about how to provide the bees with living conditions that most closely mimic those found in "naturally" occurring colonies.  My hunch is that, by providing these conditions, bees are able to fully take advantage of their innate tendencies, make more bees, produce a honey crop, and do all of that with a minimal amount of beekeeper intervention.  Unfortunately, I think that I have been failing to provide "bee friendly" conditions by using conventional Langstroth hives and their associated methods.  Thus the bee deaths of this past winter.  

Luckily, there are other people that share my philosophies.  Even more fortunate, they write books and have left a paper trail.  I have been reading and studying the methods of Fedor Lazutin and Georges de Layens.  These methods have been made readily available thanks to the work of Leo Sharashkin.  Leo does a fantastic job of presenting how to keep bees in a natural way.  What you see in the pictures are swarm traps built by me to the specifications on Leo's website.  Catching feral bees or local swarms is an important step in establishing a sustainable apiary.  I was a little bit late to the game in putting the swarm traps into trees.  Life was a little bit busy while building the traps and I was delayed by a certain baby goat among other things.  With some luck, though, I hope to catch a swarm to install in a new hive.  Hopefully, there will be more updates to follow this year.

Fox Kits

The neighbors up the road apparently have baby foxes living under their garage.  

Caught these two playing one evening!

New 'kid" on the block

Little Simon, a mini Nubian buckling, joined Silver Hill Farm last weekend.  We are bound and determined to get Abby bred this year!  

Eric is very happy to have another male body on the farm! 

 

From Paris to West Windsor

This post was to wait until later this month to celebrate the one year anniversary of our going to solar power.  Unfortunately, our federal government continues to lead us astray by ignoring the realities of climate change and we have withdrawn from the Paris Agreement.  Without becoming overly political, I will simply offer a few statistics of how successful our solar array has been as one of the efforts that we are making at decreasing our impact on the environment. 

In a little less than a year, we have generated a total of 5.17MWh of electricity.  To put that in terms that make sense, that is the equivalent of 15,661.63 light bulbs running for an entire day.  That equals 8,002.95 pounds of CO2 emissions saved or 201.57 trees planted. 

Apparently, a major motivation behind withdrawing from the Paris Agreement was that it was "bad for American workers."  We are American workers and we have not paid an electric bill for over a year because we care about climate change.  In fact, we have a credit with our power company for generating more electricity than we use.  That sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

A forest update

We've been out working in the woods this spring.  

The trails that we built last year needed to be maintained, so while Teresa raked and cleared, Eric cut down the smaller white pine trees to try and allow some sunlight onto the forest floor.

The newest addition is our fire pit.  This is likely the first and only project we'll ever complete that will take us LESS time than we expected.   

Goat approved! 

Winter Losses

As winter progressed this year, we became more and more suspicious that the bees didn't survive.  On warm days, not a single soul could be seen flying from the hive.  When the weather warmed, we opened the hive to see a few bees trickling out, but turns out they were thieving honey.  Both hives were completely dead.  We're still not 100% certain as to the cause, but we do know they left behind a BUNCH of honey!!  

Finished processing it today and ended up with this:

60+ pounds of raw honey!

Stayed tuned.  We're going to try and make beeswax candles from the comb.

The Raccoon

Last week we were sitting in the house when there started a great ruckus on the porch.  Shovels were falling everywhere and the dogs began barking like mad.  One look out the window and it wasn't hard to tell what we had on hand.  A rabid raccoon.  There he was in the middle of the afternoon wreaking havoc on the porch.  The barking dogs didn't seem to phase him one bit, so while Eric was getting the gun, the raccoon was taking laps around the cars in the driveway. 

Teresa would have been content to allow him to continue on in this mad manner, but he decided to head down the only open grass towards the barn!  It didn't take long for Teresa to go running down the path after him, with a broom in hand (at the time this seemed like a fine choice of a weapon).  Upon entering the barn, the raccoon was nowhere in sight but the goats were crying and chickens clucking.  Then Teresa saw him, sitting in Oscar's pen (thankfully Oscar was in with the girls).  It was a show down: hissing raccoon vs. angry protective farm woman.  This wasn't the first time she'd been face-to-face with a hissing raccoon.  The raccoon went dashing out the barn door and back down the path towards the house.

It would be a great story if Eric had been ready with the gun and "POW!" gone goes the raccoon, but no, Eric is STILL inside the house unlocking the gun and ammunition.  He came out of the house just in time to see the raccoon running down the road and seemed content to let him run.  Teresa, however, yells, "Kill him, he was in Oscar's pen!" and Eric takes off in mad dash down the road, gun in hand, after the raccoon.  Needless to say, the raccoon managed to escape under the neighbor's porch.  That evening, we set a trap, but before bedtime came, Eric was removing the trap due to Teresa's fear of catching a perfectly healthy, hungry, nocturnal raccoon.  A week passed with no signs of the crazy raccoon.

Until....

Last night, Teresa let the dogs out to potty before bed.  Teresa thought she heard a noise under the porch, but then silence.  Teresa ran to the other side of the porch to yell for Piper and there was again, an odd squeaking and loud rustling under the porch.  YIKES!  Teresa dashed into the house and yelled,  "Eric, the raccoon is under the porch."  Eric, having learned a lesson from the previous week, only had the gun locked, so within seconds he was loading ammunition.  Teresa lit the porch light to get a better view and there he was...

 a mouse, running across the snow as fast as his little legs would carry him!!!

(Apparently raccoons don't squeak!)

Poor chicken...that's one BIG egg!

We're not quite sure who laid this egg yesterday, but she sure does deserve a prize!