Farm Life in the Winter

Well, with winter finally in full swing, it's hunkering down season for the chickens. We've got three sets of them: one in the barn, one in the coop I built this summer, and one in the chicken house we bought a couple of months ago. For a while we weren't getting any eggs from them, which sucks, but lately they've been producing more. I'm not sure what brought it on, but maybe it's the variety in their diet, including the organ meat from the pigs we butchered last month. Hey, if they like it, I'm not going to complain.

The rabbits are still doing their thing in their hutch; I let them out at Christmas for some grass and fresh air, and it took three days to finally catch them all and return them to the hutch. I don't mind them being outside during the day, but we still have predators around here, and I'd rather not find rabbit guts or blood trails leading into the bush in the morning. Call me old-fashioned, I suppose.

The pigs, meanwhile, are doing great. They were happy to move back into the barn after the other pigs became freezer-bait, although they still spend a good chunk of time outside in their old shelter as well. At night, though, it's back to the barn and the warm straw. As to when they'll have babies, we're looking into that and trying to figure out how long it will be. We know that whatever babies Delilah does have won't be old enough to go to the butcher for at least a year, so we'll be bringing in some more meat pigs this year one last time.

The only other animals we have to worry about on the farm are the damn rats. I've tried a bunch of ways to kill them off, with limited success. We just bought some play-doh pellets laced with poison in hopes they will work on them. We'll see what happens, but I know I haven't seen a reduction in the rat population yet. In the spring, I'm going to take a more drastic measure.

So, things should be quiet on the farm for the next few months; things will ramp up again in April and May, once we get the greenhouse going and get the gardens planted again. There's a lot of planning to do before then, so I'll leave things off here and come back tomorrow.