Small farm tips

Small Farm Tips: 


No matter how big your pen is (unless it's a whopping 5 acres or something), it's always nice to bring your bigger animals out for a walk. (Not ducks. Most ducks will loathe you for a whole day or more if you even so much as pick them up.) Get a lead line and a collar, and off you go! Coko and Onyx are like glue - especially Onyx to Coko - so all I have to do is clip Coko on the line and let them run free through the property, because Onyx is bound to follow Coko anywhere. 


-May 12th, 2012





Egg blume! What? What is egg blume? (I don't know if that's how you spell it..."blume"). It's the coating on the outside of the egg. Do you ever pick up the egg (chicken or duck or quail or whatever odd hybrid bird you have), find it is dirty, and start scrubbing it furiously in hot water? This will rub the blume off of the egg, causing it to spoil faster. Give it a quick rinse in cool/cold water instead. Fresh eggs! 


-April 22nd, 2012




Live in a wet area? Does your muddy pasture squelch under your feet? This usually happens in areas where your animals walk the most. The ground gets beat up and soggy, and when rain comes, it's a disaster! What we did to solve this problem was lay woodchips down on the paddock. We did this in both the goat pen and the duck pen. The woodchips absorb the wetness and keep the ground much less wet, which leads to some healthy animals, rain or shine! 
To get the woodchips, we simply ask the people who deliver us firewood in the winter (or the people who chip up fallen down trees) if they could bring us some. They brought us a huge mound of woodchips that they'd been wanting to get off their hands, free of charge! 


-April 1st, 2012




If you have a small barn/doghouse for some of your smaller animals (like the Quack Inn'), it's a good idea to lay down a sized sheet of plastic (not solid plastic, flexible plastic). This makes it easy to change their bed - instead of having to reach into the small entrance and try to pull out all the straw, you can simply pull out the sheet of plastic, with the straw on top, out of the house. Voila! 


-March 25th, 2012