Getting our first chickens

They say that chickens are the gateway animal for homesteaders. I have to say that is totally true.

We got our first 5 chicks from answering a local Craigslist ad. The chicks are half Silkie and half Silver Spangled hamburg. They are really pretty birds. Bantams, so they are small. Because Silkies are are very hard to sex, we had no idea what sex we were getting. We ended up with three roos and two hens.

This was them on the way home from getting them. All I had was a little box with a towel in it. Heat was on in the car and the box sat on my lap. I always run hot. I think they were like a week old or so at this point.

Our ghetto brooder box. I didn't see the point of buying a expensive box that the chicks would only be spending a short time in. I did upgrade to a larger bin later when the chicks got bigger. I will use that bigger bin from now on. The bin worked wonderful. Only problem I had was when they started to climb and test their wings. I put a wire bin on top of this bin and then used a baby gate on top of the larger bin. Worked very well, until one little accident involving the chick brooder, Abby and a window. You will see all that in another post.

One of the littles as I called them. This one is the smallest (and still is) so we named her Little, as in Chicken Little.

A little baby roo. Not sure who this one turned into though. Hard to tell before all their grown up feathers come in. Our alpha roo, Harry (named after my dad who passed away a little over a year ago), is covered mostly white feathers now.

At this point, they are all outside. Taking a nice dirt bath here. You can see the Silver Spangled feather coloring good here.

Our two hens and one of the roos. You can see the Silkie poof on the hens. Because they are a cross, their poofs didn't get as big as a full Silkie.

More dirt baths. At this point they are fully feathered out and full grown. Harry our alpha roo is in the front.

Woot! Laying for the first time! Notice our ghetto bucket nesting box. Works really great for the little hens. Hoping they will work well for our newer bigger girls.

We ended up re-homing one of our roos. Having three was a bit much. They two we have left are great.

We, as in me, named this bath of chickens, Harry, Chickaletta (the other roo named after the chicken on PAW Patrol), Little and Henny Penny.

All the chickens follow me around everywhere! I was trying to get into my car and the four amigos (as we started to call the first bunch we got) decided they wanted to come to the store too. Sorry guys, I'm not one of those crazy chicken ladies who push their chickens in a stroller. Not yet anyway. You can see two of the second bunch of girls we got in the picture too.

Clearing the land.....Part 2

It is nice to have a brother in law that has access to machinery. He borrowed a small excavator from his boss to help clear the back "jungle".

This is what it looked like before we started in the back:

I was standing on the back deck. All sorts of vines and trees that had fallen during a wind storm in January. All this came right up to the house. There was maybe a two foot space, but that was slowly being taken over.

Another view of the over grown backyard jungle. Hidden in all this mess is three or so large dog crates, what looks like a chicken coop and other random crap. Our neighbor told us that the people who were here before had a puppy mill going on.

Backside view. Our house is to the left in the picture. So many thorny vines and forsythia. I hate forsythia. It takes over if you don't take care of it.

Let the games begin! Brother in law was scraping away all the vines and other jungle stuff. Hubby was cutting up the tree that fell down so his brother could move it with the excavator.

This was the spot that we were thinking the access door to the septic tank was at. He had to dig it out. The darn thing had not been emptied in almost 10 years! We called a septic company to come the next day and take care of it.

The hubby spent the day cutting down trees and cutting them up into manageable pieces. We gave the wood to a friend of ours. Nothing went to waste. All the brush and vines and crap we brought to our neighbor across the street. He has a huge fire every Friday night, so he was okay with us adding to it.

It's getting there! The trees to the right are covered in poison ivy vines. A neighbor down the street said he will cut them down for us in exchange for the wood. He has beef cows, so I asked him for some manure as well. Works for me. He gets wood to sell and I get poop to make the bad soil here better.

This was 8 hours of work. We still had little saplings and vines to remove, but the big stuff was gone. Well, in that huge pile in the upper middle of the picture. Look, you can even see the septic door too! So sad when that has me excited.

We have so much more work to do. Removing all this jungle revealed a ton of broken glass, beer cans and shotgun shells. Our neighbor said that the people before us would sit out back drinking beer and when they finished, they would toss the bottle in the air and shoot it. Now we have the joy of cleaning up after them.

It's funny seeing everything getting green now. I figured that nothing would grow where we cleared, but we have a bunch of wild violets and strawberries growing there. The plan is to make this cleared spot (and more of what we didn't get to) our garden. It won't be this year, so hoping it will be next year. I miss playing in and planning my garden.

Clearing the land...Part 1

We bought our new place at the end of February. We had a bunch of snow on the ground, so we really couldn't do much of anything. Although, Mother Nature was in a odd mood one day and it was in the 70's. That's when we started clearing the land in the front of the house.

This is what it looked like before we started the front of the house:

This is the tree line behind our rock wall, which needs to be fixed as well. If you look close, you can see little saplings between all the big trees. I didn't want them there.

There was also lots of thorny vines and poison ivy on one tree. I found out the hard way that poison ivy is still active even if it is dead or dormant. I had it on my pant line and my lower back. I had forgotten to take my gloves off and I pulled my pants up. Yup, that sucked!

This is the end of the tree line, near our nice neighbors. You can see an apple tree right in the middle. The hubby was trimming this tree over the summer, fell and broke his knee. He was out of work for like 4 months during the busy time, so paying bills sucked.

Oh, we are friends with one of the sisters that was selling our place. Matt was mowing the lawn for them and Steve was asked to help trim up some trees.

This tree fell down during a wind storm before we bought the place. Thank the Lord, it didn't hit the house! It landed in that pine tree and a lilac bush. It was our neighbors tree, so he felt really bad. It took out the phone line, but honestly, who uses landlines? We may be out in the country, but we only have cell phones.

Now that you see all the work that we had to do, here is what it looked like during the clearing:

Steve got a new Stihl chain saw, so before the hard tree removal, he decided to cur down a maple that was leaning over the driveway. I hated to see a maple getting cut, but we have a bunch more.

Steve got his revenge with the apple tree. It was in a bad spot in the yard, so it had to go. We have two or three very overgrown apple trees out back. We are thinking of planting Mac and Cortland trees anyway. We aren't sure what the tree are out back either. I did save most of the logs from this tree. I want to use the wood in my smoker. Yum, apple wood smoked meat!

Matt cleaning up the mess from the apple tree coming down, It landed on one of the benches for our picnic table, so that broke. He thought it was funny watching Steve take this thing down.

This is the tree that fell being cut up. You can see the pole that our electric meter is attached to. The tree also took down the cable line, but the cable guy just put up a new one instead. You can see the phone line that stretched across.

Still cutting up the tree. We gave all this wood to a friend of ours, who happened to be our realtor. She will use it next year to heat her house. Nothing went to waste while cleaning up this yard.

Here is part of the front tree line cleared of little saplings and vines. I will be raking up all the leaves and put them into a compost pile. Lots of them are starting to break down big time. The dirt under the leaves is very nice dark dirt. The rest of the yard is sandy, ugly brown soil.

Next post will be the before of the back yard. Lots of changes happened there.

Let the adventure begin!

This summer, the hubby and I started a new chapter in our life. For the past 8 years, we have lived and homesteaded in a mobile home park. We had a decent sized plot where we had a good sized garden. But we wanted more. We decided to look for a property with land and move. I didn't want to move. Mostly because we have so much crap and it would be up to me to pack it all. Our house went up for sale in September and we finally passed papers on it the beginning of February this year. Lots of issues with both the title on our place (which of course were never caught when we bought it and were never caught when the person we bought it from bought it) and title issues with the place we did move to. All issues have been taken care of and we finally passed papers yesterday! We were able to move into the place we are buying and rent it till we pass papers, which is awesome!

We moved 10 minutes away from where we were in a smaller town than we were in before. It has the same zipcode as the town we moved from, so that makes it easy to remember. Plus Matt is able to stay in the same school system. He is still homeschooled, he just attends a local tech school to learn welding and auto mechanics. We are still in a mobile home, but that's okay. We moved here for the land and the opportunities is has. We now have 5 acres of very overgrown land. Good thing we have family who are just as itchy to clear it out as we are. The hubby's older brother is coming over with a machine with start scraping and clearing a bunch of stuff. It's in fact where everyone has told me to put my garden. I can't wait to get started. Well, I get to watch. I hardly doubt the brother in law will let me try the excavator. These pictures are of where my garden will be. Lots of overgrown trees, vines and whatnot.

There is a ton of deer sign every where. The hubby's younger brother already has a deer stand and some trail cams out. It will be nice to have the hubby just walk out to our own yard to hunt. We also have a ton of wild turkey (I almost hit them the other day driving down my street). According to one of our new neighbors, there are also moose, coyote and a big cat. The moose will be nice to see, but the coyote and big cat freak me out. I plan on having chickens and goats. I will just have to be a little proactive to protect them from the predators. Let the fun start!