Farm Friday Is Late Again!

Summertime and the living is...hectic.  Happy Summer!  I love that it's summer but am a bit sad because the days will now begin to get shorter.  I know it will take a while, but I love having these long daylight hours.  However, these long hours of sun also tend to coincide with long hours of work when you live on a farm.  We spent the morning at the farmers' market so I'm going to give a quick rundown of some highlights of our week, along with some photos (many of which I've stolen borrowed from my husband and our facebook page).

We've had a total of 5 kids born on the farm this week.  Here's Wendy with her triplets, all female:

Holly had a single female:

The baby seemed to be having problems nursing so we milked Holly a bit so that her milk bags weren't so large.  All seems well now.

Bella also had a female yesterday:

Her baby was born while we were busy doing this:


It's hay season (a bit late this year due to all the rain).  Bill cut, raked, and baled the hay.  Then I drove the truck pulling as trailer while he loaded the bales:

Then we drove back to the barn where he unloaded the bales while I cooked dinner (we went back out to do more after dinner):

We ended up with close to 400 bales.

Earlier in the week we had to move our two "portable" chicken coops.  Portable is a relative term as it took all we had for the two of us to move them.  We moved the large one first so by the time we got around to the smaller one, it was "light" in comparison.  We had to find a better spot for the coops because a hawk was slowly picking off our poor girls, one by one.  We lost 15 our of 26 hens.  We combined the remaining chickens into one coop and turned the smaller coop into a maternity ward so that our sitting hens could get some privacy.  Here's the new location for the flock:

They're now behind our house and will help fertilize the gardens there when we let them lie fallow.  In the meantime, they'll graze the grassy areas in between the two gardens.  Hawks dislike being around people, so the girls should be safe near the house.  (We suspect we have two roosters in the bunch so they're not really all girls.)

We hosted a small church camp group Wednesday afternoon.  The kids got a hay ride and then had a picnic lunch on the back porch of the farm house.  They seemed to enjoy themselves, and especially loved the new baby goats.

A bird has built a nest on the rain gutter outside my bathroom window and I've been trying to identify it (I'm still learning about the different species in the area).  I've seen the male and the female.  Here's what the male looks like (not the best photo):

Is that an Eastern Flycatcher?

Lastly, I finally broke down and decided I needed to replace my current phone with a smart phone and picked out the one I wanted.  Got to the store to be told they were out of stock.  Maybe next week I'll have the new phone and better photos!

Have a great weekend!