A Busy But Wonderful Life...

Though it has been quite sometime since our last post on here (over two years) we are still homesteading and doing our thing. We do have a Facebook page  now so you can always keep up with us on there, but we're going to try to keep the blog updated for now on as well. 

So I am sure your dying to know what in the world have we been up to in the past two years?! Well here's what's been going on and of course an update on all the animals!

First and foremost we welcomed our second child, a sweet baby boy (LS) into the world on January 2014 so that's been one big reason for our absence on here.

Also while we are on the topic of kids here is an update photo of our two precious little ones! LS is now 14 months and LM is almost 3 years old!

Now moving on to whats been going on with our homestead....

Well one of our last post was about the garden so here is an up to date picture of that, which may surprise you, but I will explain.

Like most this time of year we are preparing our garden for new crops to be planted, but particularly this year we are redoing some of our raised beds and adding more height. Last year our garden did fine in some parts but because of a very large tree near by sucking up all the water around one side of our garden did not thrive as well as the other. Recently we removed the tree so we are hoping to have more success this year. Also this is just one side of the garden shown above but the other side looks quite the same. 

Here are some more pictures of what's going on inside the garden so far this year and also what has not yet made it into the garden.

Above is a picture of our strawberries doing well as always. We are now just looking for a way for them to grow somewhat off the ground to prevent from rotting by sitting on the ground.

Here is a picture of our favorite veggie, asparagus doing equally as well!

Recently we built a little green house to keep our plants in until we move them to garden. So far we have Kale, Broccoli, Squash (two different types), Zucchini, Cantaloupe, Sweet pepper and Cucumber started.

Now on to what you've all be waiting for the animals....

Here are some of our Guineas. They are all this color (pearl) except one that is white.

These are our chickens and here are the different kinds we currently have.

This is our one special breed we received in an order that came from Mcmurray Hatchery

which is typically where we order our chickens from. If you haven't used them and are looking for a reliable company to order your chicks from this is the place to use.

Back to the Rooster above....He is a Buff Cochin and his name is fluffy. FYI we didn't know he was a rooster before we named him. He is feather footed, as you can see and a beautiful breed.

These here are Ol Fluffs offspring which are two roosters of course that were breed with our last Red Star before she passed. So they are Red Stars and Buff Cochins.

The hens breeds we have now are some Speckled Sussex and Buff Orpingtons. Both are beautiful breeds but I tend to favor the Red Stars which we will hopefully have some of soon once we place our spring order to the hatchery.

 This is our one and only Bourbon Red Turkey hen sitting on chicken eggs. She isn't one of our smartest birds. She has yet to have any eggs hatch.

We also have a pair of breeding Khaki Campbells which are very entertaining, especially when playing in their pool. We are hoping to have ducklings from them hatch later this week so be looking for a post on those.


Talking about hatching babies these recently hatched last week and though we are not 100% sure what breed they are yet we are pretty confident the all yellow one is Buff Cochin breed with Buff Orpington and the other two, Red Star/Buff Cochin breed with Buff Orpington. So we shall see what we get when their feathers start to come in. So far we have 2 feather footed and one without.

Now moving on to the goats we currently have..... 

The top picture is the oldest goat on the farm, Pebbles. If you've read our previous post she is one of the first goats we purchased and when we got her we were told she may be pregnant and sure enough a couple months later she birthed these two baby girls. Wilma is on the left and is identical to her Momma. Then of course the bottom right is her other baby, Betty.

The other goats we have here are...

Jack and Jill which are brother and sister. Like all our goat here they are Nigerian Dwarfs.

Our newest additions are strictly for food purposes but they sure are cute to look at, for now anyways!

 These are our two female American Guinea Hogs that will be with us until about November and after that they will be remembered every time we sit down to have some of our delicious home raised pork.

On a not so happy note we recently lost our oldest animal family member, Drake. Our sweet 13 year old black lab passed away due to heart failure two weeks ago. 

Not only was this hard on all of us, (my husband especially since he had Drake the entire 13 yrs) I can only imagine it has been the hardest for our other chocolate lab, Bristol that has been with him her entire life. She has never known life as a only dog, but thankfully she has handled it like a champ and of course we have been spending lots of extra time with her to help her cope. We have considered getting her another companion but that is a whole other issue. So we will see what happens.

Well I think that about covers all that been going on here at Lees Reach. 

Oh, except one more thing.....

We are overjoyed to announce we will be welcoming our third child into the world in September of this year!!!!

Where did we go?

Have we been slacking on posting or what? Here is a quick recap on what's been going on.

We took a trip to West Virginia to visit our friends that used to live in Richmond. They went from living in the West End to what they now refer to as Possum Living. It's an interesting and admirable adventure they are on you can see at http://againstthegrainhomestead.blogspot.com/  . Hopefully they will be coming to visit us soon.

Our Babies are getting bigger. We have named the 2 new goats Betty(White) and Wilma(Brown). They are very sweet but Betty is more like her mom in that she is a little shy and Wilma although she looks exactly like Pebbles is completely different in her personality. She is very sweet.

We have placed an order for our spring chickens. They should be here mid February. We got more layers and a few Roosters to try and maintain our own stock and maybe even have a few chick to sell.

Our Bourbon Red Turkeys we got in the fall have gotten very big. We ended up losing 1 but the 4 that are remaining are doing great! We have 1 Gobbler and 3 hens so I am hoping for a productive spring!

Here is Bobby and his three ladies!

And our baby girl has her first Tooth! She is getting so big now. She is 7 months old and weighs in at 20 pounds.

We finally have babies

When we first purchased Pebbles we thought she was pregnant but we were 100%. She is the one in the Green collar.

After a few weeks it became pretty clear she was. We built a bigger pen and tried to improve her environment but honestly had no idea what we were doing. It took a while just to figure out what to feed her. I never knew it would be so complicated. I started doing some reading about how to care for a pregnant goat and how to help deliver kids. It was all so overwhelming that it made me not want to read it anymore so I didn't. Then after some of the signs I was seeing this weekend yesterday I decide I better read up. I found a great post of a forum call Backyardherds.com that explained the process very clearly and did scare me to death like everything else I had read. I have been telling my buddy Eric all along that I just wanted to come home from work one day and they just be there. I really didn't want to have to deal with any vet bills or complications. Well I rushed home yesterday from work cause I had a feeling something might be happening and sure enough......

I didn't have to do a thing. I took my hut and wrapped it in a tarp and added some pine shavings and a heat lamp and they were all set. When I checked on them this morning mom and both babies were inside sleeping. Everybody seems to be doing good so hopefully there will not be any problems and we can train these two to be friendly and maybe one day we can get some milk from them for our own use.

Farm Update 11/25/2012

 Here are Bristol and Drake on a lazy after noon laying in the sun....

We put our tree up and took a couple pictures of our fat baby!

 She is starting to sit up pretty good and is rolling over.

I am down to 9 guineas from the 17 I started with. I think this Bald Eagle might be part of the reason. I found a couple piles of feathers in a clearing by the road the other day. It looks like they are getting attacked when they go out in the open. As I have read in other places the dumbest guineas die first and the remaining "smart" ones that can survive that first year can teach the future generation how to stay alive. So hopefully we will get babies in the spring and we will have guineas that know the how to stay alive.

Our Turkeys have gotten bigger and have become my favorite addition. They are having a hard time learning to return to their house at night but I think that's my fault because I have moved them a couple time to new homes. They are now in the old Dog/Goat/guinea pen. I have given up getting the guineas to go back inside their pen at night. Instead the guineas sleep on top of it. Back to the Turkeys....They have started to Strut and Gobble which is a lot of fun to hear. They never leave the yard and they have gotten along with the dogs and other animals great. I did loose 1 Turkey but it died in it's pen so I'm not sure what happened to it. It looks like I ended up with 3 Toms and 1 Hen.

The day before Hurricane Sandy arrived My dad and I built this goat pen in the front woods. It is 45x35 ft and they really seem to like it.

 Who's they? I just realized I never posted about Lavern and Shirley. After BAMBAM died Pebbles was very lonely and was depressed. So we found a lady with Nigerian Dwarf babies and we got 2 does about 3 months old. They are about 5 months now. We were hoping since pebbles and BAMBAM weren't the most friendly goats that these would be better since they are younger but it hasn't been going to good. They aren't too bad and will come up to the fence and aren't scared of you but if you try to pet them they run off. So we will just keep trying to make them like us through food....

The new pen has a bunch of logs and hills in it that the goats love to play on. I also built this little hut out of some pallets and scrap lumber form our wood milling.

As you can see here Pebbles is VERY pregnant!

This past weekend we finally split and stacked a few oak and poplar trees that have been laying around for a while.