Studies
Photographic studies. There is a panel in the East side of the barn that has dropped creating a perfect cat door. When the big doors are closed this is where all the cats enter and exit the barn. I once knew a guy whose thesis was the entrances and exits of Shakespeare. Now THAT was a long time ago.
Impossibly sweet. (Now remember miss c’s rule, if you like a photograph just steal it, with the appropriate references of course) And if you want a file in higher res, let me know asap. 
This is Lick. The chick who landed on the floor and was licked by Boo until I found him. He looks like a He but I rather hope he is a hen. Such pretty black and white markings already. All six are happy as larks in their brooder. Their heating table is so good. Without the bright heating lamps they have a normal day and night so there is very little of that hysterical chirping you hear when chicks are under bright lights. Everything is calm. I like everyone to be calm. if they get a fright they just run straight back under the heater and feel safe. The tote is covered with a glass window so they have normal light but it is kept very warm. We have to look after our premmies. They are eating and drinking and doing all the normal things. The last egg is sitting in the incubator still. I will give it a couple more days but I think it is dead. 
John made boiled eggs for the salad last night (all the greens picked from his glass-room) and I had to point out that after all the precision surgery we went through to extricate these poor wee fellas out of their wrecked shells I felt a little odd shelling boiled eggs for dinner. But I got over it!
As soon as it warms up enough for the delivery. I hope to incubate Narragansett turkeys. Another old American heritage breed. Naturally John and Jake want some for Thanksgiving. If you want one for your Thanksgiving let me know! Also I am now taking the orders for pasture raised chickens. You buy the chicks – I raise them.
But I will hide a few to keep over the winter – and hopefully they will breed too. They can just wander about with the guineas and the peacocks and those ratbag barn chickens. See what happens next.
I love this farm life.
I cleared enough of the deep bedding in the North pen so I could close the gate and keep everyone out of it while I clean it out and prepare it for any surprise calves. The cows were very interested – in a lazy kind of way. This (below) is my favourite shot from yesterday. The icicles on her ears and the swell of her belly. Lovely Elsie. 
I wonder if the Breeder can guess how long she has to go. Hard to tell being an older cow. She is so small I think her calf will be about the size of a big cat.
As you can see it was snowing yesterday. All up we only got about three inches of lovely fluffy snow.
The angel. Godot.
These have become some of my favourite shots.
The movement of him through the air. The lack of focus is its essence really. 
Timatanga Moana. Such a nice little pig.
I hope you have a lovely day! I do!
Your friend on the farmy
celi
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The boiled eggs and chicks made me laugh – if you look up balut (a Philippine delicacy) it might put you off eggs for life! Turkeys sound like a great idea and very American 😉
yes I have heard of it.. sounds a little unsettling.. Morning Mad!
Indeed – I thought it best not to add a link! Of course, I’d like to try it 😉
hole for cats but what about Minks….Ha! ha…another animal to add to Noah’s Ark….some Turkeys….at the moment ‘under consideration’ but we all know what that means…. a week or two before you get them.
Love the pics of all the animals
There is no way I could ever Mink proof the big barn, it old and full of holes, but I seem to have kept them out of the chook house – so far anyway.. it must have about this time last year that they started to hunt here.. i must look back and see what month that was.. can you remember? c
Oh, your chicks are lovely! I was away with family during your traumatic hatching time – what a kerfuffle! It will be lovely to see how their plumage develops. I enjoy when we have a hotch-potch of chicks as the final plumage is always a surprise!
Christine
What a lovely post. Lick – or should we say Chicken Licken? – is very handsome indeed.
Miss C I don’t want to second guess you but …. 2nd last paragraph last line – do you mean you are now taking orders for pasture fed chickens? Typo not/now. I am scared of turkeys having been chased a whole gaggle of them when I was much shorter 🙂 Laura
OOPS thank you so much Laura.. I have zoomed back and fixed that. Thank you so much for catching that.. c
The heating table is a brilliant idea! I always wondered about the lamp thing and lack of night for chicks. If we do that to plants they won’t grow very well, and it’s supposed to be ok for baby animals? Nice call on the heating table for calm. Another thing to jot down in the next life organic farm note book. 😀
That Tima gets cuter every day!!! xo
and fatter.. watch your letter box,if all goes well – one day i am just going to pop a Tima piglet in there.. c
I would sing and dance if that happened!!! 🙂 And it would also be wonderful if you and Our John could ‘swing down’ for a visit sometime! xo
maybe next winter? it would have to be winter which is not quite as fun for out- door birds like us but you have wine? yes? c
Yes! We do! And Jack will have his own homemade beer as well! It would be wonderful! And it would be good for both you and Our John to get off the farmy during the winter and kick up your heels and have some fun! And fabulous for us too! We love visitors!!!
Timatanga Moana looks huge! ( ” hooooj, ” says Zelie ). It’s that the final size or will there be more growth?
She is a year old, but should get taller.. she is a bit fat though, they have discovered that they can climb into the hay stacks and help themselves, too much alfalfa for this fattie, wish the snow would go away so i can lock them out in the paddock again. c
Ooh! I did enjoy that. Lovely, lovely animals and birds.
Love,
ViV
I loved the cow eye shot, that has always been a favourite shot for me! Morning Viv. i liked your poem this morning!.. c
Icicles on cows ears…this inspires me to say that I am anxious to see green in the farm pictures, are you as anxious as well? So many changes, so many plans…all call for renewal and ‘greener pastures’ as they say. We have had no winter in my corner of the USA, but I am tired for all of you who must wake each day to more white, and cold. It is time for growth, as the new chicks will attest to I’m sure.
I think the chicks have injected a small jolt of spring.. thank goodness for Johns glass house.. it has been such a bonus this winter..
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CxFKGm2UujI
This is a link to a video showing an easy way to determine the gender of the chicks, if you really want to know if Lick is a he or a she. 🙂
thank you! this is great!. I will have a look straight away. c
Monday has arrived!!! This girl has some wicked CABIN FEVER!!! Our snow turned to SNICE on Saturday. We had a nice 6 inches in our yard and the beagles had a very hard time of it. Was happy for the melt yesterday, but more rain on top of it means we have a nice bog. Yes, I am whining. Yes, I’m a wimp with winter. God bless you all who live with this white stuff. I’m thinking about moving even further south, except I don’t like the heat either.
FYI: My Bug did a great job on Friday with the frozen roadways. It is a diesel and she pulled herself with a steady calm up every ice riddled incline with no problem. High torque is a wonderful thing. Unlike the rear wheeled drive pickups and Cadillac’s I passed on the side of the road. But, all that said, it took 3 hours to drive my 30 mile commute home. I was so exhausted.
Lovely photos today. Any signs of the owl again? I’m in search of that first herald of spring – a ROBIN!!!!
Frozen in Texas…..
Good afternoon, c. Will Lick always keep those colours or does that change with age? xx >
He will be black and white (I think) but the markings will change as he grows for sure.. c
I love Tima’s face… The kind aspect barely hides the mischief filled eyes…. Kind of reminds me of my almost two years old great granddaughter !!
Your pictures are so wonderful! And yes I so love farm live too!
Thank you for the photos of Godot. Now my day is complete. I’m bringing home baby chicks on Friday. I’ve always used the EcoGlow for our chicks and love it. So much more natural that way, with the brooder strategically place under a window. Babies are up with the sunrise, and to bed when it sets, just like it should be.
The icicles on Elsie’s ears made me think of Punkin squirrel this weekend. She had two clumps of ice on her tail, and each time I attempted to remove them gently she turned around whisking her tail away from me. Apparently she didn’t mind the frosty clumps. Have a lovely day my friend! 🙂
I have the heating table too. Pure GENIUS! Best money I’ve ever spent on an animal product. I really am astounded your chicks are doing so well, considering the ‘car wreck’ they were in. I so want turkeys, but DH has put his foot down. No more livestock. 🙂
yes, being hurled out and onto the floor is a rough start..and they are a bright fluffy bunch.. c
I love the images of the cats. Happy National Pig Day to you, Sheila, and the kune kunes!
Thank you Sweetie. c
Oops, and I just had an egg salad sandwich before sitting down to blog! (PS, really lovely photos! Ah, the farm life!)
That photo of the cows ear…speaks volumes!!! Spring needs to start showing up.
Linda ♪♫❤
http://coloradofarmlife.wordpress.com
https://coloradofarmlife.wordpress.com/sherlock-boomer
Hi Celie, love the cat pictures, very cute . My mom once told me that turkeys were difficult to raise because they are stupid animals . I have no idea if this is true . She also told me that pigs are very smart. She raised geese and chickens.
Oh these photos are beautiful today C. I love the snow flakes against the black in the last photo of Tima To To! .. I love all the photos today…Turkeys? I’m so excited to see baby turkeys… That second photo of Godot looks almost ghostly…beautiful.
I think you should print and sell the kitties in the barn photos!
By glass house do you mean a green house or the glassed in portion of the Coupe? The little peeps look so happy and healthy… 🙂
yes, it is that glassed in room attached to the Cloak Room. I will take a photo for you today. Small but very warm and light when the sun shines.. c
Beautiful – all seems to be well for today, I feel a great sense of peace!
Just a lovely visit. (Thanks for giving the darling chicks real day and night – those horrid endless lights are a type of cruelty.)
We have Narraganset turkeys here. Breeding hasn’t always been very successful, though they don’t always require artificial insemination like other domestic breeds. Turns out, that big breast we all want at Thanksgiving is what keeps domestic turkeys from reproducing naturally. We have a male that was hand-raised here. He was used as a program animal for a couple of years because he like for people to pet him. Now he’s a big, grumpy tom.
I posted some pics of reptile egg-candling today. It’s very different from chicken candling in that we get to do it several times during incubation. It takes so much longer to hatch many reptiles because mom doesn’t waste resources sitting on the eggs, so they have the luxury of waiting until the next appropriate season to hatch.
If I have a breeding pair that would not necessarily keep us going? I thought these were an old heritage breed and so were more likely to breed than the big commercial birds. I had thought to buy eggs this time around. How can I be sure they are fertile? Hmm. is there a better heritage breed that would suit me? c
Try it and see what happens. We’ve had a lot of trouble with fertility. Eggs are produced (we chill them in our egg chiller), but they haven’t had hatchlings very often. It could have something to do with our setup. They are definitely more likely to breed than commercial birds. Those animals need all kinds of help!
I will get in touch with the breeder and ask him what he thinks..It would be nice to have them breed though.. c
Definitely! It’s a question worth asking.
we have decided the Spanish Black will be better.. older too! so have ordered them! see what happens.. what do you think?
Godot’s tail looks like it’s growing back in. Are the kittens finally leaving it alone?
Nancy
I thought it looked thicker too.. he is getting ready for spring.. fingers crossed!
I had the same thoughts as you at the mention of boiled eggs but there’s no way I could have gotten past it so close to the event. Wonderful photos… those icicles! But oh, the kitties are so cute. Could you I wonder sell photos to a photo-stock agency? Have you read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver ? Her account of breeding heritage Bourbon Red turkeys is too funny 🙂 Turkey breeding could give you a whole new skill set…
Brilliant book all round, in my opinion. Not just funny, also sad and horrifying and enlightening.
I agree, and the Barbara Kingsolver also writes about the turkey experience here http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/essay-bourbon-for-dinner-raising-heirloom-turkeys 🙂
I love Barbara Kingsolver and have read a few of hers.. this essay is a good one!
When I saw the icicles on Elsie’s ears, I immediately pulled a hood over my head, I could feel the cold. Great photos and a warm cheerful mood to warm my heart.
I’ve been told turkeys are a lot more disease-prone than chickens but they can pass the diseases on to chickens as well, so you have to keep the two apart. That doesn’t sound like what you’d planned – I hope you find some healthy, lively and breedable ones, Miss C…
I am getting a very old heritage breed, they are much hardier than the modern big breasted bunch. When fattening them they will be in a large new chicken tractor for a while and the pair that I pull out and keep will be trained to live in the open barn with the peacocks. I won’t keep them in with the layers, they are too big. And so far the big barn is safer. But nothing free range is safe really. I have not heard that they cannot be mixed together – that might be in an enclosure? Still it might be fun to see if we can breed them. c
Well, whatever the ins and outs of disease and breeding, they’re going to taste a million times better than great big porky birds with huge breasts and dry, boring meat, who can hardly waddle around their enclosure because of their exaggerated endowments. Old breeds are more hardy but still naturally more susceptible than chooks. It was your chooks I was mainly worried about, because decimating your flock through disease would not be fun…
That would be nasty, I will take care. They won’t be with my layers though, they are still in a mink free zone.
years ago i got the bright idea to hatch, raise, and sell turkeys.
hatching and raiseing went pretty good. but the selling was another story.
so going into winter, with a lack of cash, the only thing i could do was butcher the unsellables.
my aunt helped pluck , for a large share of the meat. unfortunately not a large enough share. 35 large turkeys is a lot of meat.
i shared with rest of family, too.free range turkeys were not popular then.
i cooked, ground, and froze my share. for over 2 years i carryed turkey salad sandwiches in my lunch to work.
even the dog got tired of turkey too
that was over 30 years ago. i can barely stand to eat turkey at thanksgiving to this day
hope you have better luck with the selling part than i did
What an awful story.. though kind of funny too, I won’t be selling them thank goodness, only growing a few for whoever wants them.. John is the one, he wants his own turkey for thanksgiving.. him and his mates! great story Ron.. and the chicks you saved are fluffy and full.. eating and running about.. very very alive!
glad i could help
the experts all say to not help them out of shell.
survival of the fittest.
but i am a sucker for the underdog, and help them out.
i had better luck with turkeys if i had a few chicks the same age in with them.
usually would add a few chicken eggs in incubater to hatch same day. or day ahead of turkeys.
baby turkeys are not too brite,chicks would teach them how to eat/drink.
once again it is against the experts rules to mix them.
Well we HAD to help them out, their shells were destroyed. Hmm Chicks in with turkeys – now that is a good idea, thank you again ron.
Coming in at the ‘tail end’ as usual Miss C – all I can ask is ‘what next’ 😀 ? We have had the belted cows hopefully to give healthy births, we have had most of the first lot of gorgeous chickies hatching, we know the goats are almost on your doorstep – and now you mention turkeys!!! Surely the farmy will be the most exciting part of the Prairies come warm weather . . . nay, Illinois, let’s make it the whole of the US of A!!! Actually the ‘entrances and exits’ from Shakespeare . . . . seems to be an interesting topic as know I have read a book on that . . .yes, a long time ago . . .
Yes John has wanted a few turkeys for ages, i just like to do things slowly.. not that slowly apparently!
Huh!! What did you just say? !!!!! What the bf[etc] hell have you ever done slowly Missy? Sleep soundly and perchance that last chicky will be around when you wake!! [The rest of the world will keep their fingers crossed whilst you are in slumber 🙂 ] Boo & Ton – stay!!
ha ha ha ha .. laugh .. you are right!
I hope you had a lovely day too Celi. Love that pic of Elsie .. divine.
Even more lovely pics than usual, Miss C.! You always brighten my day!
Thanks for adding a little more sunshine to the internet, C. XO
I would LOVE one of your turkeys for Thanksgiving! I order organic ones online and they are over $100, so I can’t imagine it would be much more than that to have you raise one and ship it to me. Just let me know. 🙂 The chicks are beautiful and Lick with that black fuzz is just gorgeous. And Godot…goodness…always a sight to behold.
$100 – merciful heaven -that is a lot – I will put you on the list and we can work out the details later.. of course no counting our turkey chicks before they hatch!!