I hesitate to say it, but it looks like Fall may finally be coming around!  (Please don’t let this jinx us into 100+ temps again…)  This week has been lovely and cool, and rainy!  Which is great for the land.   Not so great when your roofs have been totaled in a prior storm and you’re still waiting on insurance to get it fixed.  Ugh.  But they are tarped pretty well, so fingers crossed we don’t get any leaks before we can get it fixed!
 
School is in full swing for the kids, and I finally have a few minutes a day to work without interruption, usually.  Though mostly I feel like I’m playing catchup from summer still.
 
We bought 4 piglets a few weeks ago and advertised them for sale on social media.  We weren’t entirely sure we would do pigs again this year, since my son doesn’t have a show pig, and our freezers still have a TON of pork in them.  But when they start popping up for sale, it’s pretty difficult to resist.  They are a lot of work, but we really enjoy it.  Anyway, so we ended up getting deposits for 3.5 pigs.  Which is great!  We were kind of deciding what to do with the other half, since that would be ours if we didn’t sell, when I decided to go ahead and put out another feeler to see if anyone wanted any.  We ended up selling another whole pig, which is awesome!  So we added a 5th piglet to our pen this week.  But now we are back at where we started, since we still have half a pig left!  Ha!  So if you want pork, we REALLY only have a half left haha!  5 is the max we are comfortable doing at a time with our pen size, and our workload.
 
Our little buff seabright bantam chicken came down with something.  I noticed her being lethargic and sneezing so I stuck her in the chicken hospital pen with vitamins in her water to rest and recoup.  I debated giving her some antibiotics but decided to hold off until morning to see what she looked like.  By morning she had pepped up a lot and wasn’t sneezing as much, so I decided to not do the antibiotics.  (It makes me nervous to give them to such a small chicken.)  Anyhow, she stayed there a couple of days and looked like she was pretty much recovered, so I put her back out with the flock.  The next day, Charl (my oldest son) came running up to the porch with her in his hands.  He said Kenny (our Great Pyrenees puppy) was playing with her and hurt her.  She had her eyes closed, but was still breathing.  I have a feeling she didn’t fully recover and I put her out too soon.  L  Then when Kenny saw a limp play thing, he did what puppies do and tried to play with it.  (He doesn’t attack the chickens or anything, so it definitely wasn’t malicious.  I don’t have any fears for the chickens around him.)  Anyway, she was in a bad way, both from being sick and being rough housed by a dog.  I put her in chicken hospital, but I wasn’t very hopeful.  As I suspected she would, she was dead by the morning.  So that sucked.
 
On a more positive note, I heard one of our turkeys gobble for the first time this week.  It was so funny!  It sounded like an accidental gobble.  Like he was doing his teenager peep and it just came out in the middle of it.  His whole head turned and shook, like he didn’t mean for that sound to come out, and it surprised him.  It was really very comical.
 
We purchased a chicken tractor on a garage sale site because it was a pretty dang good deal, and the converted trampoline chicken tractor we rigged up last year, didn’t really work out.  It was way too heavy and cumbersome.  And we had issues with water collecting on the tarp.  It was a good idea, but not good in real life.  So we have a smaller rectangular chicken tractor now.  I had said I wasn’t sure if we would do meat birds again, but I’m thinking we may.  It was a really neat experience last year, and I’d love to fill some of our freezer with birds for the winter.  There also may be a rooster or two that needs to go, seeing as we have way too many right now.  I’m not sure how that will all play out yet.
 
I have more to update on, but I don’t want this to get too long, so I may have to do another post for that.  Anyway, if you’ve made it this far, woohoo!  I do hope you’ll follow along on our FLOG (Farm log, ha!) and see what we are up to.  J  I’d love to hear how your “Fall” is starting out!