Around the farm

We moved a new batch of baby rabbits into the back yard, in the beginning of summer this is where the roving chicken coops were. Now the chicken poop is all gone but it fertilized wonderfully and the baby rabbits have meals ready to eat. Bully, is also waiting for her SRE, or snacks ready to eat. She desperately wants a rabbit.

She and the neighbor dog laboriously guard the ranging chickens, we have 24 chickens running around eating to their gizzards content, Bully and Max act fierce toward anything that comes near their chickens. I think, however, Bully would gladly eat a rabbit. Max also would not be good with a loose rabbit-he proved this last yr. Max is sitting next to me on my couch right now, so I am not sure I can say "the neighbor's dog" anymore.

You can see how beautiful this grass is, this is not typical up here. Most yards do not look like this. That is the nice thing about roving coops vs free range-you can direct their fertilizing.

This is much more typical, sparse, patchy and somewhat bare. This is better than most yards actually, from the last yr fertilizer from roving coops. Tad is sitting on one of his strategic shooting points, he quickly climbs this while shooting at targets with arrows.

Up close of grass. This is yucky but this yr, we are not amending the soil with roving coops here, we instead kept some yard for us. We only roved the chickens in the back of the yard, one entire side and front as we do not use the side or front. This leaves us a good bbq area and play area. Now that we let them out of roving coops (we have worried about predators so did not previously until an accident let one out and it survived 4 days alone), we will scatter treats in the bare areas encouraging them to scratch up dead grass. They will also poop and turn it under so these patches will be better.

These are their coops that they return to at night, and if we are to be gone all day-I do not open them in the morning letting them out. I just move them each morning, and let them have the day free and at night they go to a clean area in their roving coop. They have fresh water in them full time and go back for drinks.

What looks like trash here is actually feed sacks filled with straw and taped up, and the board behind the tall stump is a back stop. This is where Tad and Frank target shoot bows. They use recycleables as well, and an old basket ball made a great target that can be moved about.

Believe it or not, she is 11 and that dress is one she has had since age 6. My mom bought it for her, it still fits. She does nothing but get taller and thinner.

Stray chicken

And another, with our trashy backdrop yard.

More chickens and OH dandelions! These are making rabbit feeding free. We pick them and feed them to the bigger rabbits who do not like to be out of their cages, along with spinach, lettuce and other foraged greens and grasses. caged rabbits are naturally used to their cages and seem scared out of them. When we move, we want to raise our breeders from baby outside in roving coops so that they are adjusted to eating free range. For now, we pick their meals and it works well.

We have only 2 ducks, for pets. They hatched out a baby, we had hoped for more than 1 which we would have eaten but just the one, and Kitten beat us to the punch. He ate up Ns duck. She was fierce with him about it as he dusted downy feathers from his chops. The ducks sleep outside under the overhang and have a fresh swimming spot daily.

No, not the feeder, look at the ground. The chickens do this to the ground.

This is a dusting bin, or basin. The chickens do this and dust in it to prevent mites.

I weeded here, the landscape beds naturally grow up all kinds of weeds. I care nothing for landscaping, I rather leave it to chickens but other people do not feel the same. I pulled all of these weeds and the next half is waiting.

I wish the chickens would pull the weeds. but instead they eat the weed seeds and all bugs.

More landscape weeding...