The bees have arrived!

Sorry for the radio silence this past week, it's been a crazy one!

Last Friday I took the day off work to travel with my boyfriend from my home in northwestern Ontario to a farm in southwestern Manitoba where I would be picking up a pair of honey bee nucs!

The day began early with feeding the chickens and moving the chicken tractor for my adolescent chicks. We grabbed some gas and hit the road. My Honda is involved in that huge recall going on (with the passenger side air bags) so we stopped in Kenora to get that all sorted then after picking up some coffee we continued west to Winnipeg!

We did the trip in stages because frankly I don't like sitting for 6 hours, so when we reached Winnipeg we went to a HUGE antique store and ate at the Old Spaghetti Factory (omg, can you say tortellini!! YUM!), made a quick stop at the BeeMaid store to get some bee supplies and we were off to Brandon!

We didn't do anything too spectacular in Brandon. After a long day of travel we were pretty zonked so we ordered in some pizza to the hotel room and relaxed.

Cute little things they are!

By noon the next day we were out at the Bygarski Honey Farm talking with Bill about bees and everything we could think of to do with them. We loaded up between 20,000 and 40,000 bees (in nuc boxes!) and headed home.

The drive home was (thankfully) uneventful with only about a dozen or so bees escaping from the boxes (apparently they can do that!). They were put in their appropriate location and waited for a friend and member of our local beekeepers association to come out on Sunday to help install them into the hives.

Even installing the hives was uneventful (but fun, even for someone like me who has no bee experience and is pretty scared of getting stung!). Tim showed me the ropes, we even spotted the queens in the fray, and that was it!

By the end of the day all the dandelions in the area had been well pollinated and the bees were settled into their new homes.

speedy little guy!

So the bees have been home almost a week now, so far no stings, I'm hosting a birthday BBQ for my mum on Sunday so it'll be interesting to see how the new livestock gets along with guests, open drinks and food!

I lost a chick.

Well it was bound to happen eventually, I just really hoped it wouldn't be with my first batch.

Chicks coming home last month. (I'll not be morbid and point out the missing one.)

I've been putting the chicks (who are really more like awkward adolescents than babies now) in their old brooder but relocated to the garden shed for the nights lately. There are a number of wild cats, large rodents and dogs in the area that would love to make a snack of the little guys in their tractor and since we don't have any large enough dogs to scare these critters away, safety is indoors.

Yesterday morning before I left for work at 7, when I transferred the chicks from brooder to tractor, I realized that I had a goner on my hands. My little brown chick (who had come to me with paste bum, but had seemed to overcome it as it grew) was very limp and didn't even attempt to stand. I made a makeshift triage of chicken wire and Rubbermaid container and left the poor baby on clean grass in the sunshine and left a note for my mum to check up on it.

Work doesn't wait for sick chickens.

When I had a few minutes between my morning work tasks I did a few google searches and determined that either the paste bum caught up with the chick or (my guess) it had gotten sour crop. I texted a few treatment suggestions to my mum but she responded at about 10:30 that it was gone.

I realize that death is a part of a farm, its nothing I'm afraid of, I just had high hopes that my first batch of chicks (who were all doing very well!) would be spared!

Welcome to the life of a farmer, folks! Sometimes it suck.

But sometimes it doesn't. I did gather 6 eggs yesterday. I do gather on average 5 eggs every day.

Balance.

That's what a person looking to farm needs to remember. There is a balance on a farm. Sometimes animals die (unexpectedly or planned) sometimes that results in a freezer-full, other times it results in one less future egg per day. Its a balancing act between life and death, ups and downs, surviving and thriving.

The different shapes and sizes of my hen's offerings

Beautiful Weekend!

We had a really beautiful weekend (my shoulders can tell you just how much sun there was!) and I just have to share some of the photos I took while cleaning up the front paddock and hanging out with the chickens!

 

one of the ladies visiting me while I was laying on a blanket, knitting

 

 
 

Oh and maybe having a drink too ;)

 

A storm blew right by us, not a drop fell on our party

 

The chicks still hang out in the tractor (they don't get along with the hens yet)

 

My babies are growing up!

 

A couple hens like the chicks though

 

Max wasn't too keen on sharing his paddock with the ladies...
To be fair, they get all the green grass out there, but he's stuck in here.

How does her garden grow?

Over the past few months I've been experimenting with a few different methods of growing Avocados.

My first Avocado plant is doing great!

I LOOVE eating avocados but am always sad that I have to throw out almost have of what I buy because it's a huge seed! A couple years ago I followed the instructions of my grade 12 biology class from years ago and went through the whole "put three tooth picks in the middle of the seed and rest the bottom in water" and that took AGES! (but the result was and IS a happy and thriving avocado plant going on three years!).

I've read a lot of different opinions about different ways of convincing a grocery store bought avocado's seed to germinate, so not too long ago as mentioned back in January's post, I tried a few more in that "traditional" method" but didn't see any change until the end of May (when one FINALLY split and sent out a little root!)!

So I got frustrated and threw them all in some soil.

I didn't mention it, but not too long after I had started those three seeds in glasses, I decided to just burry a seed in a yogurt container full of soil. I kept the soil watered (no special care, I just watered it when it was dry with all my other plants) and holy, it took off!!

Look how good it's doing!

Now I have a whole windowsill full of small planters of soil with avocado seeds hiding in them and hopefully soon I'll have Avocados to share with family and friends! (I'm not crazy, I don't plan on keeping them all!!)

(ps. the one who sat in water from the end of January until the end of April before sending out a little root then ended up in soil has sent up two stems this weekend!)


New Avocado shoots sharing their pot with a spider plant baby!

More Chickens!

My blog seems to be turning into a bit of a chicken blog lately... but I just can't help it! I love these little guys :) Pretty soon I will be acquiring about 40,000 other members to the little homestead, but for the time being my 12 fluffy feathered friends keep me occupied enough!



"Chicks" in the tractor getting to know the big lad

I introduced the chicks to the chickens last week but (when I was away from the place for a night for a friend's wedding social) my parents decided it was too cold and brought the chicks back inside to the warm (and WAY too small!!) brooder. True to form, it snowed this May Long weekend, so I held off on letting the chicks back outside until we got back out of the negative temperatures.

Last night, with the forecast remaining on the plus side for the foreseeable future, I threw the chicks back with the hens! They seemed to be getting along just fine this morning! 

This morning, two chickens and three chicks shared a nesting box!

And finally, on the chicken front... I'm FINALLY making money! The hens are laying beautifully! I've been getting almost constantly six eggs per day, and if the one hen would stop laying an egg from the top of the roost (which is a good 5 feet off the ground...) I'd get to keep all six!

So far I've only been selling to my boss at work, but hopefully my client base will expand soon. I would be selling more to others but she's already bought 4 dozen in the last week (she has a husband and two kids to feed so I understand!)!

One of today's dozens for the boss. Note the one lonely HUGE egg in there! That one must be a double yolker!

Hopefully we'll have a non-chicken related post sooner or later! Freezing temperatures behind us and frost nearly out of the ground, I should be moving on to gardening very soon!!