
32 critters

I
set out with the goal of taking a photo of each animal on our
homestead. But I got sidetracked about halfway through, so no shots of
our comatose cats (2), our busy bees (uncountable hundreds), or our
happy hens (11).
Our dog usually gets top
billing, but she wasn't particularly keen on playing along today. She'd
had her head in a brier patch barking at a snake or rodent for about two
hours, and she told me she couldn't stop working for the sake of fame.
So I'm afraid all you get is a Lucy butt.
Our broilers,
though, were more amenable to the idea since they're nearly mature and
tend to nap through most of the afternoon. So far, I'd say Red Rangers
seem like a good compromise between the scrawny heirloom broiler and the
lazy Cornish Cross. They do eat like crazy, with sixteen birds going
through about fifty pounds of feed per week. But they're also energetic
enough to walk up the hillside away from their coop to scratch through
the leaves...at least from time to time. The real test will come in two
weeks when we kill and pluck our first bird, but for now I'm happy with
how Red Rangers act on the "hoof."

Meanwhile, in the goat barn, our ladies were busy picking through the fresh bedding I spread after stealing their soiled straw for the blueberries.
Previously, I tethered our herd outside, which is always a bit of a
puzzle. Where can I attach their leashes so the goats will have plenty
to eat (which at this time of year means oats and honeysuckle), where
they can't get too tangled, where they're close enough to see each other
but not to get their leashes tied together, where they can't eat my
perennials, and where Artemesia doesn't feel like she's so far away from
me that she has to be on high alert rather than chowing down? My
original hillside option was a dismal failure, so we compromised on the
honeysuckle-coated fenceline right beside the blueberry patch.
Not counting the
honeybees, that's thirty-two lives depending on our daily attention.
Some days, it feels a bit like I'm running a kindergarten.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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