Wednesday, January 21, 2009

The death of Shimmers

Well we lost our first chicken last week. We hadn't lost a one in the nine months that we had been raising them from chicks. It appears to be a victim on Coccydiosis. Everyone else seems to be fine and egg production (~22 usually) hasn't changes so we assume that she hasn't been laying for some time. She went rather fast. Just as we noticed that she was not moving around as much as the others and figured out what the problem was she expired before we could start any treatment. It was a good "farm lesson" for the kids. Death is a part of life on the farm. That doesn't stop them from crying when it happens though.

We are now letting our chickens out of their run during the day to have free rain of the whole farm. They don't go very far but they love being out and about. They all usually start heading back to the coop around and hour before dark and go back in without too much coaxing. I had heard that once they get used to roosting in one place they would return there at night and it's true!
Posted by Matthew at 2:59 PM

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Welcome!

Welcome to our family blog. We have a small (55 acres) farm and are attempting to raise beef cattle, some hay, laying hens, honey bees, a dog and a small garden. We also have a small pond that has fish in it but they pretty much raise themselves.The Twenty-eight eleven is the name of our farm. It comes from Deutronomy 28:11 which reads: "The LORD will make you abound in prosperity, in the offspring of your body and in the offspring of your beast and in the produce of your ground in the land which the LORD swore to your fathers to give you." We count on God's blessings for our life as we know it so we thought it appropriate to go ahead and give Him all the glory for anything good that we produce, be it crops, cows, or children. This blog will be a fun project for us to document what is going on at our farm and hopefully share some natural ways of farming along the way (as we learn too).