Tis' the Season
Somebody learned to walk Thursday - Watch
out world!
We're in the midst of christmas preparations here
- bought a few presents, working on making/finishing a few more, and coming up
with the Christmas Eve menu - it'll be Trinidadian this year, along with the
traditional Puerto Rican roast pork and pastellas. Grilled marinated red
snapper, calaloo soup, roastbake, sorrel.... My folks surprised us yesterday
with a new dishwasher for Chirstmas, so that will certainly make a houseful of
guests easier to handle!
The last of
the pumpkins will go out to the pigs tonight, and then we'll set up the (fake)
Christmas tree and bring in some holly for the mantel. The temperature finally
dropped and we've been reading in front of the fire every night - very
nice.
As seen above, Georgia finally
took the leap and started walking on Thursday, though she still thinks it's more
of a novelty then anything - most of the time she still crawls from point A to
point B.
Outside the hens are in
full moulting mode - the barn is covered in an inch of feathers. We didn't have
any eggs laid yesterday, three the day before. We have a mix of older hens and
spring chicks, so hopefully if we tweak the amount of light they have in the
barn, we can keep some laying all winter. With about thirty dozen in the egg
fridge, I'm not worried about running out, but I like to get at least a few eggs
a week for the amount of food we're putting into the flock. The pigs have been a
bit less active, spending most of their time in their house with this cold
biting wind that kicks up every day. We've started a serious search for a
Toggenburg buck since we're having trouble getting stud service. I'd still like
to lease a buck this year, but if we can't then I'm hoping we can at least buy
one. Our last resort would be to breed them to a registered Nigerian and sell
the resulting "Mini-Toggs", but we'd like to avoid that if at all possible since
we'd like to keep a doe on to add to our herd. The girls still give us as much
milk as we need, so hopefully they will continue to produce well for a few more
months, and we can get them bred by the end of January....
.
Posted: Tue - December
5, 2006 at 05:50 PM