More Icelandic Chickies

Some Icelandic chicks finally hatched today. Well, one hatched yesterday, and 8 more by mid-day today when I delivered them to Keene, and now there are 5 more, which she’ll come get tomorrow. (peep peep peep peep — not my favorite part of running the incubator, to be honest — I keep getting woken up at night and then have insomnia, ick.) I sort of love spreading the Icelandic Chicken addiction around, though. I really wish we had some new genes, but whatever. I love my little genetic drift. I can tell what some of the babes will look like when they grow up at this point. (We are selling them for $4 each. I already have the next batch sold as well, to someone who will be in NH in January so can pick them up. No shipping when it’s this cold!)

We also repaired some fence and finally brought the sheepies and Danny in to a paddock much closer to home. They can no longer put a hoof through the water in the swamp, so it was time to bring them in. It’ll be much easier for the Pyrs to protect them this much closer in as well. We still haven’t decided what we are going to do for their winter shelter. What I’d like to do is some reconfiguring to let them have the sheds they used last year, but only if I can figure out a way to feed the birds somewhere else. The sheep are insane when they know grain is being fed anywhere near them, and will bash fences until they can reach it. I’ve got a couple idea for how to do it and hope to convince Frank of one of them, soon, because building another shed where they are now just isn’t going to happen soon enough, and I want to stop fretting about it.

Now that cold weather seems to have really set in, we are giving the pigs big round bales of dry hay. They love it so much! They eat it, which really cuts down on everything else we need to feed them. But they also bed in it. The piglets had never seen so much hay in one spot before, and there was much running in circles and giddiness when I brought it over this morning. Too cute. (Also, now that we’ve pulled the back hoe off the tractor, it really wasn’t fun lifting that bale over the fence. We’ve got to get something heavier on the back end pretty quickly. I hate it when the tires on the tractor come off of the ground. Hate.)