So one thing that’s happened over this long gap in updates is that the farm has become a home for wayward birds. A local farmer has sold their property and is retiring to a much smaller one and was looking to reduce their bird flocks and so we’ve adopted three african geese..

6 new hens and one rooster, breed currently unknown…

and two additional ducks.

The ducks are greatly enjoying the rain and have expanded their free range territory to the point where they are just a few meters from the lake.  Once they figure out it’s there they’ll be much happier, but they’re enjoying the field ponds for now.

Our incubator trial run was semi successful.  We had one egg hatch early resulting in a much smaller hatch rate than we were hoping for as we had to open the incubator after 48 hours to get her out, but we have 6 healthy chicks that we’ve already put to work hunting cucumber beetles.

They very much enjoy their time in the pool garden and I’m able to weed without having to watch them as they can’t get out.  

Just yesterday we added three new ducks from a friends incubator experiment that worked better than expected but they’re still too shy to let me take pictures so that will need to wait for the next update.