Today we had the chance to go down and meet Honey our new Jersey heifer for the first time.  We’ve seen pictures of Honey, but they didn’t do her justice, she is BEAUTIFUL!!  We left the house around 8:00 this morning and pulled in to the farm at 11:00.  The girls went with us as well as Georgia’s boyfriend.  We went back and were able to meet and play with Honey.  Here are some of the pictures from today.

Honey is now six weeks old.  She is growing wonderfully and is very sweet.  We are looking forward to bring her home in April!

Well, not for a while, but we are getting a cow!  We have put a deposit on a Jersey heifer calf.  Right now she is about 6 weeks old and we are getting excited to have her on our farm.  We are going down to the farm she is at this Saturday to meet her.  Her name is Pepper (but we’re going to change it to Honey) and she will be with her mom until she is about 6 months old.

Once we get her she will be dehorned and vaccinated.  The woman that owns her dam is going to halter and lead train her before we bring her home in early April.  She will be grass and hay raised and will be left to be with mom 24/7.

This is her mom’s third lactation and even with leaving the calf with the mom 24/7 she is giving 6 gallons of milk a day with 2x day milking.  (So, in two years if you’re looking for fresh milk, let me know!)

We will pick Honey up in early April.  She will be raised on our pastures and given great hay.  She will continue to be trained and we are looking forward to watching her grow.  She will be bred so she will give birth to her first calf when she is around 25 months or if she isn’t ready, we’ll wait and have her bred so she’ll give birth in the spring.

Julia is looking forward to saying that we are the Farm with Milk from Honey!

Here are some pictures of Honey when she was just 2 weeks old.  We’ll take and upload more pictures this weekend!

This has been a hard decision for us, but we have decided that it is time for us to sell most of our alpacas. Due to some work changes over the past year, both Julia and I are now working almost full-time and we just do not have the time to take care of all 20 of our alpacas that are on property right now. We have decided to sell 16 of our alpacas at this time.

At this time we are asking $20,000 for all 16 of our alpacas that we have for sale. This is an amazing price.

Please contact Julia or myself if you would like to know more about our alpacas.

It is time for us to move on from the breeding and selling of alpacas. We are both working full time now and that just does not give us enough time to work with our alpacas like we would like. We just don’t have enough time to take care of all 20.

You can also see our alpacas listed on our openherd.com page at:
Silk Creek Farm Open Herd Page

Ok, that’s not 2721 eggs, but in 2010, we did wash 2721 eggs in total.  Here is about a weeks worth of eggs that I washed this morning.  As you can see we have eggs that range from white, to pink, to green, to blue, to light brown to dark brown.  I love the variety of eggs we get everyday.  It’s so fun to see all the colors.

(edited to add that once I boxed up these eggs, it turned out to be exactly 10 dozen eggs)

We have been raising turkeys on pasture since mid-July. This is our second year raising turkeys, and even though I really don’t like hauling 80 pounds of what out to them every other day or so, I really do enjoy having turkeys on pasture.

In mid-November, we had 15 day-old turkeys delivered. We lost 3 within the first week, but the other 12 have done great. We have had them on pasture living in our hoop houses that have been moved every day or so. They were completely wonderful turkeys.

Well, two weeks ago we were starting to plan the processing of the turkeys. We had planned to do the process ourselves. We were watching the weather, and on Saturday morning it was supposed to be 32 degrees and raining. It did not sound like a fun day to either Julia or I. We decided to start looking for a place to do the processing for us. We had heard about one in Scio, Oregon. We finally got a hold of Scio Poultry Processing and they were able to fit in our 12 turkeys for the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

Julia and I were going to drive them up on Monday night and then I would pick them on on Wednesday morning.  Well, Monday came along and it was very cold and starting to snow.  We had fixed the trailer so we could put them in there, but I didn’t want to tow a trailer if the roads were going to be slippery.  We finally decided to put the turkeys in the back of our Explorer.  We put the seats down, put down a thick layer of cardboard boxes.  Then we put down a large tarp and then hay on top of the tarp.  Then the hard part, getting the turkeys from the pasture up to the car.  It had been raining all day so we didn’t want to drive back there.  All 12 turkeys fit perfectly!  Here is a quick picture we took of the turkeys in the back!

Don’t they look just so happy to be traveling in style?! 

We got them up to Scio and dropped them off.  We called the owner to let her know we had dropped off the turkeys, and she had some possibly bad news for us.  This is a USDA processing facility, and the USDA guy was maybe not going to make it the next day because of the weather.  We were worried we would have to run back up, get the turkeys and then process them ourselves last night in the FREEZING rain!  BUT, he showed up and our turkeys were processed yesterday.

Lilian and I went up to Scio today to pick them up and they were a LOT bigger than we had thought they were going to be.  We had hopped they would be between 15 and 20 pounds.  Well, they were between 20 and 30 pounds.  317 pounds in all.  They barely fit in the coolers we had taken up.  We have delivered 1/2 of them, and the rest we are going to deliver tonight.  Once we have delivered them, we’ll be ready for thanksgiving.

Next year I think we’ll do some heritage breed turkeys so they don’t get as large!!!

Here’s a quick video of the new chicken plucker that a friend of our built for & with us. We supplied some of the parts, he supplied other parts and know how! Thanks Dan!

ChickenPluckerbroadhigh

We raised Freedom Ranges from JM Hatchery. Over the past 2 weeks we have butchered around 60 birds. They were either 11 or 12 weeks old. The smallest was around 3.8 pounds and the largest was 6.42 pounds. We cooked up our first ones last Sunday and we all agreed it was some of the most tender and delicious chicken we have ever had.

Comparing Cornish X chicken with the Freedom Rangers. The Cornish are ready right around 7-8 weeks, and that is about the only plus to them. The Freedom Rangers have much less health problems, actually scratch around like chickens, roost and are just more active. They taste better and we will never do the Cornish X again.

Today we started plucking around 7:30 and we were finished with all 26 chickens by 10:30. We would have never been able to get through the chickens that fast but some friends from church wanted to come over and learn how to process chickens. They brought their kids and they all did a great job. The girls jumped right in and did everything. Thanks to the Miotkes for the help!

Today for my full-time job I got an iPad and I’ve been playing with it all afternoon. I have to say that I was skeptical when the first iPads came out, but they are pretty useful. I started thinking about how this could be a farm tool (and then maybe we could have one for farm use). Here are some ideas I’ve been thinking about.

1- we use alpaca ease to keep track of our alpaca expenses, and I found out today that there is an iPad companion for alpaca ease so no matter where I am at I would be able to get and update alpaca information.

2- financial information, I can keep track of farm sales, grower’s market sales, etc. right on the iPad.

3- update the blog. WordPress has an app that I am working on right now. This will allow me to maybe add more posts and not have so many long spells without a post.

4- I’m sure there are others, let me know other ways you can think of using an iPad for farm work.

Bil

e ordered some chicks a few weeks ago but we got more than we really need so we need to sell some. So, if you are looking for some completely adorable chicks (all of them should be female and start laying in 5 months or so) let us know! We are not 100% sure of their breeds but I’m guessing we have some Rhode Island Reds, Buff Opringtons, maybe a Barred Rock and a couple of others that we just cant tell yet.

We’re asking $4 each or if you would like 10 or more we’ll sell them for $3.50. They are just over a week old at this point so they’ll need heat lamps for at least 3 more weeks. If you would like them but don’t have heat lamps, we’ll raise them for you but we would need to raise the price to $8 each for you to pick them up in 3 weeks. Here are some pictures:

esterday I saw an ad on Craigslist for some Rhode Island Red chickens that are about 18 months old and then 14 chicks that are just about a month old.  It would come with a coop, a chicken tractor, feeders and waterers, and other stuff.  All she was asking in return was a dozen eggs weekly.  Well, we thought this was just what we were looking for.  We were wanting to add more chickens but didn’t have the money to purchase some more chickens.  With this, we are able to get some more chickens & the woman is able to get the eggs she wanted.  She lives fairly close to the University where I work and it’ll be easy to drop the eggs off to her weekly.

Julia, Lilian and I went up today to take a look at the chickens and they are beautiful!  The reds are big and healthy and fairly docile.  The chicks are just as cute as cute can be.  Here are some pictures of the chicks I took once I got home.

3 of them are Buff Orpingtons:

2 white ones I’m guessing maybe legorns or white rocks.

and then 8 more BEAUTIFULLY COLORED chicks.  I’m not sure what they are but I love them!

Yes I know there are not 8 pictures there, one of them jumped out of my hand before I could take a picture of her and then I couldn’t tell which one it was.

I didn’t get any pictures of the 2 Rhode Island Reds today.  They seemed a little bit more stressed so I just gave them some water and food and then let them get comfortable in their new home.  I’ll get some pictures over the next few days.

After I took care of the chickens today I went out to water our garden, and it’s doing great.  The corn is starting to grow, the tomatoes are looking good.  The beans are going to be huge and the carrots/radishes/something else is starting to grow.

Here’s a closeup of the corn.  Isn’t it cute!

And here’s all 4 boxes.

$2000 on the 20th! That is the name of this package. Here’s how it works.

The alpacas listed (Milkyway, Liberty Blaze, Jett, Zebedee, Oberon, Marin, Nola, Robinson Crusoe, Helena, & Opal) are $2000 on the 20th of June and then add $100 each day until June 30th. So the prices are as follows:

June 20 – $2000
June 21 – $2100
June 22 – $2200
June 23 – $2300
June 24 – $2400
June 25 – $2500
June 26 – $2600
June 27 – $2700
June 28 – $2800
June 29 – $2900
June 30 – $3000

To take advantage of this, you need to call us and put a $50 non-refundable deposit down on the day you would like to purchase the alpaca. We can then work out a contract and a purchase at a later date but the deposit must be received on the date you would like to purchase your alpaca.

If you purchase just one female alpaca, we will give you JoJo for free as a companion alpaca. If you purchase a male, you must already have alpacas or purchase two males.

Give us a call (541-942-3160) today and get going on this great deal. (If you call today, June 19th, we’ll sell them for $1900.)