February Developments

Happy Leap Year!

It is hard to believe that today is the last day of February!  While we humans spent more days sick (colds and flu) than in any month I can remember, we had magic happening in our nursery.

Remember my craft room turned poultry brooder last summer?  It has once again been made into a baby bird nursery though on a smaller scale for now.

Last November, Derek met the father in law of a friend who aside from being just a real neat guy, happened to have an older style, large scale incubator he was willing to sell.  Though a little older, the  technology is the same and the wooden panelled unit was in phenomenal condition!

So, in the last days of January, Derek and Nicole moved the incubator into the craft room and Derek set to tinkering and  calibrating and on January 31 we set our first five duck eggs into the incubator.

What  a learning curve... learning to candle the eggs to ensure they were indeed fertilized and growing,  reading the humidity and temperature and adjusting as needed and finally, learning to recognize distress in hatching.

By day five we could see that we indeed had four growing embryos and one unfertilized egg.

Day five

And once those blood vessels stretched out, the embryo seemed to grow so fast!  For videos, be sure to check us out on instagram!

Day six

Day ten

Day sixteen

Day twenty-five

Newborn "Acadia" Day twenty-seven

Learning on a farm is not always easy and our girls are handling the ups and downs phenomenally.  Our first egg 'pipped' the outer shell almost 24 hours earlier than the others and knowing it can take a day for the duckling to emerge we did not panic.  Unfortunately, the little duckling passed while trying to hatch.  :(

Our little duckling Acadia emerged on her own moments after we sadly realized the passing of the first.

Worried about the progress on the final two ducklings and seeing similarities in the 'unzipping' progress we attempted to assist.  Knowing that the umbilical is attached until the very end we were very careful to assist only with some of the shell along the air pocket.  Sadly one little duckling perished shortly after getting its little body most of the way out of the egg and our final little duckling was quite weak from the hatching process.

We set this final little duckling into the brooder under the heat lamp to dry and keep warm and would you believe, little Acadia would not leave his side?  As we checked in throughout the night, Acadia had moved the little duckling away from the heat and helped him roll.  

By morning, the little duckling was up and exploring!

Nosy little duckling.  :)

The hatching process can be influenced by many factors - humidity being a big one.  As the incubator was reset, Derek spent the day reading up on the different situations that can arise and tweaking our original thermometer calibrations.  Our girls spent the day loving our new little family members.

 "Taylor (left)  and Acadia (right)"

Our next trays are in the incubator and include chicken eggs for me, the crazy chicken lady and ducklings for a neighbour down the road as well as some duck eggs for Krista's kindergarten class who would like to welcome them into the classroom for some learning adventures (can I say again how much I LOVE our small town? How cool are classroom ducklings??)  

New babies... all just in time for the Easter weekend.  :)

Jeanette

{{WORDless Wednesday}} February 10, 2016.. BEST FRIEND CHICKEN

We are half way through the week and on our way to MINUS CRAZY temperatures.  Here is a photo that is getting a lot of love on our instagram page.  Last weekend's lovely weather had us out in the wagon... Krista took lots of time to love and cuddle her favourite hen... A hen she calls "best friend Chicken".

Happy Wednesday!!

Jeanette

I am a homesteader. Because we all need a label.

Wow.. Okay, so I need to get better at carving out time to sit here at the blog... I've got tons to get written down...

Rewind to the Christmas holidays.

A family member was inquiring about our move and our property and asked me "is it a hobby farm or a working farm?"

The question stopped me in my tracks and my answer was disjointed.  Ummm... well its not our main source of income but we are selling produce but that goes back into helping pay for the pleasure animals - horses...  what am I???

I chewed over this for about a month.  And then I took a look at our goals here at SchnickAcres:

Its really only one goal:

To be as self sufficient as we can be.  In our food, household supplies and one day energy production.  (renewable wind and solar..  just in case you pictured us erecting a nuclear power plant in the back 40.)

Vegetable garden mapped out under manure

Okay so where does this fit in with the farming definition?  The more I thought about it, the clearer it became to me.  We enjoy doing for ourselves and receive great satisfaction in our successes - such as enough extra eggs to share with friends and neighbours.  We are not survivalists but feel assured that we can process our own poultry and eat should we need to.  The growth we talk about, whether it be a vegetable garden, a wind turbine or a dairy goat and a few sheep all comes back to goals of providing for ourselves.

What can we build/make ourselves today that will sustain our family tomorrow?  Basically we enjoy living a pioneer life... but with electricity, high speed internet (which is coming) and NETFLIX.

Haha... seriously though.  I really feel that the label (because we all need an important title) of homesteader fits us best.

Thanks for catching up with us,
Jeanette