Emilie's Birthday

Emilie took her friends out to meet her cows. My friend Dave took these pics.

Zach in the Leaves

Halloween

Ben is the cow, Jack is Peter Pan, and Emilie is a cat.

The kids love our next door neighbors Ruby and Calvin. We do too - they are great people. This was out first stop for the night before we rolled into town where the houses were close enough together for trick or treating. Bonus points to those who "get" my costume - most people were mystified, but three people laughed uproariously.

Carving Pumpkins

Dad was never much for playing with kids when I was little - my mom loved it, but Dad was always very busy. He is making up for lost time with the grandkids. I had a rare day off from work and Dad and I took a break from working on farm machinery to help Emilie's class carve pumpkins. I'm glad he came - several kids did not have any adult show up and we ended up "adopting" several for the project. It was kind of fun to see Dad working so well with the wee ones.

Making Cider

Friends of ours have an awesome cider press and we make an annual party out of turning a bushel or so of apples into cider.

Life is good. Life is indeed good.





Ben may have eaten a good chunk of the raw materials.

Tasty home grown turkey. Mmmm.

Turkeys

We raised heritage bronze turkeys this year. We were pleased with them - they dressed out at 12 to 17 pounds and we sold out the 39 we raised to adulthood. The heritage breed was a better flier than last year's broad breasts. My saint of a wife had to go out every morning and catch miscreants who had flown over the electric poultry netting.

Jack was an excellent assistant at catching the turkeys to load them into the trailer.

Turkeys

Edible Blue Ridge had an online teaser about free range turkeys. Unfortunately, they have our phone number wrong. Ah well.

I've got the turkeys moved for the last time into the side yard under the apple trees. They have done a good job cleaning up the weedy area where I'm going to plant a prizewinning pumpkin patch next year (Big Max not the washed out pale pink giants).

I'll post a few pics of the turkeys soon.

We have shifted processors for our poultry - Tom Silliman of Sweet Dog Farm is going to do our last batch after our usual processor left us in the lurch. He and his family have a small farm in Dyke Virginia and seem like good folks. I ended up spending two hours walking around with Tom when I dropped off the chickens. He's quite creative and has come up with chicken tractor modifications that were very interesting. Bonus: I was able to tell my wife that I'm not the only one who is continuously developing new chicken tractor versions.

Tom has a real MacGyver vibe going and I was very impressed with his version of the Wizbang poultry plucker.

On the subject of chicken tractors, I also need to do a post explaining why my PVC hoophouse is NOT the way to go. Not any time soon, mind you - the day job keeps me happily occupied most of the time. I'm hoping to do a lot of blogging and picture posting over the Christmas break.

In the meantime, you can check out Sweet Dog Farm's much more technologically savvy blog here.