Chicken Shed

Adrian has built a small chicken run for the chicks, mostly from bits laying around his garden and the farm (like an old 'hope tree' sign and some roofing battens).  I'll get some more pictures of the chicks soon as they are getting fairly big now.  Unfortunately it is looking like we might have 7 cockerels and no layers, but at least that means we have some nice meals coming soon.

In the picture below you can see some sort of wild animal has managed to get inside the chicken run with a drill.

Update on the baby goats.

'Buster' and 'Twist' are now so tame that even our regular volunteer Hans 'Mintcake' Kendall is starting to get over his fear of animals and embrace them.

'Buster' is getting frustrated with everyone taking pictures of him so has started to make rude gestures to the camera.

The goats like to check the pigs are keeping their place clean.

'Buster' gave a very good report on the standard of Adrian's roofing skills.

'Twist' and 'Buster' aren't too keen on any humans entering the pig pen and have been known to knock me to the ground to get me out.

Here are the deadly duo.  'Buster' on the left and 'Twist' on the right.

Gloucester Old Spots

Our latest additions to the farm are a pair of gloucester old spot pigs.  They are both males and we do plan to eat them, so as a result the plan is not to name them.  However they have picked up the temporary names 'Not Yet' and 'Don't Know', due to the amount of people asking what their names are.

Adrian built this pig ark from material that we found laying around the farm and his own back garden.  The pigs seem very happy with it.

Our two youngest goats have already made friends with the pigs which has been a bit of a suprise.  The baby goats are able to squeeze through the fencing and we have seen them licking the pigs and the pigs licking them back several times.

Hans Kendall came to visit the farm and although he was terrified of them, eventually managed to make friends with one of the pigs.

Both of our boys look really happy in their new home and they have loads of room to run around in since Andi, Steve and James put up a new stock fence.

Grafitti Art

We had grafitti artist AKS join us for a day to brighten up the inside of the big shed.  He used some pictures that we had taken of our goats and drew outlines for us to paint.  Then we found the right colours and began making the outlines look like pictures.  By the end of the day the shed looked fantastic.

Hatching of the Eggs

26th March

We bought 18 mixed colour orpington chicken eggs on eBay to put in our incubator.  3 weeks later 7 of the eggs hatched in our classroom.

New born goats.

Monday, March 23rd, 2009

The baby goats at 1 day old.  Mark Underwood accidently named the boy 'Buster' and the girl is now called 'Twist'.

'Buster'

'Buster' on the left and 'Twist' on the right.  The middle one isn't a goat.

The proud mum 'Miriam'

Mothering Sunday

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

Tonight our shed was the centre of attention!

It seemed like half of DC3 gathered to watch Mim give birth. After what seemed like a lot of discomfort all Sunday afternoon, Mim finally popped out a little boy at 9.00pm. 

Just when we thought all the excitement had died down, Mim sat herself down and popped out another one! 

Twins!

This time it was a little girl.

We had discussed that if it was a boy we would fatten him up to eat but we are already so attached to him there's no way we could do it! He's quite a little character!

Saturday, March 21st, 2009

Today we painted some of the 21 tyres we found around the land.  We are painting them all bright colours and then we'll plant them with flowers and vegetables

We also rotovated the vegetable patch which was really hard work because of all the bramble roots.

The goats arrive

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

Today we collected the goats from a farm in Coney Weston. We have two adult goats, one called Miriam, who is pregnant, and one called Thyme, who has a four week old kid at foot. Jake has named the baby "Spice". Miriam (Mim for short) is due to give birth next week. She is very tame because she used to live on a farm belonging to a disabled learning centre. She's very affectionate and likes to have her chin stroked. Thyme and Spice are more nervous and not so used to being handled but hopefully they'll soon settle in and get used to us.

March 9th, 2009

Dave the carpenter fitted new doors for us on the building.

Thanks to Dave for all his hard work.