-
How Our Duck Nearly Died Freezing in a Blizzard
Midwest farmer shares an astonishing story about a duck, Mr. Quackers, who survived freezing to a water dish during a -30°F blizzard after missing the coop check. Rescued by slowly thawing and warming him up, he recovered in 24 hours, living inside for 8 days to heal from frostbite. The incident led to exploring safer water solutions for ducks during extreme cold.
-
How to Coop Train Guinea Fowl
Did you even know you needed to coop train guinea fowl? Guineas are wild birds, with minds of their own. They take a long time to feel like a place is home, and like to roam. This makes keeping them around a bit of a challenge if you don’t take the right steps to ensure they know where home is. Here are the exact methods we have used in successfully training our guineas to return to our coop each and every night. It’s Much Easier to Coop Train Keets Starting off with guinea keets is one of the best ways to ensure they stick around. Adult birds have just been…
-
9 Reasons You Need Guinea Fowl
Guinea fowl are a unique and wonderful addition to your homestead. They are a natural way to control pests, and help to protect your chickens by sounding the alarm when a predator is near.
-
Do I Need a Rooster??
You must have started, or be thinking about starting your own flock of chickens! Yay! Congratulations! You are about to start the most rewarding journey as a hobby farmer. I like to call chickens, the “gateway animal.” Give it some time, and you’ll see what I mean 😉 A question I get asked rather frequently is: Do I need a rooster to get eggs? Answer: NO!!! Your chickens will lay eggs with or without a roo. Their reproductive cycles are not determined by whether or not fertilization occurs. Each breed produces and lays eggs at a slightly different rate. And environmental factors such as the amount of daylight a hen…
-
Why Aren’t My Chickens Laying in the Winter
This article contains affiliate links. This means if you click through and make a purchase I may receive a commission, at no additional cost to you. For more information see my disclosures here. Over the summer you were getting an abundance of eggs each day. So many that maybe you didn’t even know what to do with them! Then fall rolled around, and things started to slow down. By December…. you were lucky to find one lone egg in the nesting boxes. What gives?! Just like everything, eggs have a season. There are periods of high production, and periods of slow to no production. It’s all part of a healthy…
-
43 Ways to Make Money on Your Hobby Farm
Did you know you could earn a living off of your land? The more you dive into hobby farming and homesteading, the more you realize: there is no “off season.” In other words you complete one task to move to the next, and are constantly shifting your focus based on the time of year. Early springtime means starting seedlings, and hatching chicks. Then planting season begins, which moves to maintaining your gardens, the high egg production of summer time, honey, raising cattle and pigs, cut flowers and manure. As you head into fall, harvest kicks into high gear, canning season and pumpkin season take over – only to be met…
-
Building a Community Around a Dream
Three years ago I almost threw in the towel. We had a baby and we were killing ourselves trying to build our little patch when we caught someone literally filling his truck bed with our pumpkins....
