I can’t believe time has flown by! The last ‘Friday on the Backyard Farm’ was in December 😱. I have been working behind the scenes on new posts regarding poultry care and other ventures that I feel will be valuable! Those should be coming out soon, please stay tune and you can subscribe to our mailing list to get notification when they are posted!

Lets get passed the depressing news first then I’ll write the positives going around here!

Since the last post, we’ve had a lot happen. Unfortunately, we lost several chickens, one duck, and one goat. A couple of chickens got hit by a car, one chicken was egg bound, and another chicken was found dead. One duck became totally blind, had been doing well despite the fact, but ended up getting stuck in the water bowl and froze to death. 😪 With the goat, we have no idea what happened. We don’t know if he got injured or ate something that resulted in death…which is known to happen.

Right now we have a hen that I thought was having problems laying an egg, perhaps eggbound. I increased the calcium, it’s been months since that and she is still here. 🤔 Her abdomen and butt have been getting larger. Looking at her you would assume she is eggbound. That conclusion was dismissed the other day when I let her out of the run to free range and she literally squatted before me laying a massive poop. 💩 It looked like the emoji except it was missing the eyes and mouth 😂. I’ve been doing research. I believe she has water belly which is an accumulation of fluid. I will be addressing it today, hopefully all goes well and I’ll have an update next week!

We recently bought 4 pekin ducklings from Tractor Supply! They are a little older when we bought them but they are adjusting nicely. I have them in my office as I’m typing this. We are hoping to move them outside with the older ducks soon.

Love the yellow and fluffiness 😍

I don’t know if we will get chicks this year or not. We are at rooster max capacity.

We haven’t put much effort into the garden yet. I have pulled out some weeds but there are many, MANY more. I put an old trampoline liner/mesh on it to hopefully kill the weeds. It’s not doing that great, it has reduced some weeds but not all. I should have placed cardboard all over the ground instead. We are still deciding what we want to plant and will be planting seeds soon. This year I actually made a map of the garden. It’s nothing fancy, just a drawn out grid. I’ll post it when we finish the garden since it’s not much to look at right now 😅.

Thank you for reading!