New Kids On The Block

Our Glen Hill Farm family is growing! 

Two weeks ago, we brought home two doeling kids (girl baby goats). 

They are Nigerian dwarf goats.

We were planning to get a few goats this spring, assuming that was when baby farm animals are usually born, but when we found out that our friends at The Hillside Farm had some kids ready to go, we decided to jump in!

We first met these kids back in October, but they were too young to leave their mom at that point. Kit Kat (the darker one) and Cream (the lighter one) were born in September with their brother Milkshake... Triplets! We decided to just take the two girls, and that way the mom would still have her little boy by her side. And I think two goats is plenty for us right now. Our long range plan is to get milk from our goats to make cheese, so that is why we opted for the girls. But it will be a while down the road because in order to give milk, the goat needs to have a baby first. So once these girls are grown and once we are ready, we hope to breed one of them. Goats can have between one and three babies at a time, so our herd could double in one go! But I'm getting ahead of myself. For now we are just enjoying these two crazy characters!

Kit Kat and Cream are super sweet and totally hilarious. There's a lot of crazy running about and spastic jumping happening around here these days! :) They love leaping onto the doghouse roof, climbing up the slide, and gently head butting each other. But their most favorite activity is hanging out with us humans....and especially jumping onto our backs. If you lean over to pet one goat, I can guarantee that the other goat will be standing on your back in a heartbeat! So silly and it actually feels good! Like a mini massage! I'm sure this cute trick will lose its appeal once they grow some more, but for now my boys (and our kids!) are loving it!

So "helpful" to have goats jump on my back while I was trying to fix their feeding station!

Ryan holding Kit Kat. Ben holding Cream. (We may give them new names, we haven't decided yet. But we're thinking maybe Sassy and Holly...As a nod to our current and previous neighborhoods.)

Our ride home from the Hillside Farm with the kids in the back...

They found the hay. Look how tiny they are!...

And the door to their outside pen...

Down the ramp...

Outside, inside the doghouse...

On top of the doghouse...

Eating my hat...

Kit Kat (or Sassy?) having fun on the slide...

Cream (or Holly?).... Such a cutie!

They've already grown so much in just two weeks...

Our dogs are VERY interested in the goats. Lots of stalking and barking going on. Very similar to when the horses arrived last year. So, learning from that experience, I know that in a few short weeks the dogs will calm down and they will adjust to the new normal of having goats on the farm. I bet sooner than later they will all be playing together.

If you want to see some cute goat activity (nothing too exciting, just 2 minutes of normal goat playing), I've uploaded a video here. Because really, tiny goats are pretty stinkin' cute, just because. 

Video Link:  Goats Playing On Slide

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Jonathan and Ryan working out Thanksgiving morning (crushing the "Murph" WOD)...

We hosted 15 people for Thanksgiving this year...

I roasted a 13 pound turkey in the oven....

And Jonathan fried a 13 pound turkey! I have to admit that the fried turkey was the best!

And lots of help from everyone else with delicious appetizers, side dishes and desserts...

Ben baked a pumpkin pie all by himself... even a homemade crust!...

It was a great day! So much to be thankful for!

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The hens are all doing well. Penelope and Reese are going through their molts right now, so they look just terrible, but they should finish up in a week or two. I can't wait to clean out the coop afterwards to get rid of all those feathers! (Wish I could think of a good craft project to put all these feathers to good use.) They are the last two to molt, so once they are done, we should be finished... until next year, that is!

Silly Minerva Louise keeps laying her eggs on the floor! She goes in the nesting box, sits for a bit, and then she gets bored or hungry and comes out to eat, and ends up laying her egg on the floor! Silly girl. But I just appreciate that she's still laying eggs for us. Egg production is way down due to the shorter days and their molting. Keeping my fingers crossed that I won't have to buy eggs this winter. I haven't bought eggs since we got chickens and I'd like to keep it that way. We're totally spoiled at this point.



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I am loving this weather lately! Beautiful days and no snow yet. Don't get me wrong...I love the snow, too, but the landscape's colors are beautiful right now.

Comb Issues

Late Fall on the farm

There was a line at the nesting boxes the other morning.
Such good girls!

My daffodil is over her hard molt, but she now has another issue going on. I noticed some white wart-ish type dots on her comb recently. I can't remember exactly when I first noticed them... definitely a few weeks ago, maybe even a month ago? Maybe they appeared when she started her molt? I didn't think much of them at first, and thought they might go away on their own, but they haven't. Other than the tiny unsightly white bumps, she is acting healthy--eating, drinking and acting chicken-y.

Can you see the tiny white bumps?

Her comb is also very dry.

Thanks to the internet, I've narrowed down the cause of these hard white dots to two different possibilities...

The first possibility is that she has dry fowl pox which is a virus that chickens get by being bitten by an infected mosquito. The bad news is that there is no treatment for this dry fowl pox and it is possible to spread it from bird to bird. The good news is that it shouldn't be fatal. It will run its course and she'll recover. And once a chicken has had it, it can't catch it again.

The second possibility is that she has favus which is a skin condition caused by a fungus. It is possible for it to spread from bird to bird, but again luckily, favus is usually not fatal. And favus is treatable by putting miconazole nitrate 2% cream on their combs. My lady friends out there might recognize 'miconazole nitrate' as the active ingredient in the medication used to treat a yeast infection.

Since I'm not totally sure which condition she has, but one has a treatment option, I decided to start the treatment for favus to see if it helps. Off to Target I went to buy some Monistat 7. 

I guess now is the time to admit that even though I am a 43 year old woman, somehow I still kind of dread buying tampons and the like. I usually sort of put any feminine products in the bottom of my cart, and hide it under a roll of paper towels or something. (Guess I'm still an awkward teenager deep down inside.) 

So as I'm reluctantly handing my box of Monistat 7 to the cashier, I actually had the urge to say "It's not for me! It's for my chicken!" I kid you not. I almost actually said that. Thank God my brain realized in time how much creepier THAT would have sounded to the cashier. Would she have thought that my chicken had a yeast infection? Or worse, would she have thought that I named my vagina 'chicken'? Either way, I decided to keep my mouth shut and just let her think that I should eat more yogurt.

Time will tell whether Daffodil is fighting dry fowl pox or favus. Hopefully, she will survive it without too much trouble and fingers crossed that it doesn't spread to my other girls. Where Daffodil is a bit of a loner, it helps my chances of it sticking just with her.

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Jonathan has been busy building a new pen on our farm. Such a handy guy. I wonder who it's for???

He's also done a great job with getting all the leaves picked up with a new attachment for our tractor.

Our vegetable garden is almost put to bed for the winter.

Even our hens are helping with the garden clean out job!

Cooper snuck into the chicken coop the other day and found a spot to hide in.
Does he think I can't see him there?! Silly boy.

The paws of a napping puppy.

Burrs love to get caught in Jessie's fur this time of year.

Our contact-loving dog.

Happy Halloween 2015!
Glen Hill Farm Deviled Eggs

Cooper stole one of the deviled egg's tail!

Napping buddies.

Our beautiful Ruby.
She's a silver grey dorking hen.

"Chopped Junior" competition at GHF

Turkey chili. Well done, boys!

Gorgeous sunset here last night.

A Hard Molt

Feathers everywhere!

About 2 weeks ago, I noticed that Daffodil was acting strange. She was staying inside the coop and sort of staggering around a bit, kind of walking sideways. It was almost as if she was a little drunk. Maybe she had eaten a rotten apple? I decided to keep a close eye on her until I could figure out what was happening. Well, it didn't take too long...

The next morning I came out to the chicken coop, and when I tell you that it looked like a chicken exploded out there, I'm not exaggerating. Well, maybe I am just a bit, but let's just say that there were feathers everywhere! And there was my Daffodil almost bald. Okay, I'm exaggerating again, but she was definitely missing a ton of feathers.

Daffodil's strange behavior was because she was going through a hard molt. It's a bit unusual for a chicken's balance to be upset by molting, but not totally unheard of when it's a hard molt. For Daff, it was only on that one day that she was tipsy.

Can you see all the feathers around the run?
All from one chicken.

Molting is when a chicken loses his or her older feathers to make way for new feathers. Molting is a normal, healthy occurrence that every chicken experiences throughout their lives. In most cases, this happens in the Fall, as the weather is getting colder and the sun is setting earlier. Those seasonal changes trigger the chicken to replace their older feathers with new ones for the winter. 

Personally, if I were designing chickens, I think it would make more sense if this happened during the summer, so they could molt and be "naked" in the hot weather and then be ready with their new feathers in the cool Fall, right? But, strange enough, God didn't ask my opinion. :)

Our balding Daffodil

Most chickens go through their molts gradually. Gertrude and Minerva Louise are definitely going through a molt right now, too, but much more slowly. Everyday, I find just a few of their feathers on the ground. That is a regular molting experience. But of course poor Daffodil, (the odd girl out, as always), had to have the most awkward molt of all of them. I swear, that first morning, she gave her body a good shake and literally dropped half her feathers. It was like a cartoon. 

And while molting is natural, it does take a toll on the chickens. They stop laying eggs while molting. They use a lot of protein to grow feathers, so I am feeding them pellets with extra protein to help them through it. (I also gave Daffodil scrambled eggs every morning for that first week for another extra protein boost.)

She started her molt by losing her chest and neck feathers first.

A raggedy mess!

Then she started losing her wing feathers.
(eating scrambled eggs for extra protein.)

And then her tail feathers fell out!

I think she's actually looking for them here.

Sadly, it is a bit painful for chickens to grow their new feathers. The feathers grow in like little quills at first, called pin feathers, which can be very sensitive, so it was important not to pick Daffodil up while she was molting.

Those pinfeathers made her look 

more like a porcupine than a chicken!

They even look painful, don't they?

Finally the pinfeathers started opening to reveal her new feathers.

Happy to report that Daffodil's molt actually moved along quickly. Two weeks later and she looks almost back to normal. Her new feathers came in a little darker than the original ones, and we're still waiting on her tail feathers, but otherwise, she's back to looking like our cute little Daffodil.

AFTER the molt. Looking good!
Now if we can just get those tail feathers
to grow back in already!