Well, I did five and a half months ago. 

June 27th, my sister-in-law and I drove up our driveway in two separate cars. One with two great danes inside, pulling a trailer, and a smaller one packed to the hilt with boxes and bags. My husband had undergone hip surgery just a few weeks prior to the move, so he was left at home to catch a flight later in the month. We left Calgary just two days after the most devastating flood on record for that city. Zoo animals had been discovered in their pens with water up to their shoulders, and had to be moved to the city jail, on the bottom floor of the courthouse. I can’t even imagine how they got them there. Trucked, I assume, but every time I think about it, my mind pictures giraffe and hippopotamus together on a leash walking into the heart of the city to their new digs. 

The city was devastated. Roads closed. People lost their homes. Some, who lived along the river, lost half their property as well. So tragic. Thankfully we lived up on a hill in the south of the city and our home was intact. We had loaded all of our belongings into a shipping container, that was to be picked up in a few days and trucked across the country to the farm, where it would sit until our house was built. We packed up the two cars, and said goodbye to my husband, and drove for six days. 

Now here, relieved, tired and happy, we set up the trailer – a 35 foot travel trailer that would be my home for the next five months. 

Hubby came out for 4 weeks, and worked non stop, sometimes with his crutches and sometimes from a ladder without them, and amazed us all with his tireless work and good humour.  

Almost immediately, I started picking up our animals. We started with Turkeys, Guineas and Chickens, and installed them in barn pens. One turkey hen got a cut on her back during transit and had to be separated from the others for a few days. Turkeys are very flock oriented so this was likely way harder on her psychologically than it would have been to keep her with her friends, but it was imperative for her survival. Turkeys will stand on the backs of weaker, sicker, smaller birds until they are dead, so I couldn’t risk leaving her in there overnight. She was separated out, with her wound cleaned with warm water and treated with a little tea tree oil ointment and kept with her own food and water for a few days. We kept her small pen close enough to the other birds so that she could hear them. I thought this would make her feel less lonely but I don’t really know if it helped or hurt, since every time they called, she got anxious and fidgety.  

The guineas are amazing birds. Louder than I expected them to be, they sound the alarm when anything out of the ordinary happens. And when you are a flock of guineas and you move to a new farm before you are 8 weeks old, everything is out of the ordinary. Five and a half months later, moving in or out of the barn to free range around the farm is event enough to start them off, and this happens daily. Twice. There hasn’t been much physical change in the guineas since they first came here, except that they are bigger. The turkeys, however, changed drastically! They went from extra tall looking chicks, to huge beasts that regularly tried to swallow the others head. Four out of our seven turkeys turned out to be male, and the fights were endless. After 20 weeks, and not quite the weight gain we had anticipated, it was no kindness to keep these turkeys around any longer. They each looked like prize-fighters every morning.  These were Eastern Wild Turkeys, and while domestic turkeys are fairly docile and even friendly if raised from chicks, these maintained their flighty suspicion of people, whether they brought food or not. It became increasingly harder to go into their night-time pen to check water or food. All that had to be done prior to letting them in at dusk. The toms were becoming mean and increasingly aggressive. It was time. 

My husband had left to go back to Calgary, as he still had commitments at work, and would come to join me at the beginning of December. This meant I was alone at the farm to handle all these chores.

I checked around for a local processor. I had always planned to take care of processing myself. After months and months of getting up at dawn to bring clean water and organic feed, checking several times during the day to make sure they hadn’t knocked over the water, or run out of food, rounding them up nightly to make sure they were safe from predators, it seemed wrong to trust someone else to end their lives quickly and without pain. I had helped a friend with her chickens just a few weeks before, so I knew I could do it, but our equipment hadn’t arrived yet, and neither our barn or myself were prepared to do this task alone. I found one who could take the birds the very next morning, so I put a clean large pen in the back of the truck, took food away from the birds and gave them plenty of clean water, then set my alarm for 5am so I could get the birds into the truck quickly while they were still kinda sleepy. If you turn turkeys upside down while they are still sleeping, they tend to stay sleeping. This was the theory, anyway, but after you have grabbed the first two, the rest wake up and figure out something is amiss. It gets harder to catch them, and they seem to get heavier. I tried to grab the heaviest birds first and leave the lighter ones for last, but after 3 or 4, you just grab what you can and get it done.  They calmed down in the pen and were almost back to sleep when I got in and drove the 25 minutes down to the processor. I slid their pen out of the back of the truck, and left them there with a guy named Brian who promised to have them clean and ready for me by 4 o’clock. The facility was clean and organized. He commented on how good my turkeys looked. I wasn’t sure what he meant, but then he took me inside their bay to another pen where there were turkeys waiting. The turkeys I saw, looked battered and dirty, like they had been living on top of each other for months. They likely had. Our turkeys and clean feathers, beautiful proud stances, nice looking feet. I understood. Ours were healthy majestic birds. I felt happy that our turkeys had lead healthy lives. They free ranged for bugs, grass, clover and got plenty of sunshine and exercise. 

I picked them up at 4 o’clock. Clean, chilled and in shrink wrapped bags with the weight stamped on the label, for $13 per bird. 

Long absence from writing, it seems. 

Odd that I set up this blog to record the happenings at the farm, to go through the steps methodically and with care. Well, we all know how that kind of plan turns out, huh? 

It seems that when ever I get to doing, the recording of the doing gets lost. I must vow to do better if I am ever going to be able to look back to see where I was. 

The trip to the farm this year was both less than expected and more. On one hand, the weather was beautiful all the way there. 7 days on the road and each of them spectacularly warm, clear and heavenly. Once we arrived, the weather was warm, clear and heavenly, also.

Our drive up to the farm from the main road had the last of the spring lupins covering the ditches, and finally, after years of looking for it, Queen Anne’s Lace bloomed everywhere! Black Eyed Susan’s, Wild Echinacea, Wild Strawberry, Chamomile, all over the meadow…. and the Lavender I planted last year is three times the size it was. All buildings looked intact and untouched. The paths from last year, grown over. My make-shift clothes line, still hung where I left it, paler but strong enough to hold. 

On the other hand, the trip had its challenges. We were driving in two trucks, pulling two trailers. One carrying two Seadoo’s (for exploring the St. John river – yeah!) and the other carrying furniture, a painted mexican sink bought at a flea market to add to a cabin yet to be built, bicycles, boxes and suitcases. 

The first truck’s engine blew about 400km out, and with 3600km yet to go. I had to turn back, drop the trailer I was carrying and head back to pick up poor stranded hubby, two great danes and the other trailer. Then wait the better part of a week until we figured out what to do. Repair the broken truck or start fresh with another? Okay, another. 

Once at the farm, although all looked okay, we quickly discovered mice. Lots of them. Everywhere. They had cleverly migrated an entire 10lb bag of birdseed through a hole in the bottom of the bag and off the shelf where it had been placed, down two shelves, up under and through a hole in the underside of the 35ft travel trailer where we live when at the farm. That hole lead into the cupboard under the bathroom sink and they had stockpiled all that birdseed. There the babies were born. I’m guessing hundreds of babies.

New nests were started throughout the trailer – in the master mattress, under the oven, directly under the kitchen sink, and in a side cupboard. It looked like several sites were tested and abandoned as well, atop the bunk in the back of the trailer, each kitchen drawer, the tub. 

That first night was spent at a hotel. The next morning the work began. Everything had to be pulled out of the trailer, washed, disinfected and put back. We bought a washing machine to hook up in the barn, the mattress was replaced, all bedding, towels and wash cloths were laundered in very hot water. Days were spent cleaning and organizing. The smell of the damage was unending. 

Back to the good, though, we had babies. Not the mice! Heaven’s NO!  Baby chicks!

We have had a longstanding relationship with our builder, who started out as the builder of our workshop, became a friend and the builder of our barn, and now a dear friend of our family, and his family will come to visit while we are there. His young wife, Christy brings brownies, or cinnamon buns when she comes, and I always offer tea or cookies for her kids. Christy has been trying her hand at raising chickens for her family (they have 4 children) and has had a bit of bad luck this year when some kind of animal got them. She came home one day to find all her chickens dead, and her rooster pulled to bits as what ever it was tried to drag him out from under the edge of the coop. I’m guessing it was a weasel or a fisher that got them as a fox will take one chicken and leave, usually. Weasels and fishers tend to kill for sport. 

Christy replaced 6 of her chickens with some from the feed store but was left with whatever had not yet been picked up with an order.  She had one leghorn, a few red stars, and another few hybrid chickens bred for meat. All were okay, and healthy but not really meant for free range foraging, as that instinct had been bred out of them, and not likely to sit on eggs to hatch them – another instinct bred out of them. So she was looking for a breed that would go broody and hatch out a few eggs so she’d have babies next spring. We discussed a few breeds that might work for her. 

Later that day I was thinking that the likelihood of Christy being able to find a specific breed was not high. Christy and her family are Mennonite and don’t have access to internet, so unless one of her brethren raises that specific breed, she’s out of luck. 

I got on to http://www.kijiji.com and started looking. I found a man not far from us, in Hartland (home of the worlds longest covered bridge) and called him to see if I could stop by that afternoon. His chicks were beautiful, bright eyed, buff orpingtons, a heritage breed that forages well, lays well, and occasionally go broody to hatch eggs. They were about 6 weeks old, and at that stage, it’s almost impossible for an unskilled person to tell the difference between girl and boy chickens. They can be sexed by checking the shape of their vent (again, to a skilled eye) but it’s not as simple as one is female and one is male. There are 15 vent shapes and I have no clue which belong to which sex. As they get older – say about 3 months old – you can usually tell the sex by the shape of the feathers. Males have longer pointer feathers, while females have shorter rounded ones.

These were good looking chickens, though, and I took 9 of them (expecting that roughly half would be roosters), with the intent of handing them over to Christy after a week or so of quarantine so I would not inadvertently infect her flock. I set them up in our coop, with lots of dry timothy grass on the floor (about 5″ of it) and a few branches for them to use for a perch and they were snug in no time. Each morning I soaked their feed in warm milk and brought them fresh clover and greens from the yard. These were happy, happy chicks and Christy was thrilled! Maybe next year, when we are back at the farm, Christy’s chickens will have hatched their own babies, and I’ll get my chickens from her. 

I loved having them there for those two weeks, though. At night, I would take a flashlight and go peak at them sleeping. They would be all huddled together in a pile on the floor, peeping quietly in their sleep, like little chick snoring. It was adorable. During the day I opened the door wide and allowed the small fan to gently circulate the air above them. They would chase each other, stop, lower their heads as if about to charge, then fly up at each other with their claws reaching for each others. I know they were play fighting but it always just looked like a chicken “high five” to me. 

Those chickens should start laying their own eggs sometime in November.