Chicks!

While attending a Home School Convention on June 6th, we received a call from the post office telling us the chicks we ordered had arrived.  They needed to be picked up by that evening.  This posed a problem. You see, we were 30 minutes away from home at the afore mentioned convention and it would be quite a pain to go all the way back home, settle the chicks, and come back to the convention.  We would definitely be missing some sesssions if we did that and no-one wanted to miss those. :)  So, Dad called a friend who lives nearby and he graciously agreed to pick up the chicks and settle them for us (Thanks, Daniel!:) !  We ordered 30 broilers and 40 layers.  I think we've only had two die- not too bad! :)  They were in the house for the first week or so, but then we decided it was time for them to go out into the coop.

We open it up during the day so that they can get some fresh air.  There is (as pictured above) a screen in front of the door-way so they can't escape. :)

 Some of the chicks.  The white ones are the boilers and the brown ones are the layers.

Eating away!

Drinking from their water dispenser. 

Well, that's all for now!  Have a wonderful week!

~Seth Wassenberg

Spring Start Up

Hello everybody.  I hope you had a wonderful weekend.  This spring we got some more animals.  The usual stuff like chickens and turkeys and such.  We also got a new cow that we named Mocha because she is whitish/grey.  She is giving us between 2 and 3 gallons a day and we are only miking her once in the morning!  I also got a beehive in mid May from a beekeeper that is training me (he also takes care of Lavender Fields Farm's honeybees). We mainly got them to help pollinate the garden and to harvest honey from in the fall. Also just for the fun of honeybees.

Building the stantion to milk mocha in.
P.S. She doesn't like to stand on concreate so we can't get her in it!

One on one time with Sandy.

Mocha.

Mocha is released.

Is it safe out there?

Checking out each other.

The finished stantion.

The fun truck ride back to the house.  Why is every body so concerned? >
Hint: Dad

Okay swich the subject now to bees.  I got my honeybees on a Saturday and we blocked the entrance so they
didn't fly around in the car when transporting them to our house.  Then on Sunday morning I took off the mesh stuff
so they could start pollinating.

One of  my bees working in the garden this afternoon.

My beehive.

The glass jars are filled with sugar water that I put on today.

Thanks for swing'n by,
Seth

The sunset.

Eggs For Sale! :)

Hello everyone!
 
Solid Rock Ranch Eggs is in production mode (go hens! ;)!  We have collected an abundance of eggs and, as we were on vacation for a week, have not been able to use them all.  We will be selling them for $3.00 per dozen if anyone is interested.  We can bring them to our church (ccmech.org) this Sunday (3/2/14).  Comment below if you'd like to place an order or if you have any questions.
 
Have a blessed day!

~Seth Wassenberg
SRR Eggs

Catchup

It is nice to have a break from all the farm work every now and then and winter is just the time for that.  On January 2, we processed our nine turkeys but this time we used a new method.  Instead of scalding the turkeys and pulling off the feathers as we have previously did, we skinned them.  Caution!  Contains detailed information that my be unsuitable for some people. ;)  First we killed them (I finally summoned the power to do it for the first time and it was quite fine).  Our cousin was helping us so it was funny since he doesn't live in the country.  After they bled out we took them to the processing table to be skinned and gutted.  First we cut off their head, then we started cutting up their chest from the neck, then we started cutting down to the legs and wings(If you've skinned a deer it is very similar to that), we cut their wings off since the skin is hard to get off of them and dad is the only one who likes them.  Then we cut up their back and cut all the skin off, now it looks more like a turkey from the store, all that is left is to gut (which I won't explain) and clean them and put them in the pink water.  Pink water is just cold water that you put them in after you're done and it turns pink as it draws out the remaining blood.  Next job.  We moved the chickens from the chicken coop over in the field to the coop at the house(I don't now what month we did that but it was sometime near the turkey processing).  Earlier we were getting about ten eggs a day from fifty chickens and now we are getting about three dozen a day which shows that they where laying in the woods.  I feed the chickens and the bunnies since I am already out there, Caleb takes care of Sandy our cow and Josiah gathers the eggs.  We are about to order some baby turkeys, broilers and chickens for this year.  I WILL do a post of them when we get them.  That's all I can think of for today.

Thanks for reading,

Seth

Baby Bunnies

On October 18th our rabbit had six baby bunnies!  If you didn't know we had rabbits, we do.  One rabbit is mine and the other one is supposed to be mom's but it's more like Alexis'.  We had two litters of bunnies (not counting this litter) so far and all of them sold. On our first litter of five, one of our friends was just going to get one or two and ended up buying them all!  You can go here if you would like to purchase one or two or all of this batch.;)  They will be for sale on December 5th!  Excellent Christmas present.  Well, who wants to see some pics!?

The six bunnies!

 Who's there?

Thanks for reading,

Seth

Garden

We planted our fall garden a couple of weeks ago.  We have kale, collards, spinach, lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, and red & green cabbage.  We have a raised bed and mom wanted to have spinach during the winter.  So mom planted  some spinach in the raised bed.  We had a couple of extra pieces of glass from the kitchen addition so we found those and put them on top of the spinach to keep the frost off so we can have spinach for the winter(YEA)!:( Winter is supposed to be a break of salad, spinach, all that other stuff.  Hopefully it will just be enough  for mom and dad! ;)

Hope you are having a wonderful week.

Seth

This is mom's lovely winter garden.

The big garden.

Spinach.

Purple cabbage.

Beets.

Kale.

Broccoli.

Collards.

Lettuce.

Halle

On September 23rd our faithful milk cow Halle died.  She was always gentle unless she was giving you

a friendly head nudge.  She didn't knock over the milk a lot.  She is missed already, and we will probably never get a nicer cow than Halle.  We are out of milk now but will get a cow sometime soon.

Thanks,

Seth

Turkey processing

   

On Monday September 16th we processed our turkeys!  We started by getting our neighbors big crab pot (we have very nice neighbors). We filled the pot with water and heated it up. We only had two turkeys this time so it didn't take too long.  I'll just give you a quick run-through of what we did.  

Josiah and Daddy getting ready

We brought the turkeys over, killed them, dunked them in the hot water, pulled their feathers off, took their feet and heads off, gutted them, put them in cold water, pulled their pin feathers out, and then took them inside. Phew, I got through all of that!!  One turkey we saved for roasting and the other one we cut up and threw in the meat grinder to make turkey sausage.

                                                         I think that covers all of it!

Seth

Our cows.

What to say what to say. Cow are cows- there's not a whole lot of stuff to write about cows.  Well, Halle (short for Hallelujah) is our oldest cow and then we have Sandy (she was born during the hurricane Sandy). Sandy is not yet in milk but will be in 2015.  Halle is our milk cow but she is not giving us very much milk (about 1.5 gallons a day). Caleb and I milk her; Caleb in the mornings and I at night.  Halle had Sandy on October 29th, 2012.  She is part Jersey and part Holstein.  She is very nice if you know how to handle her but otherwise you will be quite afraid when she comes to give you a head nudge!  Our fence doesn't really work so sometimes Sandy wants to get out (and does) so the neighbors come over and tell us. Then Caleb and I go gallivanting all over creation trying to catch her then she walks straight through the fence to get back in!

Well here are some pictures.

Halle and Sandy thought we had food for them.

Holly was eating dirt, I guess it was salty.

Sandy was going to give  Eden a head nudge.

Thank you for reading.
Seth 

Catch up.

It has been a long time since we last posted so we are just going to do a big review of what has happened over the months. 

In April we got five turkeys.  But we currently have two because one of them died, and the other two decided they had had enough of us and ran away.  We will process the ones we have in September I think. 

We also got some chickens.  I think we got twenty five broilers and twenty five hens.  We already processed the broilers.  We also had some friends come over to help us process.  We started around 5:00 P.M. (about two hours late) and finished at 9:00 P.M.(we also did some old hens and mean roosters- they're a lot harder to do than the broilers).  By the end we were pretty tuckered out after four hours of standing! 

Just recently we got fifteen more turkeys and five died so now we have ten.  But they will be smaller than the other two turkeys because they are a different breed or otherwise we would not have enough room in the freezers! 

Just in case y'all didn't know we will not be selling eggs anymore. This blog will now be used for posting about the things that are going on around the ranch not just poultry stuff.

Thanks for reading!

Seth

Processing turkeys and chickens

Sorry we're posting late (seeing as we processed the Turkey's and Chickens for Thanksgiving).   It's not because we're busy but when we have free time we want to read a book or something else :).   So we got started by setting all the stuff up we borrowed a BIG pot from one of our neighbors to scald the birds in. Then we got a couple of tables for pulling off the feathers and gutting. Then we got started processing the turkeys and by the way turkeys are extremely strong because dad got hit in the face.  Then dad scalded them to loosen the feathers and we started to pull away, we also had some friends help, they brought the chickens we processed.  Then Hannah gutted two turkeys, and I gutted the other one.   Hannah gutted the chickens I tried to gut  them but the cavity was too small compared to a turkey.   This is what they weighed dressed and ready.  The first turkey was 43 pounds!  The second turkey was 35 pounds!  The third was 27 pounds!  Here are some pics!

 We ate the 43 pounder for Thanksgiving.

Without the skin look at all that meat. :}

Grandma was pretty excited!              

 The meat was very yummy and juicy!

 Caleb and Seth Wassenberg
Co-owners of SRR Eggs:)

Fox!

We are so sorry we have not posted for a long time.  It has been a little bit busy around here, but now we have time!  We had a fox eat about 60 of our chickens in the last couple of months.  One morning Hannah and Kimber were running and they looked over to the field and saw the fox chasing the chickens around in circles.  So the girls ran into the field and chased  the fox away.  Then they ran to the house and got me and Caleb up.  So we ran to the field to see if we could find it, but we didn't.  Then a month or so later dad went to northern Virgina to work and spent the night at his mom's house.  In the middle of the night mom woke up and heard a high pitch scream.  At first mom thought it was one of her children but it was a fox.  If you want to hear it, click here.  A few weeks later one of our friends was hunting on our property and saw the fox,  and disposed of it.  It had fresh chicken for breakfast but we don't want to explain how we know that. :)   We thought the chickens were safe until we heard the same sound again so we moved the chickens to the coop at our house.Thank you for reading... we will try to post more often. Have a blessed week!

Caleb and Seth Wassenberg
Co-owners of SRR Eggs      

Meet Sandy

Our cow Halle was pregnant and had her calf this morning October 29.  Here is a pic: 

For more updates go to http://solidrockranchupdates.blogspot.com/ 

Caleb and Seth Wassenberg
Co-owners of SRR Eggs

Turkeys at two months & recent addition(s)

In the past two months the turkeys have grown alot! They now look like they might live up to their name- Mammoth Bronze Turkey! They're roaming around in the old pen and are having a great time (especially since the grass has grown back!).  We also were recently given three bantam roosters and put them in the pen with our turkeys. They are so small in comparison! I thought you all might want to see some pictures of them so one of our sisters went out and got some pictures for the blog! 

Here is what the turkeys looked like when we first got them:

Awwww!

So cute...for that time. :)

Here is what they look like now:

Wow, right!

 Big...and ugly. ;)

 If you're wondering what the middle turkey is doing....it is stretching it's wing and right leg. :)

These are the (much smaller) roosters that we were given:

They look so funny...strutting their (lack of) stuff!

 "When the grass is up to your waist...you're small." ;)
They are probably at their full grown size (the roosters) and the turkeys are probably only about 1/2 the size they will be. : 0  Big difference!

 This is a butterfly that my sister just had to take a picture of.

...Also this sunflower that rests in our back-yard...

:)

Other than that we have had a lot of new customers with demands for large amounts of eggs- That is a praise and a prayer request.  Thank the Lord that we have been able to sell what He has provided!  Pray that we will be able to provide more eggs with the same great quality, and that the Lord will show us what we are supposed to do with these new opportunities.  Thank you for reading and have a blessed week!

Caleb and Seth Wassenberg
Co-owners of SRR Eggs