I thought I would round up a little blog post introducing all of our animals to you! Also, so that I can look back and see where we were at in Fall of 2022.
3 LITTLE PIGS
First up- we have our 3 little pigs. Their names are Fruitcake, Poundcake and Cupcake. One of these will become bacon, probably in the Spring. The other two will be kept to breed and we will hopefully have some piglets in the Spring as well! I am unsure if we plan to raise all the piglets, or if we will sell the piglets and just continue to raise a cycle of 3. 3 pigs is a very nice number. They live out in a rotating paddock in our field. They are fairly low maintenance except for the work to move their paddock every 10-12 days and be fed twice a day. They are VERY high maintenance if they get out of their paddock and have to be coaxed back in!
FLOCK OF CHICKENS
Next up is our flock of chickens! We started out with 32 hens, then we got one rooster. Unfortunately, we are down to 20 hens and the rooster. Mostly our hens have been picked off by a hawk, but we lost six in one day to completely unknown causes…they were just gone. The chickens are very low maintenance as we just let them free range around our property. They are fed twice a day and have yet to produce any eggs for us. Or perhaps they have, and we just haven’t found the spot! None of the chickens have names except our rooster who is named Kindess. He’s only so-so at living up to his name.
JOY THE BUNNY
Joy the bunny was Tera’s 8th birthday present. She is so sweet and snuggly! Bunnies don’t always smell great, but since Joy lives out in the chicken coop, we don’t have to deal with her smell at all! Having a bunny has been so fun and the snuggles are wonderful!
PEACE
Peace is our puppy and will become the working guard dog for our animals. The benefits of getting a puppy is that we get to raise her up living on our land and therefore she gets to know her territory and her people. The downside to getting a puppy is that you have to train them. I will admit we are probably not dedicating as much time to her as we should be. But we are working on it! She’s a Great Pyrenees and will probably be somewhere around 80-90 pounds full grown.
PATIENCE
Patience is our sweet indoor cat that we have moved with three times now. Patience is the most Patient cat in the world. She is truly the best, but only likes to snuggle with Theo (who does not like to snuggle with her). She has become slightly less tolerant of her humans ever since we moved here and started to bring so many animals around. She’s also our only indoor animal and constantly wishes she was an outside one. Don’t tell anyone, but Patience is my favorite of all our animals.
THE KITTENS
Last but not least is our temporary animals, the kittens. They have affectionately been named Dandelion, Tiger Lily, Black Susan and Milkweed. They are SO CUTE and sweet and have also been work that all of the other animals combined times 1000. SO HIGH MAINTENANCE. I’ll write a different blog post all about what it has been like to take care of these kittens, but let’s just say that it has not been easy or convenient! We are debating how many of these we will keep around as barn cats, but if anyone local wants a kitten- please let me know!
And those are our animals so far! I wonder what our homestead will look like in a year? Probably very different! Is it overwhelming sometimes to have this many animals? Yes, yes it is. Did we take the hard route by adding alllllll these animals at one time? Yes, yes we did. But are we learning a lot and finding the many benefits of being animal owners? Also, yes! Our future plans include no other additional animals, but we would like to add some meat chickens to our homestead next spring. Otherwise, I hope that we are just sticking with this for now!