Barnyard changes

I found my spinning wheel. It's an antique Great Wheel, or Walking Wheel. I haven't had time to spin on it though, due to all the Christmas knitting I have been doing.

Also bought my first sheep, a little bottle baby ram lamb. He is sort of spoiled, but hopefully that will keep him nice as he gets bigger. We got rid of the potbelly piglets, and decided to just keep the two adults that we started with. They are lots of fun. We have also decided to get rid of most of the chickens for the winter. Now that the goats are using the hen house, we are unable to put a heat light in there, so they are on strike. We found 2 free Nigerian dwarf goats on Craigslist and they threw in 3 Pekin ducks too. The youngest doe has blue eyes, and I would love to find a blue eyed buck to add to the herd. We lost our oldest doe a few days ago. Seems like constant change in the barnyard.

We have about a quarter inch of ice on the ground now, mixed with a dusting of snow..good time for the seed catalogs to start coming in. Planning on doing some raised beds and container gardening this year. Hopefully it will mean less weeding, and easier gardening all around. For now, I am enjoying deciding what to plant, and have several new things in mind. Not sure where this year went, Christmas is only a short week away. Hope you all enjoy it with those you love.

Piggies!! :)

It's been busy, busy, busy here. Finally got our garden in, now it's a battle to keep up with the weeds
Thanks to a great new friend, we have 2 Potbelly Pigs. One boar and one sow, bought the sow and traded for the boar. And in a few months, we will have piglets too! :)

We have sold/traded all our rabbits except one house pet, so we are now out of the rabbit business completely. They were fun, but so very time consuming. We also traded the billy goat. So we are back to 4 goats, and 2 of those are bred does. And of course all the chickens. Animal control called us this week, and asked Mr Farmer if he wanted a couple geese. DNR rounded up some Canada geese, and got some domestic geese in the process, 2 of which they gave to our friend Jim at the shelter. Mr Farmer of course picked them up, so we now have a total of 6 geese, and 4 ducks.

Spent some time outside this afternoon watching the pigs root, and the goats play, and thanking God for this place, and everyone and everything that lives here. It's a good life.