Heat Wave

Apparently, the area got a drenching a couple of weekends ago when we were in Philadelphia, but since then there has not been a drop of rain and the temperatures have been warm. This may mean that I actually can take a whole week off from mowing the lawn! Yay! Sometimes I feel the only things I do on the farm are feed the animals, fill water buckets, pick and then pickle cucumbers and...mow the lawn! Oh, and weeding. When in doubt, there is always weeding to do.

The chickens I think are feeling the heat. And they're going through a huge molting as well. Which means we are really not getting any eggs--maybe 2 a day if we're lucky. For most households, this is not necessarily a problem but the 8 year old loves, loves, LOVES french toast which requires eggs, zucchini bread uses eggs, blueberry muffins require eggs, and mayonnaise requires eggs. My darling husband is ready to dispatch the hens (this is their second year) but I'm hoping they start picking up the pace and make it through until next fall. Obviously, we will be getting a new batch of chicks in the spring to replace these current non-laying layers (keep your mind out of the gutter).

The pigs are eating us out of house and home. Each pig eats about 50lbs of grain per week in addition to any and all garden scrap, restaurant scrap, weed scrap that we have around. We also use a 50 gallon water tank for them which they prefer to stick half their bodies in when they drink, thus getting it dirty pretty quickly. I totally understand the advent of the "pig waterer" but we obviously haven't moved in that direction. So we will continue spending 20 minutes a day cleaning out and filling the water tank as well as spraying the pigs with water (which a couple of them love) and making mud pits for them to wallow in (which all of them love). I'm hoping that in the next month or so they will put on those final 75 pounds so we can ship them off.