Posts Tagged ‘feeder’

A while back we adapted our rabbit tractors for winter use. Read about those changes here and here. Elevating the tractors increased the occurence of what had previously been a minor issue: the rabbits flipping their feed dishes and spilling all the feed. When that happened and the tractors were on the ground, it was […]

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This fall we’re experimenting with a rabbit colony setup. This experiment is ongoing, so we cannot yet say whether or not it’s successful. One nice characteristic of the colony, though, is that we can quickly feed and water several rabbits at the same time. To feed the rabbits, we made a rabbit feeder comparable to […]

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With so many animals and only two farmers, we are constantly looking for ways to be more efficient with our farm tasks. Efficiencies in daily tasks such as feeding and watering pay huge dividends. A customer recently shared a poultry feeder design that we’ve implemented with great success! Here are a couple links (Link 1, […]

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Along with much of the East Coast, we just endured a record-breaking snowstorm. When you live on a homestead with livestock, weather is a big deal. The livestock need to be cared for every day, and that means getting to them, and making sure they can get around, no matter what the weather. As we […]

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Our herd of American Guinea Hogs enjoy foraging in the woods. This video is an example of some of our younger hogs rooting through the woods. This foraging and rotation through the woods gives the hogs a very healthy mix of food and avoids health problems found in commercial hog operations. The difference in the […]

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We started our first chicks with the typical feed setup: dry conventional feed in a basic plastic chick feeder.  Within weeks, though, we knew the basic setup wasn’t ideal.  We quickly switched to organic feed, and currently get our feed from Countryside Organics.  In the near future we plan on making our own custom feed […]

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It had been a little over two weeks since our last full inspection of the hives. We didn’t feel we had to do a full inspection since there’s been lots of activity in both hives, but we did want to make sure they had ample space to expand comb if needed.

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The chicks have been growing incredibly fast! The cardboard nesting box we built for them was once spacious and luxurious for the little chicks, now these little hens are all bunched up and nearly able to jump over the walls when we take the top off to replace their food and water. Luckily for them, spring has come to Northern Virginia early this year! We’ve had many warm days so have taken the chicks into our yard to explore the new surroundings, under strict supervision of course.

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Our chicks are now approximately five and three weeks old (if you recall we have two varieties: Araucanas and Golden Comets). We recently made another trip to the local feed store to get some more chick food. The twenty-five pound bag we purchased when we bought the chicks is almost all gone already, so we purchased another three twenty-five pound bags of non-medicated chick food. This should last them until they are ready to go outside and eat “layer” feed.

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Its now been about three weeks since we first installed our bees and I wanted to share with you how they are doing. We were a little apprehensive after first getting them installed because we went on vacation for a week three days after installing them and worried something might happen while we were gone […]

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Being new to beekeeping, the most sure fire way to get bees for our hives was to order packages of bees from a bee supplier. Some people order them through the mail, we were fortunate to have a local beekeeping supply company near us in Northern Virginia called Virginia Bee Supply. They bring packages of […]

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