The Farm in December

The first really cold weather of the year hit this week here in southern Indiana. I've been spending a lot of time holed up by the wood stove, and the animals have been hunkering down too. Our five most well-behaved cats stay inside with us most of the time these days, but everyone else has a den of some sort. Bruce and I have been fussing over animal shelters all month, and this week was our opportunity to test and fine-tune the efficacy of our winter shelters.



Goats, chickens, peacocks, and our lone guinea all live together in the goat shed with a heat lamp in very cold weather. I was concerned about how these very different creatures would co-exist-- the peacocks are belligerent, the chickens are totally out of it, the guinea is relentlessly aggressive, and the goats love to butt things with their heads. But they're all doing amazingly well together, and it's one of my favorite things to stand in the goat shed, drink a beer, and visit with everyone while they're roosting and curling up in the straw for the night.

As we work toward getting the animals used to bedding down for the night in the shelters we've made for them, our mother hen, Puff, has posed the biggest problem:



In addition to the chicks Puff hatched this fall, we have 13 chicks we incubated in early November:



The chicks all need a low heat lamp, so I was hoping to bed them down together in our little playhouse brooder at night. But Puff is a good mama, and is going to make sure her chicks are warm no matter what. She sometimes flies at the older chicks, clucking angrily, and chases them out of the brooder. I will find her sitting happily on the roost, her chicks peeking out from under her wings, while the 13 older chicks peep woefully in a cluster outside the door. Just when I started getting really sick of chasing them all back into the brooder and shutting them in with Puff and her wrath, they all seemed to reach some kind of agreement.

Cloud Dragon watches them hungrily during the day.



The new baby lionhead bunnies are just beginning to emerge from their fur-lined nest and hop around the rabbit hutch. This is Silkie, the loveliest and softest of them:



Their hutch is in the greenhouse for the winter, and they seem happy and warm. Pennyroyal is growing thick on the ground in there, so it smells nice and sweet and green.



I worry more about our boy rabbit, Mopsy, who is spending the winter in the enclosed hutch by the toolshed:



We keep lots of straw in the hutch with Mopsy so he can make a warm burrow.

I am getting really excited about the possibility of breeding lionhead rabbits. We have lucked into a beautiful, healthy breeding pair, and the three babies are gorgeous. I think these rabbits will make great pets.

The ducks are out and about all day, splashing in the creek and sometimes dripping icicles from their wings. They are ecstatically happy every day, same as usual:



At night they know to bed down in the duck house we made for them, and they are still laying their pretty blue eggs there. I have noticed an increase in chicken eggs, as well, since we began using the heat lamp at night.



I am finding it hard to keep up with the farm work as it get colder. Getting fresh water to all the animals in freezing weather is a lot of work, and the daylight is already gone by the time Bruce returns from work. But it is worth it to have so much life around me at a time of year when everything seems dead or dormant. And solstice is right around the corner!