Self-taught farmers confidently raising chickens, ducks, geese, and pigs. Our focus is on practices that are environmentally harmonious and respectful to our livestock. We appreciate the beauty around us, clean eating, fermenting, and responsibly utilizing the bounty of the land. If you like thinking for yourself, continuous learning, and connecting with the homesteader lifestyle, check us out.
One morning, as I filled one of several five gallon buckets for the geese, I noticed a sunflower seed spinning around and around in the eddy created by the water. We feed black oil sunflower seeds as treats to the poultry, so seeing one in a bucket is not usually cause for alarm. Until you realize that it’s not a seed at all.
Continue reading “Around the Farm: Who’s Looking at Whom?”
What’s Halloween without spiders? Certainly, bats, witches, ghosts, and all manner of ghouls are heavily featured in the day’s imagery, but spiders are right there, too. Despite the widespread biases against spiders, they are beautiful and fascinating creatures, worthy of respect and appreciation. We’re lucky to have a great variety of spiders on the farm, like those you’ll see in this post.
Continue reading “Around The Farm: Spooktacular Spiders”
The spiders here run the gamut from large to small. This particular orb weaver is tiny…so tiny that, to the naked eye, she looks like a speck. I’d noticed this line of objects atop the rooster tractor and when I looked very closely, saw that the diminutive arachnid was perched in the middle of the line. Do you see her?
It’s orb weaver time of year. Throughout the pastures, the industrious creatures have been at work, draping their webs between stalks of grass. Wet with morning dew, they’re stunning to behold. I try my best to avoid damaging those webs as I move through, but, sometimes, a spider will decide to make a web in a place where it can’t be – like atop the wire “cage” that secures the ramp from the chicken coop – and I have to ruin the spider’s masterpiece.
Continue reading “Haiku: Obstinate Orb Weaver”
This unusual beauty is a Spined Micrathena. She sits in her daily-spun web, right outside the window.
Continue reading “Haiku: Mesmerizing Micrathena”
I was walking in the pastures on a dewy morning (as they frequently are), when I noticed a small butterfly – a copper – struggling to fly out of the wet grass. I was reaching toward it to try to relocate it to higher (drier) ground, when I saw something larger move in the grass nearby. It was dark and I only caught a brief glimpse: a frog?
As I took a closer look at the area where the probable “frog” had gone into the grass, I realized it was definitely not a frog – it was a large spider! She hid from me, just wanting to keep her babies safe, so I quickly took a couple of photos and then left her in peace. What a good mother, toting all those spiderlings around. And what a rare treat to have witnessed her with her special passengers.
Learn more about amazing wolf spiders here.