June 30, 2022 – We entered into June preparing to harvest from our spring planting and growing. We were keeping our turkeys and new layers in the garage. After work John went in to check on them and feed them. He picked up the feed scoop out of a box low and behold, there was a copperhead just lying there.  He had a moment of chills run down his spine as the hair on his arms stood up. He regained his composure, placed a screen over the box, and moved it outside where he dispatched the venomous snake.

On June 8th we were supposed to butcher the 65 meat chickens we had been raising for the past 12 weeks (we lost 10 of them early on). We moved them and the electric netting closer to the house and garden in preparation, but by the time we were done with the move, we were too tired to butcher so we decided to delay it one day.

The next morning John heard chickens in the front yard. This was baffling. Why are there chickens in the front yard? John went outside and realized it was some of the meat chickens. He quickly went to the pen and found only 10 chickens still inside. But a large portion of the fence was knocked down. As he looked around, he could see dead chickens all over the pasture. Shock and awe! He yelled for Katie and she came out to help. She too was awe struck. Our hearts sank. We began combing the pasture and found 10 alive but the other 45 were dead. We had already made arrangements to sell most of these chickens ($700 worth) and it just made us sick. Our egg layers and turkeys were fine, that was a relief. We are kicking ourselves for wanting to delay 1 day. We collected up the dead chickens and loaded them into the tractor bucket.  Katie buried them in quite a bit of decomposing mulch in order to compost them. $700.00 compost. Wow! We are not certain, but we think this was the work of a few raccoons.

We decided to order another batch of meat chickens. We went back to the Cornish Crosses instead of the Big Red Broilers. The red chickens just did not grow as well as we thought they would. This time we only ordered 25 chicks (not 75 like last time). We think we timed it right so the meat chickens will be ready to process at the same time as the turkeys.

As the month rolled on, the apples were growing and the orchard looked fantastic. This is the real reason for the farm – we are building an apple orchard!

The last thing we did in June was to build and fill two more raised beds for the garden using pallets John picked up at work. The temperature is making it difficult to spend much time outside working so we stacked the remainder of the pallets and decided to hold off until it cools down before we build more beds.