Chicken Scraps Blog

Antique Lafter Rose I am happy to announce that I am now offering live Lemongrass and antique rose plants on my Etsy shop!  Currently I only have a couple of Lafter roses available, but I am going to try to get around to rooting some Thousand Beauties (a light pink climbing rose) and Rev d'Or (a light yellow climber); possibly also some Old Blush.  These are all antique roses, which means they are old, hardy varieties which are disease resistant and grow on their own roots. I also hope to add mint in the near future. Visit my shop to purchase or for more information! CCShop Live Plants

     So, you have a young heifer, or a cow which has never been milked before, and want her to be your family milk cow. You grab a bucket and head out to the barn to do some milking, and, lo and behold! she kicks you over and tries to break out of the stanchion the second you touch her udder.  What went wrong?

Well...  here I am making apologies again.  You can tell when I am staying busy farming, and when I am just writing about being busy, because when I'm truly busy, I don't post on my blogs!  Anyway, thankfully I usually have my phone on me and take lots of pictures, so these will give some idea of what we've been up to.  Enjoy! March and April were filled with: Trying to get good advertising pictures of Buttercup (so we could sell her heifer.) Spending time with younger siblings.

For those who are interested, here is a pictorial, high-speed description of the month of February. I got to experience what having a pack of four high-energy dogs is like when I "puppysat" a couple of my sister-in-law's Aussies. (They are great dogs!   palacepupsaussies.weebly.com )

Hi Everyone! Sorry I have been away from blogging for so long.  It seems like over the course of the last few months I've been so busy doing  things that I haven't had time to write about all I've been doing.  Well, it's good to stay busy, but it is also good to keep up with my blogs, so this week I have tried to focus on sewing and computer work.  So far, this is the first computer work I've done, except for a little writing on my current book, but hopefully I will be able to pile quite a few more languishing computer projects into the next few days. If you have subscribed to my newsletter, you are already aware of what has been going on in our lives; it's been a lot!  Two siblings have been married, two calves have been born, one goat is due to kid soon, and Cleone is ready to be bred for her first litter of puppies, to name a few!  If you are not subscribed to the newsletter, you can sign up now via the form on the right hand side of this blog. ...

We are offering our very nice naturally polled Jersey bull for sale or stud. He is from Shepherd's Hill Farm's closed milking herd of Jerseys from registered lines.  Almost all of their cows are A2/A2 and excellent milkers.  Barbacoa is a great bull; calm, medium sized, well built, polled, and a great example of a Jersey. I have A2/A2 test results in hand, and will be happy to email them upon request. Stud fee will be $50 per cow, if she does not need to stay overnight or be milked by me.  If she stays overnight or needs milking/ other special care, we will discuss further terms. Contact me at 352-745-3576  by call or text for more info, or send me an email at chickenscrapsblog@gmail.com This is one of his calves; our beautiful heifer, Bayberry.  She is polled and A2/A2, from our horned, A1/A2 cow, Blossom.  (Blossom is horned, but carries a recessive polled gene.)

In breeding Border collies, my first goal is to produce quality puppies, rather than quantity.  Thus I chose my two dogs from reputable breeders who breed healthy working dogs.  To make entirely sure though that Cleone and Duncan are free from the dreaded collie eye anomaly , I sent in blood samples last week to a lab in Tallahassee. Today I got the test results and they are both normal, non-carriers! To view results, click here .