Settling in.

What a start to a new year!  We made the move to Battle Ground, mostly at least...

It was a pretty crazy move.  First of all, while moving TO a farm is exciting, moving FROM one is a nightmare.  Moving fences and taking down coops and figuring out how to move animals, and all that farmy business was insane.

I put over 100 hours in going up and down from the Olympic peninsula to Battle Ground and Portland.  We had our stuff spread out between 4 homes and 2 states for most of December and January.  I can't thank our families and friends enough who helped make it all happen again.  Patrick Kligel is an amazing friend and let me have his car trailer full of my stuff for 2 months...Matthew helping me load up in Sequim and Mom, Tim, Kyle, Jesse, Shamus, Chuck and Lori for helping us move in, My Dad and Shamus for helping me tear out blackberries and fix up the barn for moving in our flock...the Moberly's for taking on housing Laird and Sharon between Christmas and the move day...so many others who helped out in so many ways, THANK YOU ALL!

Some of the challenges we faced were daunting and frustrating, but in the end we are here.  A raccoon found our ducks 2 weeks before we left and got 3 of our ducks and of course 2 were females, which is so frustrating because of our hopes to be breeding them down here.  Radar and I had him cornered and I shot him with a crossbow bolt, but holding a spotlight and shooting turned out more difficult than one may expect.  I shot at him five times over 3 different encounters, and i think I got him with one shot but never found him.  So now poor brownie has 4 males after her all the time.  I am looking for some replacement full grown females now and we have ten or so eggs in the hatcher, and it looks like we have some babies growing when we candle them!  So that part is exciting!

Right before we left Sequim, the Avian Bird Flu started hitting Washington. Luckily, I had the ducks and breeding chickens(my show jerseys, and show silkies) in an enclosed space because of the bastard raccoon.  So they were away from the crick and funny enough the wild male Mallard who liked to hang with them had left for awhile(Mallards were the main carriers).  I realized I had better keep everyone away from him and kept Radar chasing him away when he started to come back looking for his buddies.  I guess it all happened for a reason.






Sterling and I worked on cutting away the blackberries from an old stall that had become overrun. Then Shamus and I made a big pile that is almost ready to burn. It seems like I have been revamping old farm structures for 2 years...oh wait, I have been!







The new barn is awesome.  It has 5 stalls and a tack room, and in desperate need of some TLC.  It is next on the list, a little paint and some siding and gutter repair is in order, but it doesn't leak and the electricity and water works, so thats huge!

The house sits on the top of a hill overlooking the 5 acres of pasture and barn, so when we get the birds in their new digs and the lower 3 acre pasture rented out to some horse people, we will have quite a nice little view from our back porch!

The list goes on and on, but priority is to get the birds in their new spaces so I can open up a couple stalls and the lower 3 acre pasture to rent to horse folks.  The ducks will have a pond soon and the chickens will have a pasture that will be divided up for rotating them on.  We will turn part of the upper pasture into food and part into flowers.  I just bought 4 trees for a mini orchard, I imagine there will be more soon...As for additional Livestock, I will put the goat fencing up that we had for the llamas...remember them...for either a couple of Kune Kune pigs or a goat or 2, realistically that's probably not until next season, or late this one.  We will focus more on turkeys meat chickens and meat quails this season.  We had sucess last year with them so we will build off that in the new season!

In the meantime, I am the stay at home Daddy, Sharon's the worker bee, Laird's my "helper" and Sterling is in school.  Sterling's transition went well and he seems to like school although I can tell he isn't very challenged by any of it.  We will be looking to get him in some after school activities as we settle in a bit more. We are definitely looking forward to Spring, the rain has made things a bit muddy by the barn and slopping in duck and chicken poo/mud is fairly low on my "things I enjoy doing" scale.









The farm will come along, as it does. The flowers, fruits and children will grow, the Daddy will get tired, the Mommy will sparkle with joy and life will be good.   Come on up, bring some beers.  The Rowland family farm is rolling along.

Much love,
The Rowland's