Monday, December 5, 2011

Our first duck eggs~

We are getting between 5-8 eggs every morning.

The brown egg is a regular sized chicken egg (from a friend)...you can see that it is pretty close in size to the duck-pullet eggs on the left of the photo. The large egg on top, is actually about full size for a duck egg! So, one of our girls is laying full size eggs already! =)

Still life~ Duck Eggs.
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(Pleas, with the egg basket that his oldest sister gave us- thanks Bess!)
Pleas, decided that fresh eggs are the way to go...he collects the eggs, brings them in cleans 2 and cooks them for breakfast (ducks lay their eggs very early in the morning). He does not want to eat "old" eggs again! (In order to take this photo with so many eggs in it, I persuaded him to eat chicken eggs for just one morning...he did, and said "YUCK"! We've been buying fresh chicken eggs from friends, but they just don't compare!

We've kept chickens for eggs before, three different flocks through the years. We decided we'd try ducks this time and raised them from ducklings. That was a first, we'd always bought young laying chickens.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

The blessings of rain!

You know that we have been under quite a drought this year...some say the first year of a 10-year drought. We hope not!

We have received several nice rains over the past couple of months, but nothing to write home about.

Until this rain, that started yesterday. Our ground was still pretty damp from the last rain, and from the time of the rain starting yesterday afternoon 'till this morning, we received 3 inches, and our rain barrel* is full and over-flowing out the overflow pipe and out to our very dry pond!

Now, to figure out how to get the water in the yard into the pond....

It has been raining steadily...with more in the the forecast! God is so good!=)


*We got our 2500 gallon rain barrel last February/March, and it filled up one time this year (but did not overflow), in the spring. But because of the drought, it did not last very long, the Blueberries drank it all up!

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A side note: Our ducks were having SO much fun in the rain last night, they did not want to go to bed (bad children!). Dad found them around 10 o'clock, and I helped him chase them around in the chilly, dark night. (We did get them to go to bed...)