What's Been Going On Around The Homestead Lately? Farm Vlog!

Good morning. Welcome to today's vlog. This morning I decided that it was going to be a good day to vlog and I've also been wanting to show you guys some stuff that's been going on on the homestead, just kind of take you around and give you a little homesteading update. We have new animals, we've moved animals to different places, so I'm excited to take you guys around and then also just take you through our day a little bit and show you what I do as a homesteading mama of two, almost three. I am 38 weeks pregnant with our third child, so let's get right into this video. Sophia just finished picking up the living room. It's normally her chore in the morning to pick up her toys and the laundry and the shoes that accumulated from the day before. Sophia, do you like cleaning? Yeah. You did a real good job. Yeah, thank you for helping me. It looks really great in here. She keeps all her toys in this bin under the table. She's a big helper. Now we're ready to start the day. We just got a couple new kittens. These are some sweet little gray female kittens. We got two new gray kittens and then we're also keeping these little tabby kittens over here, but Luke really loves gray cats and these were free, so we decided that since we're out in the country now and unfortunately cats just get taken by predators a lot easier, we have currently five cats now. But honestly, for barn cats, that's not all that many. Over the weekend, we actually got two new sheep, which I'm really excited about, because one of them is, I think she's about four years old. She came with her new lamb who's a little less than a year old. So we got them both for a hundred bucks, which is a really great deal for Barbados sheep. But I'm really excited because the older one is really tame. I think she was bottle fed as a baby. She just seems like really, really tame. So I'm excited to have them bond with our three other sheep. The cats are fighting. Have them bond with our three other sheep that are really wild and young still, and then when we need to get the sheep off the big pasture, we can call Penny, who's the older mama, and all of them will come. So that will be really nice. So I'm really excited to have some more sheep. Now we have five total Barbados ewes. Right now, they're just in our yard because we're just getting them used to us. And then we're going to put them with our three other ewes soon. Luke's been hard at work on our firewood stash for the winter. So the bottom part was a load he got the first time. It was like $35 a truckload or something. And then the top part is posts that we get from a local place called Frontier Posts. This is just like the posts that were too warped or too knotty or something to make into fence posts. So they're untreated. They didn't go through the treatment process, which is really important for firewood. So then they sell them at a really discounted price. And just the fact that he doesn't have to go off up into the mountains and spend all the time cutting the wood or cutting the trees down, it's worth it to spend a little bit on truckloads of wood and bring it here. Especially this stuff is already in the perfect size round, so there's no splitting involved. So we're really excited about this. And isn't that cool how that wall of wood looks? We also have this big stack over here that he'll be cutting up soon. But just in the process of gathering all our firewood for the winter, it's feeling nice to have more and more of it here and prepared. Over here is the stash of kindling that we have so far. He just gets this from a local woodworking shop or cabinet maker. Just they're extra pieces of small hardwood. These are just their scraps that they throw in a big pile and they're free. So you can just come and take as many as you want and then he'll just cut them into size that will fit in these buckets and it makes perfect kindling. Over here is our chicken yard. We have them on this spot to kind of tear up their ground in this area because this will be our garden next year. So we're having them kill off this grass. So we have all of our laying hens. We have our silky chicks and the chicks we hatched. And then all the bigger ones and the ones I can tell are roosters we've already put out with our hens and they're doing great. You can see they can get through the electric netting but they don't wander far and they seem to be doing really good. So I just want to keep the silkies and the hens protected a little bit longer because I mean silkies are a more fragile breed and they're doing fine in that little cage. There's Tweeble Dee over there. He's our little bantam rooster. He is the funniest thing ever. Here's our funny little silky roosters. Sophia's getting really good at catching these chicks. Did you get a baby? Here's our rooster area. A bunch of people dropped off free roosters that they don't want to butcher themselves but they don't. Maybe they're in town and can't keep them. Different situations like that. So we take all the free roosters and then in a couple months all these will be butchered and go in the freezer. But I've actually been really surprised how well all these guys get along. There's not been a terrible amount of fighting with the amount of roosters in here. We have about 57 right now I think. So that will be a nice amount of chicken for the year and they were all free plus helping people out who just need to get rid of some roosters. But they're probably so mild because they do have five acres to roam and they're also not by our hens so there's not the competition of wanting to mate with hens. So they're in the same pasture as our other three sheep. You can see the three ewes that we got first. They're way over there and there's a couple roosters that always like to hang out with those sheep. They're like best buds. So now that all the animals have been checked on for the day we're just sitting here on the back porch. This is kind of a favorite hangout area for me and the kids. They just run around and play. They'll go out and play in the grass, find sticks and stuff and bring it back to me on the porch and we can spend hours out here and they're just really good at entertaining themselves when we're outside. They're a lot less naughty you could say when we're outside versus inside because they don't get bored as fast probably. Luke's brother and sister-in-law are grazing our steers in our pasture. So these guys got brought over last weekend and it's been so fun to see cows out in the pasture. So there's this one right here is bear and that one is gray. Just two steers and they have this whole side pasture right here. The guys went around the border and added an electric strand so they didn't start rubbing on the fence. And there's their water and mineral and they seem to be pretty happy. They're very interested in our new sheep so that's been funny to watch.