The Chicks & Ducklings have arrived!

Our first chicks & ducklings have arrived! We have 25 Buff Orpington chicks (straight run - hopefully we'll have more hens than roosters - and 20 White Pekin ducks. It looks like a couple of the ducks may be "crested" - a few of them have what looks like little cotton-ball caps on their heads. The ducks scamper around constantly - eating, drinking, and running. They are really amusing to watch. The chicks are happier sleeping most of the time. We've had them for 3 days and no casualties ... yet....










The ducks are so cute, we have to keep reminding ourselves that most of them will end up on a dinner plate in a couple of months.

Sausage Making

A couple of weekends ago we went out to Manuel Lebeck's place where he and Roy & Josh Wisnoski were making sausage out of deer meat and wild hog (not sure where that came from). Anyway, you could do just about anything in that shop - weld, work on your tractor, sit by a blazing fire, or do any kind of food preparation in the fully outfitted meat processing kitchen. I got there too late to take pics of the grinding and stuffing process. But I do have a couple of pics of the 300 pounds of sausage hanging in the smoke house.

That's Manuel on the left and Josh on the right. Manuel fired up the grill and cooked us a link and it was really good. Since then we've had the smoked version and it's good too. The other pic shows the "men folk" in the shop.