Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

Sunday: for many a day of rest!! Not so when you run a smallholding. Not that we are complaining... We have mentioned before how crucial it is to spend time watching your livestock to make sure all is okay and this afternoon we had the delight of watching our six dairy kids have a mad half hour climbing and leaping and jumping on and off their platforms. We keep re-arranging the platforms for the kids, which is the equivalent of buying a human child a new game for their iPad! They love it!!! The pygmy kids also had a mad leaping about session and dear Silver Birch and Chestnut then crashed out on one of their indoor shelves for a major snooze! Silver Birch looks so lady-like in this photo don't you think??
It has been a highly productive and enjoyable weekend and we have ticked off a lot of essential and not-so-essential jobs. First 'job' today was to check our ducklings and we were delighted to count FIFTEEN in total, all looking great. There are still four eggs left; we will leave these with mum one more day just in case any are still going to hatch - probably unlikely now but worth an extra day. This evening we moved Pear and her ducklings to a small house in the top paddock as it will be a bit quieter for them up there with just our young turkeys and chicks around. We had begun to think the main poultry area may be a bit too much for them, with so many larger birds around (not to mention the alpacas...).
We have had no luck at all with our Indian Game broodies who despite being given eggs to sit on in the barn, decided they were weren't broody anymore and wandered off. Said eggs (12 bought-in Legbar eggs) have now been set in an incubator and our hope is that when they hatch we may have a broody chicken or two who will be happy to 'become their mum'... We have also had no luck with our goose eggs, set in the incubator over two weeks ago, two 'burst' possibly due to dirt on the outside leading to nasty bacteria growing on the inside. Each time we removed the bad egg, cleaned and disinfected the whole incubator, but the remaining five eggs never started to grow. A real shame but we hope to get more goose eggs soon.
Other ticks on our 'to do' list have included: trimming the pygmy goat hooves: putting the onions we pulled on 21st May into our garage to dry: washing the goat decking; raking the poultry paddock; giving the dairy and pygmy goat stalls and the barn poultry stalls a complete clean (our compost heap is now VERY big again) AND worming the alpacas (we had a slightly higher than normal egg faecal count so our vet advised another five-day course of worming solution).
Lots more hatching due this coming week: our Orpington chickens, more ducks and some of our own cross-breed chickens... the camera and video are at the ready!!