The weather is cooler, our days are fuller (soccer, school, church…), but the chores go on as usual. And we still have piles of mucky, muddy, wet laundry and dirty boots every day. {smile} We’ve gone back and forth between the kiddos doing the chores, Mr. Fix-It and I doing the chores to lighten their load with the school adjustments, and now a hybrid of Mr. Fix-It doing morning chores with them and me doing afternoon chores with them.

We’re also moving into harvest season, so the chore load is adjusting accordingly. We’ve butchered all our meat chickens for the year, and we’re selling some of the freebie chicks we ended up with this year, so our numbers to be fed and watered daily are dwindling. We’ll be consolidating chicken pens soon. The chicks from the spring are big enough to hold their own with the old ladies. {smile} So that will reduce the chores even more.

And since the grass finally showed up this year, it’s still going strong. I see at least another month before we need to feed hay out there, once the lambs are harvested next week. We’ll be sending off the bull calves to be process this year as well. That will mean a few less mouths to graze and that Molly will be able to put weight on easier again. She’s been nursing that big bull calf all summer. I’ll feel better with her having another month of grass to put a few pounds back on before winter sets in for good.

We don’t usually wean our cows because, well, it’s a big pain. Our ewes will self wean their lambs at about 5 months, or we can wean them and the separating headache lasts about 3 days, then it’s over. The ewes won’t take the lambs back and the lambs are over it again. The cows are completely different. They never self-wean. We’ll have Molly crashing through and over fences, the calves cry and cry and cry and cry, and even after being separated for a month, we’ve had them go straight back to nursing until the momma is raw. We’ve had a two-year-old bull try to go back and nurse his momma. The only reason he didn’t was because she had a new calf. Ugh! So we usually just leave the calf with their momma until they are “harvested” or she has another calf and finally kicks them out.

The Pixie, of course, is still here with the family and doing fine. She’s living in the backyard, hanging out with the dog on the porch, and sleeping in a cat crate. {smile} Her feathers have all come back and her wing seems healed, no swelling, no mis-shape. She just doesn’t seem inclined to fly anywhere. You can see in these pictures from before and after that her tail feathers have all grown back. And apparently she’s found herself a friend. That black pullet started hanging around Pixie’s backyard pen because we give out so many treats back there. one day when the Pixie was out and we put her back for the night, the black was in there too. Now they’re buddies and hang out together all the time. The black is not as friendly (except to Pixie) but she’s becoming more tolerate. Since she lives 4 steps from our back porch, that’s probably a good thing.

How are things around your place now that Fall is here? We choose not to do Halloween as a family, but we surely do all things pumpkins and apples and red and gold leaves! {smile} Did you get our September newsletter a few weeks ago? It was full of yummy pumpkin recipes! We’ll be sharing all things apples in the October issue next week, so be sure to sign up! I’ll be sharing my super-easy, homemade and healthy crock-pot applesauce–which the crew just raves about! (And you know if I do it very often, it must be quick, easy, and impossible to mess up!)

See where I’m sharing this week…