Autumn Equinox Summary 2026

Family and Friends

This summer we hosted my mom and her partner from Cape Breton Island, as well as our friends, Lin and Meghan, who came all the way from Ontario. Both sets of guests could only stay one night but we had food and games and lots of hugs and hopefully we'll see them again soon.

Critter Status Updates

Freddy seems to be going a good job as head rooster and I hope he will be able to train an apprentice from the new chicks, but he may be too young for that responsibility. Kelly's still recuperating from the second blowfly attack. She's outside this week, but in the mobile coop to prevent the other chickens from pecking at her. Once her feathers cover her butt properly I'll move her into the barn with the rest. One of the Triplets was stepped on by one of the goats during an early morning shoving match.and has a sprained ankle to show for it.  It isn't turning weird colours and nothing is pointed the wrong way. It's just slightly swollen. She prefers to baby it but will use it to limp across the yard so I'm pretty sure it isn't broken and just needs time to rest. I'm very grateful it isn't worse. There's always births and deaths on a farm. This season had only a few. The six young chickens were probably kept separate for far too long (due to the goat shuffling issues) and are having a hard time merging with the main flock. There is progress on that front and they shouldn't have any issues snuggling up for warmth this winter.  Two of the young chickens are looking rooster-y (the white one, and one of the brown ones). I still haven't named them yet because I'm waiting to be sure, but if we do keep one of the roosters, it'll likely be the brown one for variety's sake. Jennifer had her usual explosion of feathers to kick off her molt this year and is starting to look less miserable as her feathers are on their way back in.

We said goodbye to Isabella this season. She was one of our original hens so we don't know her age but she was well into "hen-o-pause" so she wasn't young. While she hadn't laid eggs in a long time, she was a great Top Hen and ruled the coop well without any serious challengers, so it was a shock when I found her dead on the coop floor from an apparent heart attack. These things are sad but they just happen sometimes. I'm glad we could give her a good life and it will be interesting to see who emerges as the new Top Hen. Goats:   At the end of August we did finally get the four spare male goats sold. The two older boys from Honey last year, and the two we weren't keeping from Star's litter this year, all went to a butcher up in the Annapolis Valley area. The clock was really ticking on the younger goats and I did NOT want to pay to have them castrated just to sell them three months later. There was also a ticking clock on one of Honey's boys. His horn had grown in so twisted from that botched dehorning that it was starting to press on his eyebrow. Transporting all four of them in the back of the car for 3 hours was not ideal but thankfully, the next time we make that trip, there won't be full sized goats so we can comfortably fit the younger goats in the very back without putting the seats down. It'll keep them safer too because they won't have room to walk around and stumble. The place we sold them to was Oulton's Meats. They're an "Agri-zoo" as well as a butcher shop. I had a hell of a time finding someone to butcher these goats, so I decided to be okay with the fact that Oulton's doesn't do the I-pay-you-for-the-work-and-get-the-meat-back style deals. We were taking the goats in for a you-pay-me-for-the-goats (based on their weight and age) type deal.  I was desperate and a newbie, but they didn't mess me around at all. Although I was surprised at the "mail you a cheque at the end of next week" speed of business, I was certainly glad at the "yeah bring them right over Saturday and we'll hold them until we butcher on Tuesday" accommodation, and even happier with the more than reasonable payment structure.   While we were there, we bought some Emu, Crocodile, and Kangaroo, and spotted a Zebra in the distance. We agreed to make plans to walk around next time. 🪶The emu steak was delicious.Not beefy but, some undefinable red meat.   🐊 The ground crocodile meat was kinda odd... like........ chicken if you spilled just a little tuna juice on it, AND it's possible Meg is allergic to it. She got super itchy for no sensible reason that night so we won't be buying that again.  🦘 We've got the kangaroo steak on the meal plan so we'll see how that goes. Spot, Honey, and Star are settling into their new routines, and besides a few calls to the horizon by Honey on the first day after the boys were sold, they seem to be content and haven't gone looking for them or anything like that. Kitchen Projects

Besides trying to keep up with the cheese making so the milk doesn't go to waste, I've also been harvesting what I can from the greenhouse for our fresh use.  Greenhouse and Garden The greenhouse has been good to us. We got a bunch of cherry tomatoes, green onions, herbs, as well as some beets and turnips this season. Soon I'll plant some cold season crops to see if we can have some fresh veg through the winter.

I was able to do a bit of clearing the leaning branches from the driveway. It's even easier to spot the wildlife trails through the bushes now but the garden completely got away from me, again. I'm going to see what garlic and potatoes I can harvest and then I'll let the goats in to clear up the weeds before the frost wastes them. Solar Here's the latest off the solar app:

Generation on 2026-09-21 Usage on 2026-09-21 2026 Generation 2026 Usage.

On the 21st of Sept we generated 35.09 kWh of solar electricity! We used about 8 kWh of that and sold about 25 kWh to the grid. On the same day, although we used 8 kWh of our solar power, we also needed about 14 kWh of power from the grid. This means that the net total solar power sold to the grid was about 9 kWh. So far this year we've generated 8.74 MWh (8740 kWh) of solar power!  That includes 3.63 we used directly and 4.95 MWh sold to the grid.. So far this year, we've bought 9.57 MWh (9570 kWh) from the grid.  Unfortunately it was rather chilly for a good part of the year. You can see the power use drop a bit in April when we could turn of the baseboard heaters, but we had the heat pumps still going until June. Net grid power purchases so far this year is 4.62MWh. Under Construction I've mentioned in previous Weekly Witters that Meg and I have been working on my farm notes app. That's chugging along nicely but, what I haven't told you is that the blog is also under construction.  I'm looking to get away from google and blogger so Meg's been working on a way for me to migrate my old posts to a privately run blog. Hopefully by the next summary you'll see a new blog with not just the Seasonal Summaries, but the past seasons of witters (archived once a season) in the same space. The old posts might need to get added later, but I'll see what I can do.  Unfortunately there's so many projects we both want to work on besides our regular work that each one only gets a small portion of our free time.

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