February on the Farm

February 3rd, Miriam who isn't even a year old yet, gave birth to a buckling! This was the first time wee missed the actual birth of any of our goats. Cait had walked out to the barn to get something and saw this!!  Only missed it by moments!  Meet Marley.  He's a cutie with those floppy ears.  

 We decided to invest in a furnace to heat our home.  It is also a boiler that will heat our water year round.  No more high electric bills in the winter months for heat!  And with 11 people using hot water for showers each day, and all the laundry that goes with 11 people, our electric bill will decrease significantly!  An investment upfront, but well worth it.

 It has been a cold month.  Being here 3 winters now we have experience February as the coldest month each year.  This is the month it always snows.  This was more of an ice cover.  We have never seen anything like it!  It was pretty in its own way, and even though there weren't snowballs to throw, the kids still managed to find a way to have fun with it!!

We purchased 5 new dairy goats!!  Since learning of what to look for in a dairy goat and experiencing too many fails, we have been very patient and taken our time to add to our stock.  Friends of ours who have been very wise in their own purchase of dairy goats, and who have built their herd thoughtfully decided to downsize.  They've had a good kidding season and some needed to go.  I am so grateful they called us!!  We got a saanen buck and named him Rambo!  A lamancha mama with 2 babies and named her Sage, the baby girl Chloe and still haven't named the buckling because we are not sure if we will keep him.  And another lamancha yearling that we named Bella.  

The mama in milk who we have named Sage came with her 2 babies.  These friends remove the baby goats the moment they are born and bottle feed them…this allows them to have complete control over the goat's milk production.  This has brought our care of and experience with baby goats to a whole new level…much more commitment!!  We have always left our babies with their moms for several months and only milked once a day for our own consumption.  Sage must be milked twice a day, and now milk must be bottled and fed by hand to the 2 kids.  Everyone is taking turns and actually enjoying it.  Having farm animals is definitely not something to take lightly.  It is a commitment on so many levels and requires lots of time and care and work.  Ben is feeding baby Chloe.

And this is what we have waited so patiently for!!  This is Sage's first freshening and she is giving us almost a whole gallon a day.  I'm confident her second kidding season will give us over a gallon a day! And those udders…they are so easy to milk!!  Finally feeling some success with our dairy goats.

This was Jesse's second kidding and her milk production is way up from the first time.  We still let her babies be with her during the day, but they sleep in a separate pen.  First thing in the morning we milk her, and from that one milking in the morning she is giving us a half gallon.  Her udders are smaller and bit harder to milk, but she is the same breed as Sage, a saanen, and the milk is supurb…no "goaty" taste at all from these gals!!  

I have wanted to have a farm sign up for when guests & customers come to visit.  Just for fun really.  I can't believe it has taken me over 2 years to get to making one, but Ellie and I finally did!!  Ellie painted every piece black all by herself!  I love spending quality time with my kids on projects!

On our journey to successful farming we have found the need for lots of freezer space.  You can't advertise your farm to a storefront and then run out of bacon by the second delivery!  Jason spent lots of time looking for a walk-in freezer and he found two!!  They need a little fixing up and putting together, but this will be a much needed addition that will allow us to grow!

We love kidding season!!!

Farming Around

We are still harvesting plenty of tomatoes here at the farm!  Have you ever wondered why farmers have rabbits?  Not only for their meat, but for their droppings…we ammended our garden soil this year with a couple trailor fulls of rabbit droppings and this is the result!…large amounts of tomatoes! And everything else is producing just as well!

Ellie is just smitten with her kitten!  Our cats have no lack of love and attention, that's for sure!

There is always a need for more laying hens when you own a farm that sells its eggs.  One big step we have taken towards being a more sustainable, self-sufficient farm is incubating our hen's eggs.  It has enabled us to step away from the need of a hatchery.  We currently have 11 chickens growing that we hatched from our incubator!  A few are visibly roosters, but they are needed as well to continue our ability to hatch eggs :)

We have 3 more piggies growing in our woods!  We have a couple different breeds this time, one being the heritage breed Tamworth. They originiated in England, and are a lean pig producing leaner pork!  We have researched and have learned that they do take longer to grow, but they truly forrage and have no need for grain supplements which we are excited about.  Again, another step towards being sustainable and self-sufficient!  We are also investing in a mamma Tamworth that is pregnant with her 2nd litter.  We visited the farm she lives on, and she is being raised the same way we raise ours…out in the woods forraging.  Can't wait to make her part of the family! 

Our turkeys are plumping up.  Their have grown in their beautiful feathers, and the males have already started puffing themselves up to show off around the females!  Can't wait to hear the first "gobble, gobble"!

Jason purchased a tractor for our farm!!  We have several projects it will be used for, but our oldest son, Nathan, has already put it to use a few times.  We move the hens around our property so they have new places to scratch and we usually have to push/pull these "hens on wheels" to their new place…not anymore!  Great job Nate!

Snow Day!!

 We woke this morning to a couple inches of beautiful snow!

 Time for some fun!!

 Jason took the kids down to the creek to sled down the hill

We have added to our flock of hens with guineas!  6 of them for now, and that may be it…they are extremely loud!  That is one of the reasons we got them.  They alert the rest of the flock of predators…well, anything that they think may be a threat…they squak at cars that drive by and they squak at us when we go to collect eggs or clean the egg mobile!!  They will also provide us with eggs that are extremely rich in omega 3's due to the high volume of insects they eat, which is the other reason we added them to our farm…to help control the bugs, ticks especially.  They will free roam with the hens, but I'm looking forward to keeping them in the garden this Spring & Summer.  They don't scratch like chickens do, and they are always on the hunt for bugs so they will really help out in that area!  They are an interesting looking bird…we serve a creative Maker!!

 Handsome fellow, isn't he?  He's our cinnamon king!

Our piggies are fattening up very quickly.  Their feed intake has increased 150lbs every 2 weeks for the last month!  And they are always rooting.

This is our 2 year old Alpine beauty, Esther.  All the goat's thick coats grew in back in November, and they are bushy and beautiful!

 Ruthie was enjoying licking the snow off the fence!

Even on fun snow days there is still work to be done and animals to be fed.

All the waterers had an inch thick of ice covering the top that had to be broken to allow the animals to drink.

All our cinnamon queen and barred rock hens have started laying and we are getting an average of 2 dozen eggs a day!  Live nearby and want to feed your family fresh eggs from free roaming hens?  Contact us on our Facebook page to get more information!

 I love this big helper!!

Farm Update

Bright and early, April 16, the kids and I headed out to create and plant our garden.

After our neighbor, Mr. Covington, used his tractor to uproot and drag out all the thorns and brush, Nate tilled the soil to further prepare it...this part of land has never been cultivated before and it was very, very tough ground.

 After Nathan tilled the entire quarter acre all by himself (I'm sure to some of you that is nothing, but for first timers, it was A LOT to do) we had to build our rows.  The gardening method we are following has been created from a gardener by the name of Edward Smith.  He has a great book called The Vegetable Gardener's Bible.  His method is called W.O.R.D. 

W= wide rows

O= organic methods

R= raised beds

D= deep soil

We built the rows up by shoveling on the soil from where we designated our walkways.  They are 2 feet wide as well...this has proven to be fun when weeding...because the rows are so wide 2 people can be weeding the same area at the same time, facing one another and talking!

Once the rows were built, and wow did that expend a lot of energy from us all, we placed what chicken manure we had from the eggmobile on the rows to add nutrients to the soil.  Poop?? Nutrients??  Sounds gross, but it's true.  As you can see, we need a lot more!  That will come with time.

This picture here is the same shot, 7 weeks later!!!  Isn't it just amazing?  On the far left we have peppers, then green bush beans and onions.  

We have also planted...

carrots

eggplant

okra

peas

tomatoes

corn

cucumbers

yellow squash

zucchini

watermelon

tigger melon

strawberries

cabbage

spinach

We have been very busy constantly weeding.  There is so much to tend to with a garden, but with many young hands, the burden is light!  I have been more thankful than ever for the rain since we have no watering system out there yet...praise God for the goodness He brings through the rain!!

We have discovered a mullberry tree across the street!  The kids love to ride their bikes in the afternoon and we kept finding squished berries on the road.  I decided to eat a few and they were really good!!  We had never seen berries growing on a tree so we asked our neighbor what they were.  Delicious!!

 The goats are growing up like crazy!!  They are almost as big as their momma.  We decided, for the betterment of the herd, to sell our one goat, Latte...she was the mom of Jack and Jill, our first kids born here on the farm.  She was very mean to all the other goats and was always restless.  And when it came time to milk her in the mornings, she was a serious pain...less than a quarter cup of milk we would get from her to top it all off.  Literally the day after we got rid of her, Mocha's milk production skyrocketed!!  I believe she was stressed out from Latte!  We are getting 3-4cups from her a day!!  We have made goat milk soap with it and I use it to cook/bake with every day, and we are stocking it up in the freezer.  Our next adventure will be attempting to make goat milk fudge...yum!!

The next batch of meat birds are 3 weeks old now and have been moved to pasture.  We have 100 again and will be butchering the weekend of July 13 for those of you interested in helping/buying!!

Our bee colonies are doing magnificent!  I check on them once every 2 weeks.  Can you see the larve in the picture?!  It's fascinating to open the hives and see all the work they are doing.

After long mornings tending to the garden, feeding and caring for all our animals and doing some school, we LOVE to relax outside under the trees.  Spring is beautiful...we are so blessed to be here!!!