Farm Report # 8: Living at the Farm!

We moved to our new home on the farm in December.  Living at the farm has made it much easier to take care of the animals and land.

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Though, we have been surprised with how much mud, dirt, and dust there is when living on the farm!  I haven’t given a farm report since October, so here are some of the highlights of things on the farm.

  1. We started our chicken flock.  The end of March we purchased 50 chicks.  30 meat chickens called Cornish Rocks and 20 various other breeds for egg laying.  We built them a coop in one of the horse stalls in the barn.  The meat birds eat like starving POWs and grew really fast.  We had a problem with some of them dying, but was never able to determine the cause.
  2. We have finally been able to harvest some animals and the reward is great!  We had two Berkshire hogs slaughtered.  They weighed about 350 and 400 lbs.  We have been very pleased with their meat.  I even cured and smoked some of the bacon from one of them.  The bacon turned out a bit salty, but is still very good.  The pork chops have been tender and the sausage great.  We had a Dexter steer slaughtered as well in early June.  We haven’t eaten much of his meat yet, but are excited to have it.  The cow was grass-fed solely and both the pigs and the cow were not given any shots or antibiotics.  So the meat is as natural as it comes.  We had 19 meat chickens make it to full size.  We processed them all ourselves.  It wasn’t too bad, just took some time and wasn’t the most pleasant experience ever!  But we have plenty of chicken in the freezer.  We should have three sheep that will be ready for processing in September to October range.

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    Two of the chickens ready for the freezer.

  3. We had two calves born and lost one calf to still-birth.  We were blessed with two calves, both little girls born this spring.  We were disappointed that one of our cows, which gave us a calf last year, had a premature birth of a still-born calf.  So we will settle for two new calves this year instead of three as we had hoped.IMG_0957
  4. We milked a cow for over 2 months.  One of our biggest ventures on the farm was milking a cow.  We milked Pippin, our four year old Dexter cow.   She was the cow that had the still-born calf.  We had never milked a cow and she had never been milked, so it was new to us all.  We enjoyed the raw milk we got from her.  We made ice cream, kefir, butter, and used it for all other milk purposes.  Amanda, and a few of the kids, have dairy allergy problems.  They found they were able to use the raw milk without any of their typical symptoms. It was a real blessing for our family.  The challenge involved having to be tied down so much to do it daily.  Also here milk supply decreased to the point that the result did not justify the time.  We tried various things to increase her milk supply, but they didn’t seem to work, so we decided to stop when it got down to only 3-4 cups a milking.  Amanda and I did it together.  We found it was a blessing to get up and get our day started talking and working together.  Sometimes it was frustrating but most days it was an enjoyable shared experience.  We hope to do it again in the future with hopefully better results.

    Amanda was great at milking!! She could handle the poop, pee, flies, and tail swats.

    Amanda was great at milking!! She could handle the poop, pee, flies, and tail swats.

  5. We finally have a successful garden at the farm.  Our gardens at the farm have not gone well the last two years.  We didn’t live at the farm and the place we tried for the garden was very rocky, poor soil.  So this year we tried a different spot and we changed the primary gardener!  Amanda took over as the driving force behind the garden.  I was busy the first weekend of May leveling our yard and putting in drainage pipe when she planted the garden with some help from Ashley and the kids.  She has done a great job of keeping it clean, organically fertilized, and picked. We are getting lots of veggies off of it already and looking forward to much more.  We even canned our first few jars of pickles.  We have never canned before, but hope to preserve much of the veggies for later use.IMG_0895

    Our garden now!

    Our garden now!

This gives you a quick report on some of the things that have gone on at “Happy Home Farm.”

 

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  1. Thanks for this report. Always love your farm reports!

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