The pullets suddenly transitioned from being terrified of us to mobbing us at every chance. Something must have clicked in their brains connecting us with food. Now we are their best friends. They are certainly the most gregarious group of chickens we’ve raised.
We started picking apples the last week of July. Since then we’ve been picking and preserving apples every week. We love apples. There comes a point when we love being finished with them too. Besides the innumerable apples eaten out of hand, this year we managed to dehydrate over 700 pounds of them. Cores and bad
This is our last day of grazing grass. From now until May the cattle will still be eating grass, but it will either be harvested and dried (hay) or fermented (baleage). We can usually stretch our grazing out into December. January is possible in a mild year if we don’t get early ice and slush
Back when I was picking puffball mushrooms I found a long, vivid green swath of grass about two feet wide. I didn’t think much of it, but a few weeks later when I returned to that field I realized that the green grass formed a long arc about fifty feet in diameter. It puzzled me for
Whenever I drive into the sows’ pasture to drop off a bale of hay, they come barrelling out of all corners of the field, ears flopping, doing the bucking-horse run I never grow tired of watching. Do they care about the hay? Are they happy to see me? No and no. They are only excited because
Our bales of bedding straw came from a weedy field that wasn’t combined, so there are plenty of oats still attached to the stems. This straw would be disastrous if used for garden mulch, but it excels as livestock bedding. It fulfills two Maslovian first tier requirements in one package (food and shelter), almost as good
Last winter I pondered whether it would be feasible to add laying hens to our operation. We gave it a try, and we lost money spectacularly. Rate of lay rarely exceeded 60% and most of the summer it hovered just under 50%. This might be due to any number of things. Maybe our Red Sex Link
Vertical Integration Read More »
CSAs deliveries are wrapping up for the season. This is our second year working with the Montclair CSA. For anyone living in Essex County, NJ, we have high praise for them. We feel fortunate to work with folks who are so supportive. It is no shocking revelation to observe that our culture seems to push us
