This winter I’ve changed up my bedding management for the laying hens. They are free to walk out of their hoophouse, but with everything consistently snowbound this winter there hasn’t been much for them to find out in the fields and so they prefer to stay closer to home. All those hens dropping turds all […]
Bedding Management Read More »
Looks like the weather has repented of its dalliance with springtime and returned to proper winteriness. The contrast between 60 degrees and -8 degrees is pretty stark. Yesterday’s warm rain froze solid, creating beautiful ice sculptures, but making many simple tasks challenging. Doors on the walk in cooler and the pig’s milk greenhouse were frozen
Chilling and Truck Shopping Read More »
I saw the gauges going crazy, but I was on the road in a whiteout of blowing snow before sunrise at zero degrees, so I wasn’t about to pull over onto the partially-cleared shoulder to investigate. Instead I kept driving on as the oil pressure gauge flipped between normal and zero. I have had other
A Mess and a Thanks Read More »
I’ve tried all kinds of schemes for providing water for chickens during the winter. This year, I think I’m finally close to a satisfactory design. This design owes a lot of credit to a similar system described at Green Machine Farm. I’m using a very similar setup with an aquarium pump, a tank heater, an
Frost Free Chicken Water Read More »
Just a dumb play on words, but here’s a cat proudly using the catwalk in our milk greenhouse. The temperature in the building was a balmy 33 degrees while it was zero outside, so I found several cats sprawled out sunning themselves in here. Most people try to keep their milk cool so it doesn’t
Blog posts have been infrequent recently, but not for lack of material. I’m just far behind on many projects, so bear with me. I’ll post some catchup farm photos in blog posts over the next few days. This year I was especially late getting the bales set for this winter’s bale grazing. I managed to finish
Bale Grazing, Finally Read More »
I’ve been adding a few chicken heads to our soup recently, but I wanted to see what would happen if I made a batch of broth using heads alone. So I placed thirty heads in a pot and cooked them down overnight. After straining and cooling the broth, here are the results: This is as
I found one persistent dandelion blooming this morning. The farm was covered in a heavy freezing fog, the rocks and plants were white with wispy frost, and the soil was crunchy underfoot. But in one clump of trees the frost was light. And this dandelion was almost entirely frost free, probably owing to the shelter
Right Place, Right Time Read More »
This fall we stretched the pigs’ grazing season longer than usual. Some years we’ve had to curtail it by late October, though normally we bring them in just before deer hunting begins in mid-November. This year their rotation pattern brought them farther from the woods so they weren’t interfering with hunters. But with the fields
Last night we moved the chickens into their winter hoophouse, just as the snow started falling. We seem to have a knack for squeaking by when we have deadlines to face. Each year the autumn weather patterns are a bit different, so we don’t have hard calendar deadlines. Rather there is a complex coefficient of
