We had our first dose of winter today, windy and cold. Cold weather means frequent trips out to the hens to gather the eggs. Most of our chickens behave themselves and lay eggs in the nests, or at least in the cove next to the nest box, but there are four or five hens that […]
If you threw me into water in freezing weather, I’d scramble to get out as quickly as possible. Even being thirsty wouldn’t influence my instinct to escape. But not so with pigs. Their first thought isn’t “I’m cold”. It is “I might be hungry or thirsty later, so I’d better drink while I’m here”. Our pigs
These are pig-fattening stations…the swine are fed here. Anyway, I was a pig man. As the prophet Daniel warned King Nebuchadnezzar, “They shall drive thee from among men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field.” Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King OK, that quote doesn’t have much to do with anything, but
This year I reduced my bale spacing to 30 feet versus 40 feet in past years. We’ll see if this is too close. But it allows me to feed at a lot higher density (96 bales in this little field versus 54 in the same space). Why did I originally go with 40 foot spacing?
Bale Grazing, 2015-2016 Winter Edition Read More »
Up goes another hoop building! AJ did all the surveying work for me, laying out the posts and squaring the corners. It was a good project for him and provided his introduction to the Pythagorean Theorem and its applications. The layout got away from him a little, but these buildings are flexible so I didn’t follow up
After the bulldozers scraped a somewhat level spot near the lane for this year’s building project, we had a lot of exposed subsoil. I messed around with the tractor in the area for a few weeks in between other projects, moving dirt here and there to adjust things a bit. I didn’t want the soil to erode, so
Seems like whenever I discuss recipes with other farmers, our conversations follow along the lines of the Portlandia “Did You Read?” sketch. But the book that usually tops the list is Ruhlman’s Charcuterie. For anyone who hasn’t read it, I recommend it. (Hint: if you are reluctant to buy yet another cookbook, it should be easy to
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
