Whew… I don’t guess I need to say ‘I’ve been busy;’ the lack of posts makes that fairly clear. The worst part is though, we’ve been so busy the camera has almost gotten dusty. We have caught a few things though, of our recent flurry of Springtime activity, so here’s a run down of the farm happenings for the past few weeks:
Pigs! This has to be one of the most exciting things to happen this Spring. My sister Leah and her husband Michael were planning a trip to Tennessee to buy a weanling piglet and we made plans for them to bring us two piglets as well. Leroy and Petunia are 3/4 Gloucestershire Old Spots and 1/4 Berkshire pigs, and boy, am I dreaming about the bacon already!
The gardens have taken much of our time and we’ve had a blast planting potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers, green beans, okra, field peas, peanuts, butternut squash, pumpkins, watermelons, cantaloupe; oh my, I’m hungry again!
But, thankfully springtime isn’t only planting time, we’ve been tending the strawberry patch and the asparagus bed and those two must be some the nicest things to harvest. Just as soon as winter is over, you’ve got sweet berries and tender spears!
The cows have been racing around the pasture with the electric fence trying to keep up with all the luscious ryegrass that has done great this spring, thanks to all the rain the Lord sent. This is the first paddock in our big pasture:
And here the girls are finishing up the last paddock in the big pasture before moving to the neighbors grass:
We’ve already processed the first batch of broilers and batches number 2 & 3 are marching along just fine. We also have new laying hen chicks in the works. I’ve been practicing with my austrian scythe as well, mowing some ryegrass we couldn’t get the cows to, so I took the grass to them!
I’ve also built a peening bench, but I’ll have to explain that in another post. And to add to the busy schedule of farm work, my brother gets married this weekend so we’re hosting the visiting folks for a drop-in meal on Friday before the wedding… And with all of that, I think I must go back to work! Thanks for reading.
As we might say in Texas (and maybe Georgia?), I am busier than a one legged man at a square dance! ha! This year has been crazy for us too!!! Molly finally had a live calf about 3 weeks ago and it was a heifer! whoo hoo! We still have fence to build but we HAVE to get a stretch over the rock soon because we can’t get the cows over there if not.
It was funny ya’ll got some Old Spots because that was the first hogs I looked at! I had a contact and was waiting on piglets. The 100% spots are around $600/piglet. Also, they are hard to get unrelated without driving far. I finally just threw the towel in and went with the Tamworth. I do have a Berkshire sow now. There should be some Tamworth/Berkshire crosses in the near future!! Let me know if ya’ll need one or two to raise out later. I do think I owe you! ha!…no really!
Herple and Hershle graduate high school and we are doing the ceremony and a get together for them. We are doing it with 2 other homeschool families which has made the event pretty large in numbers! It is always fun but definitely a lot on one’s plate! Hope ya’ll are doing well. The babies are getting so big! I must come see everyone soon!
Hey Carrie! Glad to hear things are going well. Yay for a heifer! Are you able to milk Molly and is she giving much? We love the Old Spots so far; we’ll see this fall how they turn out – we’re hoping to butcher them ourselves. Tell the guys congrats on graduation! Stop by sometime when y’all are out running around.