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Tag Archive for Farm Stuff

Farm Expansion

Posted by html404 on January 7, 2013
in Animals, Family Stuff, Farm Stuff

What does 4.5 acres plus 12.2 acres equal? Yes 16.7 acres but it also means farm expansion. When we initially moved in 16 months ago we rented the house and about 4.5 acres with it. This included the property containing the house and barn plus an extra pasture on the west side of the barn and two smaller fields on the east side of the barn/north side of the house.

Initially, our landlords (four sisters) were against us using the barn and having large animals. After raising our small flock of chickens and turkeys we realized that if we wanted to grow our farm we’d need additional space and appealed to them late summer/early fall to reconsider, especially since we were willing to purchase farm insurance.

The sisters agreed and we moved forward to rent the additional land. Now there’s a ton of work to do and plans for a farm expansion!

Our priorities are:

Clean and organize barn.
Build a couple of stalls.
Bring our horse Blaze home to save on board.
Have a small vegetable CSA (Consumer Supported Agriculture).
Put up our low-cost greenhouse.
Fix our fence line.
Get a family cow.
Plant more pasture.
Buy our 2013 turkeys.

Other possibilities include:

Raising broilers (meat chickens).
Raise a couple of hogs. While we do not eat much pork, having a year supply of bacon sounds really good to us. Plus hogs are fun to observe.
Raise a beef cow or two for our family’s meat.

We have been busy marketing our farm. We got our egg license in December. Our eggs can be found at a local health food store and at a local monthly Green Market, but we have so much more marketing to do for our CSA and any other products we decide to raise. We do have over 60 people on our e-list and have 20 likes on Facebook. We are excited about the possibilities yet it’s with trepidation that we move forward. After all farming isn’t exactly a profession most people are getting into these days and is even considered career roadkill.

Let’s just say this is another huge step of faith on our part.

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Vamping Up Egg Production

Posted by html404 on December 3, 2012
in Animals, Business, Family Stuff, Farm Stuff

Jr. vamping up egg production by helping collect eggs.

It’s been nearly six weeks since our hens started laying. I can’t tell you how much we have been enjoying our farm fresh egglicious treats! Our homemade waffles, pancakes and baked goods are so much more light and fluffy. It’s amazing. And the girls have been saying they notice a difference in how the eggs cook as well.

Our original flock of hens.

I was slightly ambitious and marketed our eggs right away and quickly sold out of them! Yeah, even before we had eggs to fulfill orders….but we have a waiting list in case anyone dwindles off! Incredible, eh? We even had someone stop by the other day and asked if we have eggs – that’s with no signage whatsoever except for the farm magnet on our van which only states our farm name and phone number…no products but I guess they can see chickens when they are out. 😉

All my marketing efforts were simply via email and we have a paid listing on Eat Wild ($50/yr) and Local Harvest ($25 suggested donation/year), but only one egg customer came through Eat Wild and she’s on our waiting list. Gotta love free to low cost marketing.

So based on this experience we will be increasing our flock for 2013 and have already started. We have a broody hen setting on two eggs now. It’s kind of an experiment because we came across two fertilized eggs while candling them so I decided it won’t do any harm in letting a hen sit on them to see what happens.

Broody hen update: The hens are sitting on the eggs but they don’t seem to be sitting on them consistently so I think we will be looking to borrow or rent an egg incubator to hatch out a batch of fertilized eggs. It’s kind of disappointing not to have one devoted hen unless something went wrong with the eggs or something. We may try again…we’ll see.

Candling to those unfamiliar is simply putting a light under the egg and slowly turning the egg to see if you find a dark spot, otherwise known as the fertilized egg. Candling is also used to detect any defects or cracked eggs.

Our hens have laid up to 17 24 eggs a day, then we had that cold snap and their production trickled back down to several a day. Then we (or my hubby did with Peanut’s help) winterized our coops since we will be over-wintering 32 hens/roosters and two turkeys and today we are back up to 15 eggs in a day. So we should be able to supply our egg customers with eggs this weekend. Yay! I am so excited to finally see our hens start paying for their keep! 😉

New flock of 100 red sex-links, not a heritage breed, unfortunately.

Please Note: this was written weeks ago and just kept getting pushed back. And last week we purchased a flock of 100 one year old hens, sooner than we thought we would buy more chickens, but when the opportunity came from an area family farm we know and trust and with people waiting for local eggs we just went ahead and did it. The “new” hens are giving us 60-70 eggs a day and I really need to get marketing them as a few leads fell through from our waiting list. I have a couple of leads to follow up on and we have an event on 12/15…but I won’t be taking two week old eggs there because our slogan is “Fresh. Local. Every Time.” and I don’t want to be accused of not having fresh eggs.

Turkey egg and yes, they are a brown speckled egg.

Brownie, our turkey hen, also started laying…but bah-humbug she’s not very maternal. 🙁 Disappointing to say the least but we have a farmer friend who asked if one of our daughters would be interested in incubating turkey eggs for her and we’d split the hatch, which will be a very cool farm, homeschooling learning experience! Farmer C has heritage breed turkeys which is what we wanted to try next year so here’s to hoping it all works out and goes well. We might even try and incubate some of Brownie’s eggs as we do want to do Midget White Turkeys again. They are very yummy! We ate one for Thanksgiving dinner!

Tom and Brownie, our Midget White turkey breeding pair.

Tom, our turkey tom, is still strutting his stuff. 😉 Every day this is what our pair of turkeys looks like with Tom following Brownie around.

So we are really vamping up egg production around here!

Oh and we finally got our electric fencing, but have yet to get the solar panel up and running. Technically we aren’t suppose to use the fencing or the solar panel during the winter or with snow, but we haven’t had any heavy snow yet….so we are keeping it up until the snow flies at least.

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Christmas Shopping

Posted by html404 on November 1, 2012
in Coupons, Family Stuff, Farm Stuff, Gift Ideas, Shopping

It’s the beginning of November and we all know what that means, right? The retail Christmas shopping season has officially begun. As I eluded to in a post last week, I have a few more hard-to-get gifts to buy. Robert’s mom and his aunt are super hard to buy for because they have everything and to be honest I never really know what they will absolutely love. I may just opt for sending them flowers as that is something either of them buy for themselves. And then our little 6 year old niece will be easy to buy for, not to mention fun! 😉

We might be buying ourselves electric fencing and a solar panel with battery pack. A farm expense, but out-of-the pocket expense since our farm is not yet turning enough profit to cover it. Now some of you may not “get” that but we value our poultry “friends” and the food they provide for our family. Now that it’s cold outside the children are tired of always having to chase them when it’s time to bring them in after we let them free-range. The only thing is the electric fencing won’t be much help once the snow flies but we will be able to get a little use out of it if I get it ordered this week. Regardless, it will be needed in the spring anyways.

What about you? Starting your Christmas shopping? Looking for sales? K-Mart is hosting a Family and Friends sale this Sunday, November 4th. Visit Kmart.com to download coupons and get started on Christmas gifts for your family and friends.

This post is sponsored through a Mom Bloggers Club member program. All thoughts and opinions are our own.

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Enter Mike the Gardener’s Sweepstakes #Giveaway

Posted by html404 on October 16, 2012
in Contests, Eco Friendly Products, Family Stuff, Farm Stuff, Food and Treats, Health and Garden Tuesday, Organic

I wrote about Mike the Gardener in the Spring and his great deal for a year worth of seeds. Well, I was just on Facebook and Mike the Gardener is having a sweepstakes to Win 5 Years worth of Vegetable Seeds! Go now and sign up!

Editor’s Note: I signed up too! 😉

Happy Health and Garden Tuesday!

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An Angora Rabbit…New Addition to Our Family – Wordless Wednesday

Posted by html404 on September 26, 2012
in Animals, Farm Stuff

Yes, we have another new addition to our family…our farmyard that is…meet Daisy. She’s an angora rabbit. We aren’t quite sure what breed yet, still trying to figure it out. Another homeschooling family had posted on our homeschool loop that they were giving Daisy away…and I being the softie that I am responded saying we’d love to take her! We still had rabbit food and the children loved the bunnies and this bunny was FREE! So I had to take her. Come to find out a farm not too far from us who breed angora rabbits charge $200 for a rabbit. Whooeee! Angora rabbits provide fiber and Daisy is in need of getting clipped as you will soon see from the photos taken on September 14th, the day we got her. She came all matted and that was the biggest reason the family was giving her away because they didn’t have the time to keep up with her grooming.

So far our girls are doing wonderfully grooming her, let’s hope it continues because Daisy’s health depends on it. Since angora rabbit fur gets so long they are prone to what is called “wool block”. This is when the rabbit cannot eat due to a fur ball being stuck in their throat. This can be prevented by giving the rabbit a piece of fresh pineapple or papaya on a daily basis. We are not sure how the fruit prevents it but my daughter read about it and we’ve started giving her pineapple after noticing her BMs (bowel movements or rabbit poop) were strung together with hair, which is/or can be a sign of wool block. 🙁

The photo above is of the fur the girls cut off of Daisy during their first grooming session. The photo below is how she looked after the fact….mucho better.

We are looking into selling or using her fur to knit with, but have to learn how to go about doing it first. We attended a free session with a spinners guild last Thursday and plan to attend their next meeting in October, will miss November and pick it back up in December to learn more about fiber, spinning and to meet others doing the same thing.

Even Daisy gets to enjoy the fresh grass since we recycled old pieces of a mini greenhouse we had a couple of years ago and created a play yard for her.

She’s still getting acclimated to all the children but we think she’s going to be a great addition to our farm. She’s huge by the way, if you couldn’t tell from the photos. If you remember our other bunnies were just wee little things. We’ll see Daisy’s true size once we clip her fur. One of our daughters doesn’t want to clip her because then she’ll be “naked” and cold but I think now is the time before winter is here that way she has time to grow it back. On average she will need to be clipped four times a year. Definitely makes for lots of new things to learn…..

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Egglicious!

Posted by html404 on September 19, 2012
in Animals, Business, Farm Stuff, Organic

Yippee! Doing the happy dance! We got our very first farm fresh egg from one of our hens today – thus the title of this post…..egglicious! Our hens are officially 22 weeks old this week. We’ve been waiting and waiting. I was starting to get worried so I did a Google search and found a chicken forum (yes there are chicken forums too!) and some people had to wait up to 30 weeks for their first egg! To be honest that made my heart sag at the thought! That’s why this is a happy occasion!

In regards to our first egg, our oldest son asked if he could eat it! 🙂 Always thinking about food that one. I wonder if he remembered to eat it? He didn’t and he’s too late because our third daughter Oms named the egg and wants to keep it …slight problem(s) with that idea, but she’s cute for coming up with it. Think she named it Hammy.

Just so you know this is a very good sized egg for the first one…

Some pullet eggs can be very small and I’m sure we’ll have our share of them. I don’t know if any of you care, but I am sure we’ll be comparing sizes and trying to figure out which hens are laying the best eggs. For those will be the ones we’ll want to hatch out new chicks from! Hoping to start that in December once we figure out which hens are the broodiest (if that’s even a word), as the broodier the better they will be at hatching out eggs. If you aren’t sure what broody means, it’s simply how well a hen likes sitting on her nest of eggs.

Now, if only the other 30 hens would get “cracking”….heehee pun intended….and give us an egg, we’d be in business. Literally, because we should get about an egg a day from them, which of course may vary now that there’s less daylight. That means about 17 dozen eggs a week! Our girls want to have an egg business and I want an egg business so we will be working on rounding up not only eggs but customers too!

“I’m so excited and I just can’t hide it…” Name that song? And isn’t that an 80’s song all of you Momdotters/Brandcation attendees? 😉

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My Little Guys – Wordless Wednesday

Posted by html404 on September 19, 2012
in Animals, Family Stuff, Farm Stuff, Wordless Wednesday

What can I say? I love my little guys, like I do all my children. All of them are growing up way too fast. These are photos of my little guys and some of their animal pals from the past couple of weeks

I’m about as proud of my boys/children as these puffed up turkeys! 😉

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Canning and Freezing Veggies – The Labor of Love

Posted by Brande on September 13, 2012
in All Natural Products, Family Stuff, Farm Stuff, Food and Treats, Fun Stuff, Gardening, Health and Nutrition, Home, Organic, Seasonal Stuff

Well, I did it! I accomplished canning and freezing veggies! My first canning season in the new place with most of my own veggies! The other veggies that we didn’t grow I bought from a local stand. The kitchen heats up awful fast in the middle of August, but it will be so nice in those cold months to make my family meals with vegetables from our own garden! Here’s what I canned: pickles, crushed tomatoes, 3 pickled beans, pickled grape tomatoes, salsa, BBQ sauce, pickled hot peppers, white peaches, and bruschetta! In all that makes exactly 50 jars of wonderfulness!

I also blanched and froze bags of corn, cut peppers, whole red peppers, peas, beans, cucumbers, and zucchini!

I looked up most of the recipes on the internet with a few out of an old Ball Canning Book I found. I received and email from Grit Magazine awhile ago with the “Ultimate Guide to Food Preservation”, that would have been VERY handy a few weeks back! There is a wealth of information on their site, including sweepstakes! Go and check them out!

~ Brande

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Ranch Dude & Dudette Wordless Wednesday

Posted by html404 on September 12, 2012
in Wordless Wednesday

The weather has been great here and we have gone to the barn for the past three days. The children have been horse back riding bare back and all of them save the two little boys have trotted on Blaze! Jumpy had got on and off of Blaze by himself and even led Blaze around. A year or even six months ago Jumpy wasn’t doing these things. He’s growing up. It’s been so fun to watch them with the animals. Just call this Animal Week…

Here are our Ranch Dude and Dudette for this week:

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Happy Chickens and Turkeys

Posted by html404 on September 11, 2012
in Animals, Family Stuff, Farm Stuff

I wanted to add some new photos of the chickens in their new home and of our turkeys, for those of you interested. I wish I had my phone or camera when we let all the turkeys and chickens out this morning. They loved stretching their wings, flying, puffing up and the chickens especially enjoyed foraging. While we move their coops every day or two depending, we don’t get them out enough, especially the turkeys. Electric fencing runs around $500 and we’ve been trying to hold off on that expense a bit longer…It was fun to watch the “barnyard” full of poultry. Of course we had to keep Padfoot tied up so he couldn’t cause any trouble.

Our Buff Orpington rooster went at our youngest daughter, Blondie, today because one of the hens she was holding made a noise. Blondie was more frightened than hurt. She said he pecked her on the back but there wasn’t any marks at all. He’s still alive and I am at a loss what to do because by all rights he should be on a platter, but the girls reminded me that we want to raise our own chicks and they have decided they want Buff Orpingtons. Without a rooster no baby chicks. A slight dilemma.

I was very proud of Peanut and Jumpy for catching the turkeys and getting them back into their coop. The younger children are quite adept at chicken catching too.

We have some very happy chickens and turkeys…take a look:

The turkey that is above all the rest in the photo below is our largest turkey and he’s also the one that was the hero the other night when a predator came a-callin’.