Terrabyte Farm

The last month of the farm has been one of our busiest.  We managed to butcher all of our remaining turkeys prior to Thanksgiving, 8 chickens, 2 ducks, and fifteen rabbits.  The only meat animal (aside from the two calves) left on the farm is our black sheep.  He goes to the butcher on Sunday.  He will be about ten months old; anything under 18 months is considered lamb, over that age and it is called mutton.  We will be sending his hide to a small family-run business in Pennsylvania that specializes in tanning sheep skins.  It should work out so that his hide will be returned to us right around the time the baby is born.  I can’t imagine anything nicer than laying my sweet sleeping babe down on a nice warm sheep skin that was grown right here on our farm.

Speaking of sheep, in mid-December we took our two girls back to their home farm to be bred.  I started “flushing” them two weeks prior.  This means that instead of just eating hay and grass, I gave them each daily grain rations with the hope of increasing their fertility.  Our girls were twins (to each other) so the odds of them each producing twins are high.  We have worked out a great arrangement with our good friend and breeder at Iris Creek Farm such that for every four lambs produced, she keeps one.  For the first few years, we are hoping to produce lamb for our table, some fiber for spinning, and lambskin rugs.  We won’t be looking to add to our flock for at least four more years.  Our friend, however, is looking to establish a breeding line, so having her pick of the top conforming lamb out of each set of four allows her more options for improving her stock.  It is a great arrangement for all; we have found that most times, people who farm are incredibly creative and agreeable in their solutions to new and different enterprises.

Today I am going to check out a spinning wheel.  Another farm neighbor of ours is looking to switch brands and she happens to have the very wheel that I want.  Hopefully it will work out for both of us.  Additionally, her husband raises the best pigs in the state.  The two pigs we had over the summer came from his stock and his boar was their father.  They were amazing, easy going, extremely meaty, perfect.  We will be getting at least two and maybe even four pigs this spring and want to make sure to get on the list early and talk merits of different breeds and crossings with him.  Again, we are finding such a wealth of information right in our own backyard.

The goats seem to be doing well.  We were having some more hoof problems with our girl Flora this fall, but we treated her again and now that the ground is totally frozen, she seems much better.  The cows are also well, the calves are getting very big.  We have made the decision to keep them for two years and breed their mothers this summer, so we may need to buy an interim cow to hold us over between what we have in our freezer and the next set.  Luckily, now we have a number of good sources and even if we bought straight from another farmer and took the cows right to the butcher, we trust we will be getting really good beef from animals that were treated in accordance with our standards.

The ducks and geese seem to be doing fine.  They keep a small section of the pond un-frozen with the help of Mike and Jackson who go out each day to break up their spot.  The chickens and roosters are finally down to their winter numbers.  We currently have 37 hens and 3 roosters and for the past few days have been getting 10-12 eggs/day which is pretty good considering the weather.  The rabbits have been moved to their indoor winter quarters inside the coop.  We think it has made a big difference and that they will be much warmer.  We need to check on the bees, but there is not much to be done for them at this point.  They have the perfect site where they receive maximum southern sun, they filled their hives with honey, and we luckily did not have any pests or parasites when we checked them this fall.  They are very low maintenance for the most part.

The garden is done and we have opened it up so the goats and sheep can forage.  We will till it again next spring, maybe after throwing the pigs on it for a month or so to get all the last bits of goodness out.  The fruit and nut trees and berry bushes are all dormant and we are fantasizing about the harvests they will provide for us in years to come.

One of the main reasons for the busyness (in addition to the time of year and the fact that we have a new baby coming this April) is that for the first time in over a year, we took a vacation.  Good friends of ours who are also looking to move out this way and take up the small family-farm life stayed at our farm for a week and took care of everything.  The two weeks before were spent making sure that everything was in place, nothing was broken, things were tidy, etc.  The week before our friends came to spend the afternoon and walk through the farm with us, learning about the animals, the house, the farm, etc.  One question they had was what to do if there was a really big snow.  Historically, the week around Christmas has been mild up here, we have not had a white Christmas but maybe once in the last ten years we have lived in CT.  We told them not to worry, told them where the shovels, salt, etc were and to hope for the best.  So, imagine our stress as we are driving out literally hours before the “blizzard of the century” hit CT, one of the biggest single event snow falls in our area of CT for the last half century.  At the time it hit CT, we were in Orlando walking around the Magic Kingdom trying to help our friends figure out plowing, seriously frozen water, you name it.  We have been in our house for over a year, but we did not get the big animals until the end of March, so technically, this is our first experience of over-wintering large animals.  We are still trying to figure things out ourselves and felt pretty awful that our friends were having to wing it.  BUT, having said that, our friends were AWESOME, even managing to shovel our entire 200ft driveway by hand in addition to shoveling out multiple paths to and from the animals.  Everyone was well taken care of, and our friends told us they actually had fun.  It is so difficult to leave a farm, but knowing that we had such amazing, caring, and hard working friends made it easier. The biggest irony is that by the time we were back, all of the snow had melted.  However, this winter is supposed to be pretty snowy and cold, so I am sure we will get our fair share.

Good luck to you as you prepare for the change in seasons, wherever that may be.