The House:
We’re building a house! Over the last 6 months, I’ve had the opportunity to play carpenter, electrician and plumber as I built our house. That work has been inspected and passed. No contractors have been involved, but some outside skilled labor is about to get involved - next week the insulation people will come and spray a few inches of closed-cell foam insulation in the walls. I am stoked – 40 degree mornings inside the house are coming to a close. After that is a drywall contractor, followed by a floor refinisher. We will do the finish work ourselves and, before ya know it, it’s going to be a real modern house!
The Fields:
The farmer renter came November 1st to harvest his soybeans. The land is now flat and bare. This coming Spring, most likely, it will be seeded with a pasture mix of grasses and clovers. Pigs and beef will follow. The animals will be rotationally grazed to the benefit of the land, they will have baby animals on our farm to the benefit of our hearts and souls, and eventually the animals will be harvested to the benefit our pocketbooks and our customers’ dinner plates. We have 1 boar and 2 sow Idaho Pasture Pigs on order for the Spring. Hopefully they will provide 30+ piglets per year that will mostly be butcher hogs and will be available to our customers as delicious custom processed pork.
The Tractor:
We got a tractor! Many chores and projects are now feasible in a practical amount of time, now that we have 60 horsepower to put to productive work sculpting the land and managing the farm operation.
The Chickens:
We have 45 (or so) egg chickens. 5 out of 8 of our original barred rock hens are still kickin (fatalities are attributed to 1 hawk, 1 owl, 1 mystery), plus 40 out of 41 chicks that we got at the beginning of August. The second group is 17 weeks old, so in the next month or two they might start laying eggs. A handful of them are roosters. “Cock-a-doodle-doo, baby, it’s 4:30am!! It won’t be light for another 2 hours, but just so you know, the sun is coming! Whoooo!” The roosters crack me up and I like their noises, but I have to imagine the hens might feel differently. The hens are two inches away from the screaming rooster. And this overly-enthusiastic alarm is going off a full 2 hours before wake up time. The hens might kick the roosters to the curb, if they could. But they can’t, because the roosters are 50% bigger than the hens. And I’m going to keep the roosters as long as they play nice, because they’re pretty, I like the cock-a-doodle-doo, they could protect the hens from some predators, and they could help make free baby chickens.
Happy Thanksgiving friends. Be well :)