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State of the Farm – Spring
Spring is one of my favorite times on the farm. It’s always full of changes, new life, anticipation, and hope. This year is shaping up to be a big one on the farm. It’s set to be a season with lots of beginnings and endings.
Let’s knock out the endings first.
-We are selling off most of our goat herd this spring. We have a handful of purebred Nigerian Dwarves still available, but I anticipate us being down to only three goats soon. We are transitioning away from the goat market to a different one (one of those beginnings, I mentioned).
-On a sadder note, our sweet gelding lost his battle with heart failure yesterday. Our boy will be missed. He was forever begging for treats from anyone and everyone, and was exactly the horse we needed and loved.
That does leave us without a rideable horse for kids over 100 pounds for the time being. Please keep this in mind when you are booking an event with us. We will still be able to accomodate pony rides for kids under 100 pounds with Princess Sparkles (and soon, Marshmallow!).
Ready for the beginnings? Yeah, me too.
-For the first time ever, we will be offering lamb shares in the fall. We’ve raised meat sheep before, but only for our family. It’s mild in flavor, tasty, and an incredibly healthy option. This year begins sharing lamb with the public, and I’m super excited about it! Availability is quite limited this year, so message me to be put on the waitlist.
These lambs will be grassfed on rotating pastures, making them healthy and happy while also enriching the soil. We are adding some Katadhin ewes and a Katadhin/Dorper ram from Oakvale Farms to our sheep flock. They will produce excellent meat lambs, and fantastic breeding stock for other homesteaders interested in adding hair sheep to their farms.
If you aren’t familiar with meat shares, the way it works is that you can buy a whole or half of a market-sized lamb, we deliver the sheep to a processor, and you pick up the meat from them, then straight to your freezer. It’s a great way to buy in bulk from local farms.
We charge $8.75 per pound, and then you pay the processing fees to the processor. It usually ends up being about $10-12 per pound. The total amount of meat from a Katadhin lamb varies, but is usually somewhere in the realm of 55-80 pounds.
We will also be offering meat chickens again this year, after a break last year to have a baby right at the begin of meat chicken season. They will be $5 a pound, so approximately $25 for a whole chicken.
This is not just any whole chicken, but the best chicken you’ve ever had. Our chickens are raised on rotating pastures, scratching for bugs, and living their best lives. We feed locally milled chicken feed, and they will be processed right here on the farm. Meat chickens will be on-farm pickup, though we also offer delivery within the surrounding area with a per-mile delivery fee. They will be available starting in early May, so jump on the waitlist now.
Another cool development is that we will be adding a store to our farm website, so you should be able to order products (like our meat chickens) right from the comfort of your home. Bear with me as we struggle through the initial hiccups I’m sure will happen! 😉
-Lastly, we will be adding a Livestock Guardian Dog to the farm. A female Maremma puppy, who will need a couple years of training before she is effective at her job, but who should help with the predation we’ve been experiencing the last few years. She is unnamed, as of yet, but will certainly be making an appearance in our photos. LGDs may end up being serious, somber dogs, but they sure start off as cuddly, round, ridiculous puppies like every other.
I’m ecstatic and hopeful about the direction the farm is going. We look forward to partnering with the community to bring more healthy, local food options to the table.
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Animal Profiles: Journey
Journey Before Destination is our BLM Mustang, from the Three Fingers HMA in Oregon that was decimated by wildfires a few years ago. I bought her from a BLM auction on the internet, sight unseen. She was a “boring” bay color, so few were interested in her, but there was a note on her page that she was “calm and friendly”. In her video, she didn’t spook or gallop around the inside of the pen like most of the horses, but trotted around a bit, and then started nosing around for grass. Her color has become quite pretty as she has gotten older too, even if it is a common bay.
Despite being our tallest horse by a good bit, she is still a filly, not yet full grown. I was expecting a Mustang pony, and was surprised with a Mustang horse instead. It is clear that God worked that out on purpose, since her favorite person is my husband, who loves her right back. I wouldn’t generally recommend a wild Mustang as someone’s first horse, but it seems to work for them.
Journey is inquisitive and observant. While she has a long way to go to become comfortable with human handling and normal husbandry stuff, much less saddle training (hopefully starting this winter!), she is not the slightest bit worried about following people around the pasture. Journey also seems to have a special affinity for neurodivergent kids, something we’ve noticed on several occasions, as she will allow them to pet her face in ways that she stills shies away from with most others. She’s an incredibly cool horse, and we are so blessed to have her in our lives.
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Animal Profiles: Glory
Weight of Glory is our chestnut Quarter Pony gelding. He is a well-rounded horse, and is capable of everything from dressage to cross country to carrying around a beginner that has never sat on a horse before. In my experience, many horses are content to graze the day away, but Glory actually gets grouchy when he isn’t in regular work of some kind. I suspect he likes the mental challenge.
Don’t get me wrong though, Glory also loves to graze the day away, and is a big fan of cookies, cupcakes, curly fries, and whatever other junk food he can get. He wants to be involved with everything, as contractors that have worked here can attest.
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Animal Profiles: Sparkles
In my childhood fantasy come true, we have a number of horses roaming around my back pasture. 12 year old me would be in Heaven…
Admittedly, so is 34 year old me!
Princess Starlight Sparkles, so named by her owner, my 7 year old daughter, came home from Ocala in the back of our minivan 3 days before Hurricane Michael destroyed the farm we were supposed to close on later that week. She ended up being boarded at the farm we eventually bought, and rode out the category 5 storm in an open air stall that a tree landed on. It was a wild ride, and I’d do it all again for this little mare. She is gentle, loves kids, and takes such good care of my daughter. She never puts a foot wrong, and doesn’t mind being swarmed with kids painting, petting, and brushing her. Sparkles is our beautiful unicorn pony, since she is clearly magical.
