Almost to the Finish Line with the Farmhouse + Fall Forage and Treats for the Livestock

Our focus has mostly been on finishing our house in the last two weeks (scroll down to the bottom for some photos of our progress!), but of course the livestock still have to be fed, moved and cared for, don’t they?

It is a pretty great time of year to be an animal on our farm with the temperatures finally starting to drop, at least overnight, plenty of forage and acorns are starting to fall, too! The goldenrod is just starting to bloom, morning glory in various colors are still blossoming and the swamp sunflowers, a personal favorite of mine are starting to pop, too.

One feeder group of pigs finished up a ton of a whole corn a neighbor gave us from last year’s crop (and despite my wishes, the goats jumped in their area and nibbled on it, too). Large amounts of hog or chicken feed can cause bloat and rumen upset in goats, but fortunately ingesting some of the whole corn along with the fibrous husk and cob (and not being able to gorge themselves in a short period because they have to pull the dry kernels off the cob) didn’t cause any issues.

One of our bakery egg customers regularly gives us stale bread, so another feeder group feasted on that this week, too.

And the three sows are still working on their cogon grass eradication project in one field and loving the task!

Flock 1 has some compost to spread out for us in their new paddock this week and Flock 2 is continuing to perplex us with their fence breaking antics.

There are some old school beliefs that chickens aren’t able to establish a pecking order and functional flock dynamics when the numbers surpass 400 birds or so.

Typically our flocks have just been a little over 400, but we increased the number of chicks in the newest flock this year. The last Flock 2 started at about 530 birds and they did fine, but with a contingent of birds still constantly ducking under or flying over the fence, we are contemplating moving some to Flock 3 and seeing if that helps!

We have no Barred Rocks (a black and white striped breed) in Flock 1 or Flock 3, so we could easily pull those out of Flock 2 and move them and then at least easily be able to tell which birds are the youngest when it comes time to sell off the oldest birds. Generally we don’t mix ages in our flocks so we can put an entire flock in at one time and sell/cull them at the same time, but there has been some predation issues over the years in Flock 1, so there is room for more birds.

The beef herd worked their way through a lush 8 acre field this week and did some internal road grazing, as well.

And Grant just dropped off two more cows at processor this morning. We have been out of Caveman ground beef and a few other cuts for a few weeks, so we will have those back in stock in 2-3 weeks.

The goats are still living it up doing brush clearance! Grant has been cutting small undesirable trees, shrubs, branches and vines for them every day.

We even decided to cut a bunch of the saplings that have grown up around the ditch that runs through one side of the farm. It’s become hard to maintain the high tensile fence there because of all the blackberry and other vines and shrubs that grow up on it.

And we had the realization that now that we have so much more acreage than when we installed it, we really don’t even need it anymore. So likely we will be taking that fence up this winter!

As usual, my parents were such a huge help on their recent visit! The last main project was installing the floor and despite a little learning curve, my dad got the entire house done. Meanwhile my mom was his assistant and also took care of cleaning up the exterior doors, installing door knobs on the internal doors, unpacking boxes of kitchen stuff from storage and more.

By the end of their visit, we got our big dining room table out of storage and had pizza in the house to celebrate!

We also got a sectional from Facebook Marketplace last week and since the propane tank was installed on Friday, moved our stove over from our tiny house so it could be tested. Turns out there was a snafu with the cabinet measurements, so now we’re in the market for a much less common 36-inch stove to fit in that space.

There’s some drywall repairs and touch up paint to be done, baseboards and painting the trim, installing the hood vent and of course smaller projects like blinds, closet shelving, etc., but electrical and plumbing are pretty much done, so we should be able to get the final occupancy permit soon, start moving in and finish some aesthetic projects while we’re living in there!

This has been such a long time coming and wouldn’t be possible without our customers patronizing our business week in and week out. We can’t wait to finally host some farm events to thank you!