(Even) More New Kids, Family Visit, Piglet Watch, Chickens & Cattle on the Move
Im between the rain this morning and the bouts of severe weather, we’ve had some seriously gorgeous spring days lately. I try to remind myself that this is our reward for brutal summers and to enjoy it while it lasts!
Don’t forget to sign up for an April farm tour if you’re interested in seeing the farm for yourself. All the details are on our tours and classes page here.
My family (parents, sister, brother-in-law and niece) got to town for a visit yesterday and the first stop was the goats of course!
And it was very sweet because the last time my niece was here in 2022, our goat Heidi had a set of twins and my niece, Margot, named the female Margot. (Those first three pictures are from 2022 right after the kids were born and cleaned off).
Then on Saturday, the day before their arrival, Margot’s daughter, Jazzy (named after Margot’s bestie) had her first kid! And she was the absolute chillest little newborn, letting my mom and Margot hold her for probably 30 minutes straight!
Besides Jazzy’s new kid, another yearling, Pixie, had a doe mid last week to kick off another round of kidding. Pixie is 5th generation from one of our original goats, Lemon, and I had to mine a list of specific citrus varieties to come up with her name! So her line is Lemon -> Clementine -> Mandarin -> Bergamot -> Pixie -> and the new doeling.
And then one of Uma’s great granddaughters, also from Lemon’s line, had a very tiny bow-legged doe on Sunday, too. We’ve seen a few cases of contracted tendons in kids in the past and they’ve always straightened out, so likely that will be the case for her, too.
We moved our three sows back to the paddock that abuts the three-stall farrowing barn last week and now we’re on piglet watch for the red spotted gal.
The white/blond sow is due on April 4th and we didn’t see the red sow be bred, but based on her underline and size, she’ll go last, a week or more behind the white sow.
Spots is in full beached whale status, laying around with her udder swelling more and more every day. But she doesn’t quite have her milk in yet and hasn’t started nesting, so it’s hard to say how much longer until she has her piglets arrive!
Meanwhile, the feeder pigs are still deep in their large woods paddock and half of the group went to the processor on Tuesday for harvest. It’s always bittersweet, but knowing we gave them a great life and that they will go on to nourish your families does make us proud.
The other group will go on April 2nd and then it’ll be just the breeders and their new piglets on the farm!
The cattle are making fast rotations around the farm right now, so as not to eat the spring forage down too quickly and let it bounce back!
Aside from this morning, when we got 2.6 inches of rain, the rain lately has come in smaller amounts which is ideal to provide enough moisture for everything but not make the fields too muddy and sloppy.
And the chickens are moving paddocks again after we parked them for the winter. One coop needs some major repairs and upgrades, so we are wagon wheeling the pasture rotations around them, while the other two coops we are still moving forward in our usual rotations.
We’re getting ready to get a new flock of teenage hens in at the end of April, so will be selling off our oldest and least productive flock.
At the same time, Cade and Grant have been playing around with a new skid design for a mobile coop that we can drag versus relying on an old trailer and at that point we may semi-retire some of our original coops and set up smaller flocks in fields that haven’t had chickens yet where we can wagon wheel their pasture rotations as well and move the whole coop less frequently.