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Two Videos of our Baby Chicks and Spring Lambs Springing
July has swept over the farm and everybody is running around like crazy. We’re picking weeds, sowing our last crops, mulching the gardens, preparing for hay (if the weather ever cooperates, we’ll cut soon), mowing the lawns, selling the chickens, feeding the animals, chasing after Angus (our 1-year-old son), and so on. Even the chickens and…
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Our Season’s First Lacto-Fermented Garlic Dill Pickles
Holy crap I love pickles. I don’t care if Portlandia made it funny and fashionable to bash the brine lovers of the world, I wear my pickle pride … with pride. And so, when I saw that Cousin Lisa had crates of cucumbers for sale at the Dorset Farmers’ Market last Sunday, I blurted out, “Holy crap…
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Farm Tours; and We’ve Got Chicken, Yes We Do…
With two incredibly successful batches of chickens under our belt for the season, our freezers are packed to the top with some of the happiest, healthiest, most-carbon-sequestery chickens Vermont has ever seen. We’re incredibly proud of the work these birds did for the land while they were with us, and we’re just thrilled with the…
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Want to get to 10,000 steps every day? Farm.
Back in my web programming/marketing/design days, I sat. A lot. Almost all day, in fact. The things that you would expect to happen, happened: I got fat. I got slow. I had chest pains and leg pains and problems sleeping. I was angry a lot. I was addicted to beeps and pings and bright screens—the brighter…
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50 Sheep Added to Our Hayfield Restoration Program
For a few years now, Cally and I have been tossing around the idea of bringing sheep here to the farm to compliment the work that the poultry is doing in our pasture (soil) rehabilitation program. The advantages were clear: But, because we’re incredibly careful people—and despite thoughtful encouragement from elders we trust—we hadn’t braved the plunge…
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How We Raised Pastured Pork in 2014
Last year, as one of our early pastured meat experiments, we raised four Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs from Hidden Nest Farm in Argyle, New York. As we strive to provide any animal we bring onto this farm with a full, safe, and interesting life, we circled a 1.5 acre hillside—complete with an old horse stall, trees,…
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Hayfield Restoration With Chickens: The Exciting Results Can Be Seen From Space!
It is March 18th here in Vermont, and while all the bitter dispositions of Vermonters are slowly warming, the temperature outside is decidedly not. It is an 18° Windsday today—the wind is cutting straight through wool, beards, and bone. It turned out to be fortunate, however, that the weather is so bitter, because had it been pleasant—and had I…
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Hayfield Restoration with Chickens: Year One
I don’t have much more to add to my previous post on this subject. The real “proof-in-the-pudding” will arrive in the spring with the new grass. If the lush green stripes return, viola! We’ve done something real—though, in a small way. If not, we’ll go back to the drawing board.
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Hayfield Restoration with Chickens: Idea & Testing
We started raising chickens on grass this year for a reason that I don’t hear or read often. We didn’t do it for the chicken. We didn’t do it for the money. We did it for the grass. Those of you who are familiar with our farm know that while this farm has transitioned through…
