...And Taking A Breath

Over the past seven years, we've had plenty of opportunities to dip our toes in the waters of making a living as a family farm. Marketing books and classes, trying different projects and products and tracking them to find out what was profitable and what wasn't, and which of those profitable activities we most enjoy...and here we are this year really pushing through with a business plan, an advertising plan, and some clear goals for the year.

I actually found myself telling Matt earlier this month that our "Q2 outlook" was better than we'd expected. Which gave me pause. It's hard sometimes to think of turkeys as inventory or of what we've built as a family as a business. We've been lucky to have great turnaround on all of our farm products this year, due in large part to a refreshed advertising strategy and a new method for deciding where to invest our time. Small scale urban farming is a tough business - it can sometimes be hard to sell the local community on the value of what we provide and finding just the right "niche" at just the right price point to ensure we make more than $1/hour has been a challenge.

To that end, where the first part of our Spring was filled with babies and setting up new projects, the last half of our Spring has been filled with selling the fleeces from our end of April shearing, packaging up and shipping non-local orders, and hatching and selling all kinds of birds. And paperwork. Lots and lots of paperwork. Business taxes, renewing farm business licensing, hatchery licensing, beekeeping licensing, breed association registrations for animals as they are born, and advertising in upcoming endangered breed publications. The paperwork is the least fun part of what we do.

And now we are taking a breath before we start in to Farmer's Market season.

We've grabbed a few new strays this Spring. We've rescued two roosters in the past month - one was dumped in a gulley near the canyons and the other was dropped off at the front door of a neighbor's store. It took them a few minutes to get acquainted - a little power struggle and now that they have an understanding, there is peace.

Last week, we picked up our first bee swarm of the year. We've been on the UDAF swarm capture list for the past 10 years and this is always the busiest time of the year. We have learned, and we planned ahead this year - with plenty of empty hives waiting for captures!

And we are back in the swing of milking the girls, since we always dry them up 60 days before calving. 

We are expecting our last calf of the year this next week - a mid-size Jersey from one of the small Standard babies we rescued two summers ago. She's so uncomfortable, we know she will be relieved to have this pregnancy behind her!

I've been busy in the pottery studio this Spring, too - gearing up for Market Season!

How are things for all of you, as we head in to Summer?

Fleeces and Cups...

It has been a long winter. Pink eye, a goat with a UTI, and constant cold and wet have made animal management in our little neck of the woods the usual challenge. The sheep seemed to time the birth of every lamb with the onslaught of a Spring snowstorm.

We welcomed our last lamb of the Spring, this little brown ewe, early this past week. She's a gorgeous chocolate brown With Two Grey Hills markings. Our first time mothers tend to be a little "wild" and wary of having us around their babies. They stomp their feet to keep us away and jump to get around, or OVER, us so getting them and their lambs safely stowed after birthing can be a junior rodeo.

One of our neighbor's dogs killed another neighbor's rabbit and is constantly coming under our fence, so getting the lambs out of the pasture is essential for protection from one urban version of predators.

The shearer came this morning and sheared our entire flock. We are up in the teens now, so shearing ourselves was not an option. Our shearer is wonderful and it took him an hour to do an entire flock that would have taken us a whole day. The fleeces turned out beautifully, and I spent the rest of theday skirting and storing and photographing the fleeces we will sell. It's nice to be done with our major sheep management for this time of year before May for a change!

Calving our mini and mid Jersey calves starts within the next week! Our rescued Jerseys are expecting babies this Spring.

And I'm back to carding wool and making yarn and rugs, and throwing cups for an upcoming show.

What creative plans do you have for this Spring?

More Lambs!

Two more lambs made an appearance since my last blog post - one on Easter day! 

This handsome Easter ram is doing very well...

And so is his little half-sister, born early yesterday morning as we were trying to leave for work. Our experienced mothers are done lambing, so we are getting in to the first time mothers now. They take a bit more work, ensuring that they are feeding their babies and looking after them. If they aren't, we step in and bottle feed.

The father of the lambs we've had so far is four-for-four beautiful, healthy babies! The proud papa celebrated with a "cold one" - LOL

The twins are growing like crazy! We are actively looking for names...

The geese are still laying eggs - and we are incubating as many as we can.

Everyone is here is enjoying the beautiful weather...

Are you?

New Life and Providing Our Own...

Our first lambs arrived early last week. We were lucky enough to get two twin ewes born to one of our experienced mothers! They were very tiny at birth, which made us nervous, but their mom is seasoned and a very diligent and nurturing ewe. Every time she stands up, she rallies them to eat, and they are now growing like little weeds!

We've spent the past couple of weeks filling our freezers. It's that time of year!

We slaughtered our beef steer just in time for two more to take it's place. We let the beef hang for 14 days, no small feat, since the steer weighed over 1200 pounds. Then we spent a few days cutting up and butchering the meat ourselves. We ended up with about 700 pounds of roasts, steaks, and stew meat; and about 100 pounds of hamburger.

We've exclusively raised our own meat for about 10 years, so we've been able to get the butchering down to a science. We have also been able to buy, as we could afford them, the commercial saws, grinders, and wrapping equipment that make the process go much faster.

Because of the timing, we took the three pigs we raised over the winter to a local butcher for slaughtering and processing. You can't age pig meat like you can beef, so it was too much for our little family to do both a large beef and three pigs all at the same time.

And you can't herd pigs anywhere they don't want to go...

So, now our freezer is full for another year.

And, if the weather keeps cooperating - soon our gardens will be full, too.

Do you have plans for a garden this year?