Fall may be the time of year when nature prepares to go to sleep for the winter, but it’s a very busy time on the farm. Right now we’re harvesting our storage crops and putting them away for the winter farm markets. We’ve also been doing a lot of canning and preserving. This means we’ll have plenty of items for sale throughout the winter at the farmer’s markets we’ll be attending. We’re not sure yet where we’ll be, but we’ll let you know via the mailing list and the facebook page, as well as on our website calendar. Don’t worry! We’ll make ourselves easy to find.
After a relaxing summer, the horses are getting back to work. We are seeding most of our garden with cover crops, which serve a dual purpose: they protect the topsoil through the winter, and they will provide “green manure” for next year’s vegetables. The big news around here is that we’re doubling the size of our garden for 2017. We sell out of vegetables every time we visit the market, so we want to meet the demand for healthy, yummy food as best we can!
Our last batch of chickens is about four weeks old now. They will be processed in mid-October, after having spent their lives in the equivalent of chicken paradise. Our Christmas turkeys are 8 weeks old now and will be ready at the end of November or beginning of December.
We will start processing the pigs about a month later than originally planned. They’ve been running around a lot, getting plenty of exercise in this beautiful weather, and we’ve decided to let that continue. Although it lowers our feed conversion rate (FCR) it makes for happier pigs, and very tasty, lean pork. We’ll do a few each month until December or January.
Finally, we also need to get the farm ready for winter. That means cutting and stacking lots of firewood, fixing everything that needs to be fixed (always lots of things on a farm that need fixing), storing tools and implements, and doing general fall clean-up.
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