Phew.  Glad that is over with!  6 pigs are now in a much more spacious paddock on fresh, higher, drier ground.  Spring is here and it’s time to start rotating pastures again.  I think we’ll just use the trailer next time.

Busy days are here again, but I wanted to briefly share some photos of our first lambs here on the farm.  Ridgely, our resident photographer has been camped out in the lambing jug and sent us some of his pictures.  The white and black lamb is named Frankie, thanks to a generous contributor of our Fund The Well project, who won the naming raffle.  Naturally, the black lamb then had to be named Johnny.  Both lambs are girls and seem quite healthy so far.

We had the easiest first lambing experience that we could have hoped for.  We saw the signs that lambing time was near and were monitoring Bonita’s condition regularly, but still happened to miss the whole thing!  When we check on her at 5 am yesterday, she was just standing there, with a number of extra legs sticking out from under her!  She is a great mom so far, nudging her girls to nurse, baahing at them, licking them and snuggling up with them.

We have 3 more pregnant ewes, and it looks like it will won’t be long before we are joined by more lambs!

Head over to our IndieGoGo page to check out the short documentary about our latest farm project!

FUND THE WELL!

It’s that time of year again!   Forget these cold temperatures by signing up for your CSA share and spend the evening toasty warm inside, looking up new recipes for your summer bounty.  We have kept our prices the same as last year and added the option of a Market Share for our Thomaston patrons.  Check out the CSA page for more information and a link to the registration form.  Thank you!

We have entered into an exciting collaborative relationship with another business, Harvest Moon Pizza.  We are working together to revitalize and steward historic farmland in Bremen.  Drilling a well for a reliable source of irrigation is a key part of this effort and we will be launching a fundraising campaign for this project in February.  We will share more about this project over the next two weeks, leading up to the release of a short film asking for your support.

For today, we would like to share some historic photos of the farm, which has been owned by the family of Mary Sue Weeks for at least 313 years.  It was farmed for vegetables, hay and poultry over the years.  It also served as the community center where both the school house and post office were located, and still stand today.

For additional updates and photos, check out www.facebook.com/fundthewell.

Learn more at http://www.harlowgallery.org/wordpress1/?p=6064!

We were wondering which we would be able to eat first, our first chicken or our first egg.  We had our first chicken dinner on Wednesday, and found our first egg the very next day.  We’ve been collecting one egg each day since, until today when we found two!  It won’t be long before we can start putting our pile of egg cartons to good use!

Radish

Cabbage

Kohlrabi

Purple Kohlrabi

Broccoli Raab

Bok Choy

Beet

Broccoli, starting to crown

Leftovers from market

First day in a new paddock

The Dude has finally learned to crow

Finally getting around to putting up pictures from two weeks ago and, of course, everything looks totally different now!

I thought we should visit the chicken yard today as it’s been a while since the blog has checked in on the layers.

“The Dude,” as Michael calls him, and the runt.

Or as Anna referred to him for some time, “What is his name again, The Dudley?”

A Buff.  We’ll have to include the Golden Comets next time, they hid out in the coop for the first week or two.

We moved the pigs to a paddock in the woods… I think they are pretty happy with the new digs.