A Bountiful Bazaar

The annual Cotton Mill Farmers' Market holiday bazaar was in mid-November. It was very well attended, and Freaky Farms and Full Life Farm did quite well. Yay! I sold soap, lotion, and luffa in addition to some beets, which I decided that I did not have time to can. Santa was there too with an elf and some "reindeer": a pony, a miniature pig, and a miniature goat. Raine got his photo taken with Santa and some of his friends.

My winter garden is small, but it is coming along well. I have some kale, mustard greens, and arugula growing. Plus, I planted a bunch of brussels sprouts. I have not grown any of this type of plant before, so I was excited when they started sprouting brussels. :-) I got my garlic planting done just after Halloween. I planted 46 cloves this year. Otherwise, I have been cleaning up my garden beds, digging a couple of new beds (thanks to wwoofer Andreas!), and planning next year's garden. I can't wait to try some new plants, including a melon, lima beans, and a different type of basil called Mammoth Basil.

The porch now has a roof. Hooray! The grill has been moved onto it, and some firewood is stacked there for easier access to fuel for our wood-burning stove, which will keep us warm through the winter months. We plan to eventually screen in the porch.

Lastly, it looks like all four of our does are going to be having babies soon. December should be an exciting month!

-Annie

Fall Farm Tours

We participated in the local CSA's Fall farm tours day on October 15, and approximately 40 people visited us at The Haven that day. It was a beautiful day, and we enjoyed showing our visitors around and selling Freaky Farms products, including lotion. I have been experimenting with lotion-making lately and made some available for sale for the first time on the tour day. Sales went really well. :-)

My pepper plants are still producing well, especially after August when we started getting a little more rain. I don't think it rained a single day during the month of August. My eggplants are also doing very well, and I hope to have another crop of tomatoes come in before the first frost. I still have a few Moon Glow tomato plants still producing. My fall garden is also coming along. I planted beets, brussel sprouts, mustard greens, and kale - the latter two from saved seeds. Additionally, my arugula and dill plants reseeded well. Later this month I will plant garlic, and soon I will start harvesting luffa.

We haven't made much more progress on the porch, but we did get the floor weatherized. Paul and Jeff have also worked on weatherizing the barn by painting it with used motor oil. We've made more progress on the retaining wall. All of the tires have been pounded, and a big pile of dirt is ready to be spread around. More clover seed has been spread below the wall, and not all of it was washed away by rains this time. Yay!

We have sold all of the 2011 kids, and at least one doe has been bred again so far. Katie is due to kid in late December. Lily and Zella usually breed in late Sept/early Oct, but no mating has been witnessed, and Romulus, our buck, hasn't been obviously as horny as he was back in July, when he and Katie were observed to be getting it on. Perhaps Romulus has just been keeping his cool around the ladies more since then, or maybe all four does were bred back in July. Hopefully, the breeding will turn out to be spread out, but not knowing when to expect the does to kid makes things more challenging. Anyway, we are still getting milk, but it is less than a half gallon a day now. We made a lot more cheese with the milk this year, including mozzarella and chevre. Yum! We look forward to lots more cheese-making next year. :-)

-Annie

A Rainey Day

Well, the blog has not been updated in quite a while, but I have a pretty good reason: Raine is here! He was born on his due date, May 18. Unfortunately, he was not born at home as planned, but he is healthy (and absolutely precious). I, on the other hand, will finish recuperating someday. ;-) My water broke early and labor didn't progress fast enough. Low dose pitocin was needed to augment labor. I gave birth to Raine, without the use of pain meds, at 11am, after 33 hours of labor. Jeff, Terra, and my mom were present as well as my 2 midwives, who delivered me: my "dream team." :-) I also appreciate all of the wonderful women who participated in my blessing way ceremony and everyone who has been so supportive during the pregnancy and following the birth, including those who brought us yummy meals and gave us generous baby gifts.

So much has happened since the last post...Katie and Maegan each had a kid. They each had only one male kid, but Maegan's kid died a few weeks after birth and we don't know the cause. Both Katie and Maegan are good producers of milk, especially Maegan, for whom this is her second freshening. We were also given a couple of Lamancha baby girls by a local dairy, because they were sickly and they didn't have the time to manage them. One died but we were able to nurse the other back to health. Hopefully, we will be able to sell her as well as Zella's two girls and Katie's boy. Romulus, our buck whom we bottle fed as a baby last year, has gone into rut recently, and we think he has already bred Katie. It would be nice to space out the breeding of our four does, but we don't have the capability of doing that yet, so we're crossing our fingers that the does go into heat at different times. Fencing out more pasture is on the to-do list, among many many other things.

I think we started work on a retaining wall on the west side of the house sometime in March in order to take care of the erosion issues there. We are building it with dirt packed used tires. In May we began constructing a porch on the house. The floor and a ramp have been completed so far. The plan is to cover it and screen it in. We can't wait to grill on it and spend time there during the cooler hours of the day. It will also help shade that side of the house and provide extra space for all of our activities and things such as the baby stroller.

The gardens this year are coming along fairly well - even mine, although I have been rather neglectful lately with the baby to take care of. I planted around 25 tomato plants of 5 different vareties, and Paul planted many many more than that. We have canned at least 40 quarts of tomatoes and put many quarts of salsa in the freezer so far this year (thanks to the help of the Kunzlers, a family of five currently wwoofing with us). Lately, We've been enjoying tomato sandwiches with homemade mayo, pesto, and goat cheese. YUM! My favorite tomato varieties right now are Brandywine, Moonglow, and Tommy Toes. I'm also growing peppers, beans, and eggplant currently. I'm having much better luck with eggplant than I have in the past. I was also able to grow dill for the first time this year. However, the gourd and luffa vines aren't producing at all this year. I should ammend the soil well next year. Paul's feed corn and okra patches are doing well in the front garden currently.

I continue to make soap with the help of our wwoofers. I sell them at the farmers' market, when I am able to go, but they are also being sold in two local stores and on the internet.

We used an incubator to hatch out some new chicks, and now we have about 30 young chickens in the first pasture. All of the other Haven chickens are in the pasture with the new coop. Among the new chickens are a good number of Australorps, our best laying breed. Also, a neighbor gave us a Dominicker hen, who is often broody and makes a good mother. None of The Haven hens seem to be very broody, so we hope to use the Dominicker hen for hatching out new chicks in the future.

The newest additions at The Haven, though, are a couple of kittens that the wwoofing family found along the road between The Haven and Full Life Farm. We decided to keep them and make them barn cats in the hopes that they will help control our mouse population. We are currently calling them Thing One and Thing Two.

-Annie

Kidding season has arrived!

Lily had her babies on Feb. 24: triplets - all boys. Unfortunately, one of them didn't make it. He was born weak, with a lot of fluid in his lungs, and he died minutes after birth. It was sad, but grilled baby goat is pretty tasty. Anyway, that left 1 brown kid and 1 white one - just like her kids from last year, except male. Zella kidded exactly 1 week later, hours after my mom arrived for her visit. Zella also had triplets, as she did last year: 2 girls and a boy. So we have 5 new kids frolicking around The Haven right now. It is still uncertain whether or not our other 2 does will have babies this spring as well.

Lily had some problems following the birth. She was very lethargic, had a somewhat hard udder, and was not producing much milk. She got treated at the vet, and she is doing much better, although we are still concerned about her milk production. We supplemented her kids' diet with bottle feedings for awhile, using milk from another goat farmer and Zella milk after she kidded. We will start separating Lily and her kids at night this week in order to start milking her in the mornings. Hopefully, she will be producing a sufficient quantity of milk for us.

We got a disbudding iron and disbudded the kids ourselves this year. Hopefully, we did a good job, and none of them will grow horns. At least, we and the kids all appear to have survived the experience.

The mudroom and the hoop house are full of seedlings for this year's spring garden. Paul has already put many plants in his garden beds already, and I have some kale and mustard greens that overwintered in my beds, in addition to the garlic I planted last fall and the perennial herbs. Paul has dug more beds in the front yard and enclosed the area with some chicken wire to keep out the rabbits. We also planted a couple of blackberry bushes in the front garden area and 7 blueberry bushes in an area we cleared on the other side of the driveway. Four redbud trees were planted along the driveway, and an oak and a beech tree were planted near the northwest corner of the house, which will hopefully help shade the house someday. Lastly, some flowers were planted too, including a few irises and poppies given to us by a friend, as well as hundreds of daffodils, which we dug up from a nearby cow pasture. We are still trying to figure out what to do with our remaining yard, full of red clay and erosion issues.

We have separated our Australorps from our other chickens, mostly because the rooster was getting too beat up by the top dog rooster but also to be prepared with hatching eggs, whenever a hen goes broody and is ready to sit on some eggs. The Australorps are our best layers, and they now reside back in a chicken tractor in the first pasture. The rest of the chickens are still in the coop house, which we recently built and is working out really well.

Lastly, I am still on schedule to hatch out my baby in mid-May. Two months to go! My big belly has started slowing me down quite a bit, especially as things get crammed up under my ribs, which is really uncomfortable and even painful at times. Ack, I wonder what the next 2 months will be like! Anyway, Raine is a very active little guy (although he doesn't feel so little sometimes), and we are all excited to meet him in a couple months.

-Annie

Keeping Warm

The snow and ice from Sunday's strom are finally melting. Things have been closed down around here for most of the week, and we have spent a lot of time sitting around the wood burning stove watching videos. The goats have not been convinced to stray far from the barn, since the storm. Some of the chickens are out and about, but they often end up ice skating across the top of the crusty snow. Ha! We didn't quite get the new chicken house completed before this storm and cold spell hit, but it has a roof, walls, and roosts now, which are providing better shelter than the tractors did. Hopefully, we'll get a door on it soon, as well as nesting boxes and a storage cabinet for their feed and other supplies.


Jeff and I experienced a white christmas in Murphy, NC, where we celebrated the holiday with the Davis family. A bunch of us made a snowman, and I watched the others sled in the abundant wet snow. There was the requisite snowball fight as well. Inside, we enjoyed Aunt Ellen's fabulous cooking and playing board games, including Battlestar Galactica. Jeff and Bill turned out to be cylons, and Dawn and I were unable to prevent the brothers from anihilating the human race. Drats!

I did a lot of knitting in December, making hats and ear warmers for family members. I also knitted a tiny hat and scarf (modeled below by a homemade ugly doll), which I hope will fit the baby next winter, as well as barbie blankets for my nieces' dolls. I will be taking knitting lessons at the local yarn shop next week to learn how to make socks. I also got a book from the library that has instructions on how to make knitted toys. Fun! I am excited about my future knitting projects!!






















-Annie

New Additions to the Herd

We bought 2 new female goats this week, since we lost several females a few months ago. We bought them from a local family that raises dairy cows and goats. Although they don't look like it, the new goats are sisters. Maegan is almost 2 years old, and she has beautiful coloring. She had her first kids last fall, and she is still in milk. Katie is the same age as Remus and Romulus (born last spring), and she looks like R&R too. We were assured that both Maegan and Katie have been bred, so we hope to be milking 4 goats this year. We'd like to increase our milk production so that we can make and sell more goat milk products.

Both Zella and Lily look very pregnant (and like to lie down a lot now). Lily is especially big, and we expect her to kid first this year - probably early next month. Zella and then Katie should not be too far behind, and Maegan should kid in either April or May. Hopefully we can start staggering the breeding more so that we don't have gaps in milking, since the does should be dried off 2 months before kidding. Pete bred Zella and Lily again this year, and a beautiful chestnut spotted buck named Boaz bred Maegan and Katie. We can't wait to see what this kidding season brings!

The human herd is expanding too. :-) I have reached the halfway mark in my pregnancy, and my belly is expanding fast. I gained 7 pounds last month with the help of all the good holiday food. I've been feeling the baby moving around a lot the past few weeks, and I recently discovered that I can feel some kicking from the outside too. Hopefully the baby will do some good kicking sometime soon when his papa is around to feel it too.

-Annie