It’s finally salad season, with early crops mature enough to pick. We’ve got some beautiful radishes, along with lettuce, spinach, green onion, mustard, and beet greens. The rhubarb is also thriving, but it’s too early for other fruits to combine it with!
Posts under ‘Farming’
Buying Local Hay
With the unusually cold spring, there’s still not enough vegetation in our fields for the goats to browse on, so we supplement their diet with hay. Last fall, we bought four tons for the winter, but that’s now mostly gone. Fortunately, we made it through until summer. In the past, we’ve had to drive south [...]
Cow Cuddling
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyWnWpE0Jf8 “Inspiring people, businesses and organizations to enjoy the unique harmony between man, animals and nature.” So says a Dutch website (as translated by Google Translate) promoting “cow cuddling” or “cow hugging.” And they’re charging 25 euros for 2 hours, or 47.50 euros for 3 hours. The premise is simple: dressed in protective coveralls, you [...]
Is summer finally here?
With the hackberry trees in bloom and National Weather Service predicting a week of lows in the 40s (after one more night of frost), it’s tempting to declare that winter is finally over. Maybe it is, maybe not. We’ve seen frost as late as the second week of June. Nevertheless, it’s time to plant tomatoes. [...]
Milk as fertilizer
Here’s an article that suggests milk makes excellent fertilizer. We use our milk to make cheese, but we do use our whey as fertilizer on our garden and forage crops.
How others do it
We’ll be milking ten goats this year– more than we’ve ever milked before, but not enough to keep our equipment busy. So we’ve been looking for a cow dairy from which to buy milk for making other varieties of cheese.
This week, we came to an agreement with a dairy out west of us. It’s a huge facility with state of the art equipment– and the owner has a reputation for doing things right.
Here’s a look at how a large but ethical dairy does things.
Something New: Jerusalem Artichoke
(Wikimedia photo.) As winter finally breaks into spring, my thoughts turn to gardening. The promise of fresh food that is both tastier and better for the earth than anything we can buy in a store is tantalizing. As soon as tax season is over, I’m ready to trade my laptop for a shovel. Our soil [...]
Canada’s Egg Police: Industry vs. Small Farmers
In Canada, a small farmer with 99 or fewer hens can sell “ungraded” eggs at his/her gate, but nowhere else. So a small farmer who sells eggs at the farmers market is breaking the law. With prices for farmstead eggs skyrocketing, industrial egg producers are fighting back against what they see as an infringement [...]
Ranch Picture of the Day
(DJ Mitchell Photo) Suellen & Annie This picture is our East view. Obviously taken during a warmer time of the year. DJ is already getting spring fever and has ordered some seeds for the garden.
The facts about food and farming
“On the one side, the hard-line aggies seem convinced that a bunch of know-nothing urbanites want to send them back to Stone Age farming techniques. On the other side, there’s a tendency by agricultural reformers to lump together all farms (or at least those that aren’t purely organic, hemp-clad mom-and-pop operations) as thoughtless ravagers of [...]
