Thanks for checking out our August Wrap-up! August 2022 was a pretty slow month for us. We ended our watermelon season in July so there was not much work to be done on the farm this month except mowing the grass and cleaning up the barn. We are still getting plenty of chicken eggs, though the old girls seem to be slowing down a little bit. We have also been working behind the scenes to expand and improve our farming operation so that we can offer a wider variety of products to our customers with fewer gaps between crops.
For those who don’t know, we have seven chickens, all hens, that lay more eggs than even our large family can eat. They are all different breeds that lay different colored eggs. They are kept in two separate fortresses that give them plenty of room to run and fly and they even have have swings to keep them busy. Pictured to your right is mama’s favorite, a Polish hen named Ruth Bader Hensburg. RBH for short. She’s a funny lookin chicken who isn’t a great laying hen and she’s scared of her own shadow (due to her limited visibility from her cray cray poof) but she sure is pretty and if you get the chance to hold her, she is good at cuddling.
All of our chickens have plenty of table scraps, watermelon rinds, mealworms and organic feed accessible all day. Our favorite feed to use is Nutrena® Naturewise™ 16% Layer Pellet. The 16 % represents the amount of protein in the feed weed is an important part of a chicken’s diet and we like pellets better than crumbles because there is less waste. These girls will sometimes dump several pounds worth of feed on the ground and when they do that, crumbles seem to get stomped into the dirt, never to be seen again.
Besides our lovely ladies, we have been in an ongoing search for more space for our farm. If you read our first blog post, or you have been following us on instagram and Facebook, you may know that our farm is only about 7 acres and at least 5 of that is used to grow hay for a cattle rancher in South Georgia. The actual growing space is only about an acre and is not irrigated so I have had to get creative over the last three years to be able to water our crops and it doesn’t always work out very well. That means I have to fill up 160 gallon water tanks at my house, haul them to the farm, fill the stationary tanks and then rely on a rudimentary solar water pump system. So, we are looking for a space where we can utilize as much or as little ground as we want, that has a water source, and a place to keep my tractor out of the elements.
So that’s what’s been going on this month. I will try to post regularly so interested folks can find out what’s going on around here. Be sure to check out our shop to find out what is available.
