Summer is LONG gone, and I owe an update because we had quite the year. Early in the Spring, we added five ewe lambs to our farm, and they will be breeding stock starting this summer. As you may have seen in our previous
post, our breeding sow gave birth to 6 beautiful baby pigs and two have already found new homes. We are left with two gilts (unbred sows) and two boarlings. They make great pets but they are excellent meat animals too. We also fell in love with a goat we met and she happened to be for sale with her two sisters so they are roaming the pastures. But… we were offered a free Billy and he was just too cute to pass up.
Fast Forward
Fast forward to today (January 31, 2025), and our three goats
are expecting within the next three weeks and we just can’t wait. We’re still
not quite sure what to do with the babies when they are weaned, but we have a
few weeks to think about it. We have our sow and breeding boar together now and
I look forward to more babies as soon as she’s ready. Unfortunately, we
suffered a devastating loss with her piglets recently but I’m not ready to
write about it just yet. We will keep you up to date on all the babies as we
have done before and will continue to take the wins with the losses as they
come.
The Good News
There is good news, however. We have processed our first pork and it will be for sale as soon as I can get the labeling requirements nailed down. So look for pork chops, bacon, and sausage in our store or on the Red Hills Online Market in February!
Garden Update
Our garden has been replanted after a very long battle with the tractor. After having the fuel pump supposedly rebuilt at Shiver Diesel in Midway, the AgPro in Tallahassee reported that the pump was locked up so we ended up having to replace it. I will say our experience with Shiver was awful and I will never recommend them to anyone I know, even though they are local and supposedly the only place around that can rebuild fuel injection pumps. I ended up fixing the tractor myself after neither shop could repair it, no matter how much I paid them. The problem actually ended up being an acorn stuck in the fuel tank right where the fuel line connects!
Anyway, we have had good luck with it since then and were able to plant broccoli and Brussels sprouts in our garden plot. Those will hopefully be ready any day now. A few weeks later, we planted 600 sweet Vidalia onions and they actually survived the cold and snow we had earlier this month. I also planted 150 strawberry plants, but don’t expect to see those on the market. Those are just for our family since we LOVE strawberries almost as much as watermelon. Speaking of which, we will be starting the watermelon plot next week. *Sigh*. Our work is never over, but I have to admit. I love planting and harvesting as much as possible. It’s such a rewarding experience to be able to produce such good produce.
Stay Tuned
Stay tuned to the website. I will try to post updates more often and have already started working on a post about the freak snow we had earlier this month. Thanks for reading our (Late) Summer Update!
