WellsTavernFarm’s Weblog

Come to the farm and get fresh eggs today!

Chickens:
The chickens are coming through on their end of the deal… we feed them fine, organic food, and keep them happy, then they give us brown eggs. The eggs are here! Ten a day so far. Good job chickens. We have 50 hens, so we should, theoretically, be getting 45-ish a day on our best day… sometime soon. If you want eggs, please let me know! I have them available. And boy, are they tasty! Mmmm.

Goats:

Patches has a new home. We found her food possessiveness too much around the babies, and she has a new home on a new farm. Thanks for all of the interest in her.
Ava is a fabulous mommy. Her kids, Bambi and Flower, are still jumping and practicing their acrobatics.
Arrianne and Isabelle, our two Nubians, are happily co-existing with Ava, the babies, and Sassy & George.
Sassy is filling out and looking mighty goaty. She is still a little person in a goat-suit, but very happy pretending that she is a goat.
And George, is our King of the Beasts. He is coming into his own as the only male among some very eligible and good looking females, if you get what I mean!

Cows:
They graze, chew cud. Sleep, drink. Graze, swat a fly, moo, chew cud, drink, doze.

Pigs:
After seeing other people’s pigs get weighed at the Northampton Cooperative Auction on Tuesday, Myles thinks that our pigs are nearer to three-hundred pounds (each) than I thought. They will be freezered soon.

Turkeys:
Who knew that I could come to LOVE those sort-of ugly creatures? They are very lovable, and growning very well on grass, bugs, weeds, grain and scratch-feeds.

Family News: We went out for dinner at Elmer’s in Ashfield. Wow! What a great local dinner! They served up: Grilled Shrimp (for Myles) or Sesame Tofu (for me), with Jasmine Rice, Succotash and Peach Salsa Salad. Seth had yummy macaroni and cheese. Great dinner, onnly Friday night’s frm 5 to 9.
Elmer’s Store is located at 396 Main St., Ashfield, MA 01330
Phone: (413) 628-4003

George, our Boer Buck, and mommy Boer/Nubian cross, Ava behind him.

Ava’s babies, Flower and Bambi. (Flower is white, Bambi is deer colored)

Flower and Bambi. They were born last month. We think they are great!

(the photo is of one of our belted galloways, by the way)

If you are looking for someplace to find a pretty darned good directory of “local” meats, eggs, cheese, milk, produce, and other farm-created local to you products, look no further than sustainabletable.com.
We just got our farm listed at the Eat Well Guide “www.eatwellguide.org, is a free online directory of nearly 9,000 farms, stores, restaurants and other outlets that offer sustainably-raised meat, poultry, dairy, and eggs in the United States and Canada. Consumers simply enter their zip or postal code, or take advantage of the advanced search feature, to look for animal products free of antibiotics and added hormones, as well as sustainable production methods that include organic, pasture raised and heritage.”
Yeah, we find our neighbors and other nearby farms offering many of the same or similiar products, but you know as well as I do, that they are not the same, and will not taste the same, and that is a GOOD THING! For instance, there’s a farm about a half-mile down the road, who sells brown eggs. We too, sell brown eggs. Both farms (theirs and ours) may price our eggs the same. We may attract certain other neighbors based upon our pre-established relationships, and we may based purely upon proximity ot roads, and traffic. All that aside, we have different chickens. Ours may be eating different foods, and are clearly in a different period of their life than that farm’s chickens. Let’s be very clear here, I am not saying that either one of our products is better than the other… what I am saying is that the product is like a brand, and they can happily co-exist… especially with such high-quality products like one of the most perfect foods out there — the egg.

Do you think that there is a flavor or quality difference between “brands” of eggs, or am I proving myself crazy once again?

Perhaps the analogy to “counting sheep” works. It’s like the cartoon that reads: I don’t know how many sheep I’ve got, I count up to sixty five and fall asleep.” I think that is what the turkeys are trying to do — fall asleep! Myles and I went out last evening to round up the turkey flock and put them in their protective house (‘that jack built’) for the night and there were two turkeys outside the brand new five foot high fence. Okay, it was later than they usually get put to bed… maybe they hopped over the fence in an effort to out the others to sleep? And then they stopped counting at 2? …maybe?

Great news on the chicken front: another hen has begun the egg-laying-journey! We got the sixth egg in a series from the Black Australorp that is maturing fastest, and there was another egg; a new, rounded and very small egg with a distinctly different shell composition. I think that came from a Barred Rock. We will know more when we finish the new chicken area, and give them a new and bigger pasture, because they will be nearer the house, and have a large laying box area. And, if we can amass the money, we want to set up wireless surveillance cameras to monitor the animals. The latest Mac magazine we got had a great article on that.

At about $18 for a 50# bag of organic feed for the chickens, we plow (actually THEY plow) through a bag plus a week. Those eggs should be coming fast and furiously very very soon. I have ordered up 100 of the 18 egg boxes. We figure that with almost fifty egg laying chickens, we will be getting four dozen eggs daily. Rather than take up more refrigerator space, we decided that a dozen and a a half FRESH organically fed chicken eggs, would be easier to move around, store and market. We will find out soon enough if that was the right decision or not These eggs are crafted by chickens who not only enjoy the organic grains, and organic scratch feed, but also the weeds, grasses, and bugs, and who are helping to perpetuate their heritage breeds, by creating a marketable product with a “face” to associate the product with. We do confine them at night to protect them from predators.

We remind you, today, to buy local whenever possible, and remember where your food comes from.

Communities reap more economic benefits from the presence of small farms than they do from large ones. Studies have shown that small farms re-invest more money into local economies by purchasing feed, seed and other materials from local businesses, whereas large farms often order in bulk from distant companies. Buy local. You’ll strengthen your local economy – Buying local food keeps your dollars circulating in your community. Getting to know the farmers who grow your food builds relationships based on understanding and trust. Who knows what else might happen?

Operation “Keep the Neighbors Happy” — otherwise known as put up another fence to try to keep the turkeys in, was completed yesterday.

Prior to the newly erected 60″ poultry fence, the flock of lilacs would hop over, or duck under their poultry net, and wander around the garden, pasture, lawn, driveway… and then meander across the road and… um… wander into the neighbors’ beautifully manicured, lush green lawn. If I were a turkey, I would head that way too. But, that is not a great way to be a neighbor with farm animals, so we purchased $166 worth of fencing material (300′ of 2″ opening poultry fencing that is 60″ high) and ten light duty metal fence posts. Using a bunch of existing fence posts (and just attaching the new fence to the other side) we conserved posts, and managed to have one left over to use to prop the door to the pasture closed. I am probably speaking too soon, but the new fence kept them in for more than five hours of turkey-plotting, and turkey-scheming. We’ll see how long this “small-hurdle” keeps the birds in!

The new-to-us pygmy goats, “Wild Bobby” and “Little Brownie” (they came to us with those names) are happy munching nettles and weeds in the pasture with the Belted Galloways and nine free-ranging chickens.

The piggies are happy that the turkeys might stay in their adjoining pasture. It was annoying to the piggies to have to stop wallowing in their daily mud-baths, and get up and waddle across their pasture to sniff the turkeys that had gotten loose and decided to visit the pigs.

The rest of the goaties enjoy the hot dry weather, which provides them ample opportunity to take dust baths and stretch out (legs out, head and neck stretched out) and look very, very dead… until they twitch. And then we breathe again… I guess they are still alive! Flower and Bambi the babies kids that were born last month are packing on the pounds, and practicing their triple lutz’ and getting a lot of air-time. I can’t wait to see them perform on ice!

We are still getting an egg a day from the chickens. Our family believes that our extra cost and hassle involved in finding and purchasing certified organic feed for the chickens will create a better end product. As we pull our hair out in frustration over our constant need to herd our flocks (turkeys and chickens) — they are raised outside of confining cages, and are either free-ranging, or pastured during the day (and housed at night in spacious, wired-windowed houses to keep them safe from predators). Our chickens and turkeys don’t have any herbicides, pesticides, chemicals, or animal parts in them. Although we are not using certified organic feed for the turkeys, what they are eating is a New England produced grain that is free from animal by-products, and has a high enough protein content so that our turkeys will get the nourishment that they need. Turkeys need a very high percentage of protein in their diet — ours are eating a game bird bagged feed that we most recently purchased in Keene, NH… and it contains 28% protein.

We hope that all of this expense is of value. Is it?

Our two goats that we raised for meat brought $102 each (less commissions) at the auction Tuesday. Not bad for a season’s work! Patches our Nubian Boer cross goat is still available for sale — and we have described her as people-friendly and mildly food-possessive around other goats. It is not hard to believe that one, if you look at her physique!

Work continues with our new chicken enclosure. More on that, maybe even with photos… tomorrow?

We are seeing more eggs!
They are little, but eggs.

“Patches” the Nubian/Boer Goat is still for sale:
We are looking for $150. We thought that we had sold her over the weekend, but that buyer had a crisis come up with her horses, and wasn’t able to pay.

We sold our two neutered goats that we raised with meat as the intent. We will see tomorrow or the next day what their check yields.

Turkeys are beautiful and growning great.

They spend days outside of the ‘house that jack built’ roaming around the garden and yard. We tried to confine them with a small fence, but it didn’t work out. It is just easier to let them roam free, than fight with keeping them in.

At long last… an egg!

We walked into the pen with the assorted colored chickens– all brown egg layers — and there was a very over-protective Barred Rock who reached out to go out of her way to peck at me. THAT was not usual. It took about two seconds before I realized that she had an EGG. This is discovered egg number one for our fifty-plus flock. I am sure that some of the free-range chickens have been laying for a little while, but we just have not discovered their eggs.

Sometime today we are scheduled to construct a very large chicken enclosure in our big barn, and hang roosting boxes — which are yet to be built. Now that there has been an egg-sighting (or egg-xciting!) we need to hurry through this process so that the chickens can get comfortable in their new environment and LAY EGGS. This is what we have been dumping organic feed at $18-$25 a week into them for, since April.

I have avoided blogging for as long as I could possibly put it off. I guess that it is one of the pitfalls to laziness — it is far easier to blog than perform an update to our website. (sigh) Oh well. Such is life.

There are so many things happening on the farm — it is only time to do an update!

1. The Lilac Turkeys are growing like weeds — and boy do we grow big, healthy weeds in the Northeast. In July we constructed a house for the turkeys with a large fenced yard for them to play in during the day. We call the house “the house that Jack built” — we don’t actually know anybody named Jack, but it just seemed like the right thing to do.

We got a phone call from another farmer regarding lilac turkeys. We are still new to the turkey scene, and I have asked Myles to return that phone call and attempt to answer her questions. If anyone knows more/anything about lilac turkeys, we are looking for information. We are members of “RareHeritageTurkey” and highly recommend that listserv if you have an interest or farm or fancy, rare, heritage breed turkeys.
2. Goats are great. We are so pleased with the kids that were born in August to Ava. We are very happy with the way that our UMass spring buck is growing, and we look forward to the acquisition of two more goatie-friends this weekend… more details about that later! In short: we are getting two (intact) and horned male pygmy goats from a family in Hampden, MA. Since one of the “baby” goats has already incurred a “boo-boo” as Seth would say, Myles and I have decided that it will be far too dangerous to place them in the same pasture with our herd (with babies) and so we picked up lines, collars and stakes and will have them graze their way through the brush, and small trees at our property across the road.

More on that baby goat injury — we have no idea what actually happened; it seems like she jammed or fell, or more probably, was bunted by our horned Boer/Nubian cross, Patches. The white kid, “Flower” now walks with a limp, and often holds her front leg up. I think that she will be fine after a few days.

To that end, we have agreed to sell Patches, who was a perfectly well-behaved goat BEFORE the kids were born… now she is just too rough around them. I think that Patches will be living on a farm in West Brookfield before the end of next week.

3. Belted Galloways continue to graze. They just do their own thing/in a bovine-kind-of-way-at- that ruminant-kind-of-pace.

4. Chickens are growing. Our Delawares are pastured during the day with their rooster. The rest of the flock either live in the former milkroom or have already been re-located to the goat/galloway pasture, as completely loose fowl. The chickens that we have let loose in this fashion have survived the many predators that we know lurk at night: neighbors domesticated dogs, coydogs, foxes, raccoons, bears, weasels, ermine, and skunks. Lucky chickens– but very happy. Eventually we will move theentire flock into this confinement-free location. That will be a project for another day.

5. Pigs. They just are. I guess of all of the critters that we have, they are the ones that I like the least. They are quite smart, but very pushy, and extremely loud. I think that piggy squeal is the most objectionable feature that they have. Other than that, they are great. We really need to prepare to say goodbye to them soon. The freezer is calling.