WellsTavernFarm’s Weblog

Here is a quick look at the varied stages of development and issues that we have been addressing on the farm lately:

• We have very content puddle ducks who have discovered the singular, circular indentation of soil in their pasture, and these ducks just wait for spring showers to fill up their puddle! They play and splash and quack until the water has been flung far and wide, and then wait again for the rain to refill the puddle.
• The turkey poults continue hatching, and the Buff Orpington and Light Brahma Chicks are proving themselves easy-starters.
• The goslings (Pilgrim Geese) are learning how to control their gigantic “feet” and they tend to look more like a “Godzilla” remake than a cute baby bird, clomping around their pen. squawking.
• We have found a suitable mate for our Gloucestershire Old Spots gilts. For this first breeding, we will be using the services of a younger Red Duroc boar. He has a nice even temperament and is very healthy.
• Tending fences, moving animals to and from pastures, burning brush that fell during the winters’ huge ice storms, buying hay, performing general spring cleanup, starting seeds for the vegetable garden, constructing cold frames, bottle feeding the White Galloway Bull calf, tending goats, collecting about four dozen eggs daily, buying grain from the local coop, and mucking out winter accommodations have been on the itinerary lately.
• Raising my boys, ages 4 and 9 months, has also been on my plate — especially since the three of us are home, sick this week. 

We love spring!  Really, we do.

Sunday, March 29, 2009:  A gray, “rainy” New England day.  No “park” just substitute “Garden” for “park” — and as always, we have lots of “other things”!  (yes, it WAS the Cowsills)

The rhubarb is just beginning to emerge.

The newly constructed cold frame/hot frame.  If all goes as planned, it will get lots of use.  We have it placed in the turkey pasture at present.

It is just a perfect oatmeal walnut chocolate chunk & chip cookie day.  Three weeks ago, I whipped up a batch that was supposed to actually make a gross (144) of cookies — and I believe the recipe too — it was more than ten cups of ingredients before I added the chocolate!  We ate our way (painlessly! I might add) through half of the dough a few weeks ago. When I got sick of baking cookies that day, I rolled out the last of the dough, wrapped it in waxed paper, and double bagged it with the baking directions, and threw it into the freezer.   Voila!  Today, we have cookies.  Mmmm.

• A British rock group, Vanity Fare, poked fun at the Cowsills by naming their 1968 album The Sun, the Wind, and Other Things. (You can bet that I will use that as a blog title in a few weeks!)
• ‘”The Rain, The Park and Other Things” is known to many as “The Flower Girl”
• #1 in Canada in the week of November 13, 1967

“No one thinks of Winter when the grass is green.” a quote from Rudyard Kipling

We are getting warmer in Western Massachusetts. The sap is still running, as the nights are below freezing, and the days are a warm spring temperature. It is the end of March and we lived through the Ides and the weirdness surrounding the full moon this month, and here we are! Hatching baby ducks, turkeys and chickens, repairing fences, caring for the pigs and cows, goats and lambs.

We put the ducks and Mrs. Goose out to pasture the other day. They have their own house to sleep in, to keep them safe from predation. They are very happy grazers, and they “talk” all day long about the sights they see!

We have dozens and dozens of fresh brown and tinted (green) eggs available for sale for just $3 a dozen. Avoid the retail markup and buy direct from the farm. Just stop by and we can deliver your order — carside, like the sit-down chain restaurants in Greenfield with a name beginning with a tree fruit.

Look for a new farm sign on the barn next week, and let me know what you think of it. In the meantime, we will be constructing cold frames (convertable to hot beds) and starting our seeds for the market garden. We will also be eating lots and lots of eggs.  You should too.  They are awfully good for you.   All of the egg’s vitamin A, D and E is in the egg yolk. The egg is one of the few foods which naturally contain Vitamin D.

I have garden envy. Have you seen the photos of the planting of the White House Garden… the planting map, and the beautiful started plants that they put in? Wow. Very, very impressive and inspiring.

I am building cold frames this week, and starting seeds either later this week, or the beginning of next week. We have had beautiful 60 degree sunny weather and most of the snow has melted around here. Until today… this afternoon the forecast called for partly cloudy, chance of showers and high in the lower 40’s. We haen’t made it there yet, as we just had a snow shower with a beautiful blue sky and puffy white clouds in the sky. So it goes, March in New England!

Unpredictable. Last night as we were falling asleep, Myles and I we were doing a baby turkey count (called “poults”) and we thought that we were on the right track for having the target number of poults to raise for Thanksgiving ‘09.  This morning we woke up and realized that  the latest tragedy occurred last night while we were sleeping: the heat source in the barn where we raise the poults stopped heating at some point during the night last night.  It was a clear March night in New England, low in the lower 20’s.  We lost eleven poults to the cold.

We will make up for the loss by either purchasing more poults from a hatchery later this spring, or try to make do with less.

The tragedy is very, very sad.  I cannot figure out why the heat was working fine late last night, and then wasn’t by early this morning. Life is so fragile.  Myles and I are very distraught over the loss of the little lives. We have spent over 840 hours on each poult we lost in getting them to today. And then it was cut short.  Just like that.

Economically the poults we lost were worth over a hundred dollars to us if we were to sell them as poults, and they were worth nearly half again that number if we were to try to replace them – which cannot be done as easily as placing a phone call or web order.

Yes, we are realists as far as that goes: we know that we are raising a bird that is nearly impossible to find on the open market — hence, nearly impossible to replace, and we know that accidents happen, and we know that accidents and errors are just parts of life.  Got that.  It doesn’t make the heat loss last night feel any better to me today.

In our periodic rehashing of the numbers: we have about 17 healthy poults on the ground now.  Yes, they could die tomorrow, but right now they are alive.  There are about 20 more turkey eggs in the incuabor currently.  We have more than 40 chicken eggs in the incubator. There are about 12 duck eggs in the incubator.  We have more than 6 broody turkey hens sitting on more than 20 eggs between them.. I have no idea how those eggs are doing as we don’t dare move the ladies.  We should see some of those eggs hatching soon if they will be hatching.  Purchases:  we have  20 Pilgrim goslings coming, as well as  20 Burbon Red poults and 15 Bronze poults coming.

The calf in a computer box in the rear of my Rav4, on his way to our farm– his new home.

Welcome to the world little one!  We just got this little bull calf from a neighbor — they have dozens of cows due in the next two weeks, and they don’t have time for a bottle calf who came two weeks early.  So, it will be a life of milk replacer and bottles, in the pen with the lambs, for now, until he is strong enough to meet the herd of Belted Galloways.

Calf, meet your neighbors, the lambs from Utica, New York:

It’s springtime!  We are hatching baby turkeys, ducks, chicken chicks, and coping with New England mud.