Around the farm

Today we managed to get the electric wiring done in Pasture 2 so we could move the pigs into that pasture. It took us all day, first moving the shed, then finishing the barbed wire fencing in one area and then putting in the electric. But it's done! I am so glad DH built the pig shed on skids so we could move it from area to area. The Farmall got put to work today!

All we haven't done yet is put a pig water nipple on the waterer on that side, so we left the small gate between the two pastures open and will add the water nipple tomorrow.


This is the double sided waterer we were lucky enough to inherit with the house and land. If you look closely, you can see my wonderful DH has added a pig water nipple on the front and connected it to the waterworks. SO wonderful not to have to carry buckets of water around! The pigs love it too. We installed the green gate on the left last weekend, that is our human gate between the two pastures, we don't have the livestock gate in yet, so the animals use this too. Butterbelle was a bit hesitant, but has since adapted to it quite nicely. DH is going to add another water nipple on the other side of this waterer so the pigs will have water available in both pastures.

Exploring the wonderful green grass. I am pretty excited that our rotational grazing plan is coming along nicely. We still need to divide the third area in two and then we'll have four pastures total, with a possible fifth in our vegetable area.

Our little Daredevil. He has caused a bit of havoc on the farm in the last week! He was climbing on the haybales and knocked one onto the chicks container after I moved them into the garage. They haybale broke the container so I had to figure something else out for them. What we have now is actually better, I'll share a photo of that later. He also rode into one of our newly planted fruit trees today, luckily no damage, but he was grounded from the ATV for the rest of the afternoon.

The tree in question, as you can see it's just fine. Look at those buds! Other things are doing great on the farm as well....

The garlic.

The spinach, broccoli and cauliflower bed. They are doing wonderfully well. We had some really strong winds here the last few days, and a lot of the greenery you see is those "helicopter" seeds blown down from one of our trees.

The gooseberry bush we got from Henry Fields. I cut it down to half its height after we planted it. We've never had gooseberries before.. so we really hope they're good!

Grapes coming along nicely.

DH gave lessons to our oldest DD and oldest DS on how to drive the tractor. They both did great!




The chickens haven't quite been pulling their weight. We have 13 laying hens and only get about 8 eggs a day. They've definitely slowed in production, so we're looking at adding oyster shell to their feed again.

Today was a very busy, but productive and satisfying day!