Farm Visitors, the End of Goat Kidding (Finally!), Weaning Piglets, Grazing Cattle & Goats, Growing Chicks & Summer Blooms

We had back-to-back Mondays with some lovely farm visitors, we finally reached the end of non-stop goat kidding, the piglets are weaned and the sows are on vacation, the main goat herd and the cattle are make their grazing rounds and the bees are happy with lots of beautiful summer flowers.

Since moving into our house this fall, we are really hitting our stride with hosting visitors to the farm and it's the best. It really feels like the culmination of what we've worked toward for a decade! Feeding people food we raise and source from other local vendors and showing them around our land — there’s really nothing better.

Besides the photos, we’ve also had some other visitors drop in when blueberry picking nearby and various dinner guests and it just feels so good to open our home up whenever we want versus when we were so limited doing that in our tiny house for so many years.

Two Mondays ago, we had our Laughing Buddha store staff up to the farm for a pizza party and little retreat, followed by a visit to the animals.

It was a really lovely day overall and always fun to have very little baby goats to snuggle and piglets to play with when visitors are here! Since the shop is open five days a week, it can be hard to get the staff up here all that often, but we’ll be aiming for more of this!

Then last Monday, we had the staff from the Well Cafe at the Spyre Center.

The Well Cafe has been buying eggs, bone for broth, Andouille sausage and maple syrup for the cafe since they opened four years ago. The cafe is open seven days a week so finding time when they all can come has been tricky! But Memorial Day, we finally made it happen and it was so much fun.

They especially loved the baby goat crew and the girls got very adept at holding down willow branches for the main herd to eat, too!

Meanwhile, my precious Uma goat’s grand daughter had what I think should be the last kid of the year last week. The new momma’s name is Daisy and fittingly, her and her twin, Summer, were the last kids born last kidding season (January to May 2024). Summer beat her to the punch and kidded a doeling in March.

Uma’s other grand daughter also had a doeling in February (the same day Uma kidded, as it happens), so now she has three great grand daughters in the herd and don’t tell Grant but I plan to keep all of them!

The rest of the newborn crew are doing well and all the kids should be old enough to start grazing with the main herd by the time they rotate through all the paddocks on the farm and end up back over to the hoophouse to start the circuit again!

The piglets are enormous and we moved the sows out to their own paddock on the other side of the farm last week.

The sows can’t really wean the piglets on their own — there’s just too many of them and they would keep producing milk as long as they piglets, however big, were suckling at every opportunity.

So we typically wean the piglets at somewhere between 6 and 8 weeks old. In commercial farrow barns, they are weaned just 3 weeks!

This time the oldest litter was 7 weeks and the youngest litter was 6 weeks and they are plenty big enough, eating feed and doing great.

We built the three-stall farrowing barn with doors on both sides, so that it’s easy to back up the hog trailer to one of the doors, walk the sows in and keep the piglets from going in.

The piglets have stayed in the farrowing barn paddock in the last week, but now we parked the trailer flush to one of the doors and put the feeder in the trailer to get them comfortable going in there.

Later this week, we’ll set up another hog panel electric fence training paddock in different part of the farm and move the piglets over there.

And we have plans to get some Khaki Campbell ducklings at the end of June and convert the stalls to duckling brooders. We don’t plan to have more litters of piglets until October, so it’ll be great to get another use out of the barn!

Oh, the chickens! Thank goodness for A&A Acres, Credo Farms and Pearl River Pastures keeping the shop stocked with eggs while we sort through our lower production — mostly from all the predation we’ve had.

We’re really getting a handle on it, but at the same time, we are still waiting for our new flock to start laying. This breed often starts at 20 weeks and now they’re 22 weeks and we’re still waiting. They’ve grown a lot in the six weeks we’ve had them, so we’re expecting to see the first eggs in the nest boxes literally any day. Annnnyyy day!

And the first two trial batches of chicks we hatched in our new incubator are doing great! Grant has some impressive Black Solider Fly Larvae bins cranking away (these are a specific type of fly that don’t live long enough in adulthood to eat, only to breed, so they are not a pest fly). And the larvae eat a ton of waste — much more quickly than earthworms or other decomposers.

If you’ve ever seen dehydrated grubs for chickens called “Grubblies,” or something similar, they are Black Soldier Fly Larvae. So our chicks are getting large daily amounts from the larvae harvests and since they’re so high in protein and help encourage natural foraging behavior at an early age, it’s really a fantastic win win.

Despite staying at the kidding hoophouse paddock later in the season than usual because of the extended kidding season, the goats certainly don’t forget how to graze and browse!

We also did a little buckling trade with our friend and farm former staffer this week. They got a trio of doelings from us last year and those does kidded three does and one buckling. They wanted another buck to breed them back that wasn’t directly related, so we decided to trade out their buckling once he was past three months old for one of ours born around the same time.

Both of Uma’s bucklings are beautiful, but I had my eye on this one with the frosty brown coat since he was born.

So they came and got him this weekend and then we put Pants, their buckling, out with the herd. He definitely is adjusting and our herd knows he’s an outsider, but they seem to be figuring it out. The irony is that he is related to them, he just wasn’t born here!

We don’t have many cattle right now since cattle prices remain so high, but that just means with our stocking density lower, they are eating so well with no supplementation and looking absolutely sleek and fat and gorgeous.

We will process a few more in the next month and then once that beef is out, we’ll need to source from other local farms for grass-finished beef until the market stabilizes enough to buy in more. We have two calves born last year that won’t be processed until 2026, plus a cow we just sent to our neighbors to breed back.

And as the mimosas continue to bloom, the swamp mallows have also started. We have both white and light pink varieties, a type of wild hibiscus and the bees, especially the bumblebees, absolutely love it. It’s one of the bright spots of June when Hurricane Season officially starts and a bit of that doom for a long, hot and potentially stormy summer creeps in.

A few little bonus photos of the barn kitties and my cherry tomato plants. I harvested a round early because they’re ripe enough to finish ripening inside and the pests are out, especially the sap suckers like stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs. I’ve only seen a few and pulled them off, but an infestation can happen overnight and they can really damage the fruit to where it won’t be good anymore! So harvesting early it is!