Willow grazing on a sunny November morning This is our first winter on the farm and the shift in seasons has posed a lot of new hurdles, including the grazing situation.Over the past few weeks the pastures have slowly transitioned from bright, green grass to a brown, stemmy, seedy mess....
Sprouted spelt and wheatAs I bet you can tell, Scrapple and I aren't necessarily about doing things the easy way. We've set out down this path to do them the right way, or at least the way we believe that to be. This mindset led us to rotational grazing, which,...
Attaching the hoops. Old red barn in the background. We're remodeling an old red barn that was used for milking cows in the 1970's and 80's. It's been abandoned since then and was infested with termites, brown recluse spiders, and who knows what else (actually, I know everything else that...
Willow, happily munching on the rose bushes around the house. She's quite spoiled that Willow This was a question posed by one of our readers a few weeks ago. It's a subject I've often thought about addressing. A common belief is that goats will eat anything. Many people imagine a...
Gozer, putting the moves on Tijeras A few months ago, Scrapple and I had a little kitchen table meeting to strategize our first breeding season. We decided that we would aim to kid at the beginning of April. By that time the grass is growing and the sun is warm...
Pig Maze? While we're on the topic of letting wild animals loose, I might as well write about what the pigs have been up to. They aren't yet roaming in electrically fenced areas like the bucks (and the rest of our animals), but they're getting there.
The two buddies, grazing together in the forest, makes me happy Today was a big day for the bucks (and us too). They got a paddock outside of their pen so they could browse and graze in the forest. Prior to today, I would chop down saplings and bring them fresh...
Rotational Grazing "Rotational grazing" means controlling when and where an animal grazes by moving the animals between grazing locations (aka paddocks) on a regular basis. For us, we move our goats to a new paddock every 3-7 days. This is very rare for goats, which are normally managed in confinement...
