Howdy everyone,
Just a quick update, nearly 90% of everything on both farms is in the ground and I am wore out! Took today as a "rain day" to get some R and R, soon enough I'll be posting plenty of updates and pictures both here and at the Homegrown Goodness Message Board. The board gets a little slow during the Northern Hemisphere growing season, but don't fret, we will keep it going this summer and fall will breathe new life and discussions into everyone as well.
We have already began harvesting the first of the seasons produce, a huge mix of leaf and romaine lettuce types, green onions, raddishes, kales, and as always eggs from our free range chickens and guineas. We also purchased our first Bourban Red Turkeys, five of them, two males, three females. The first of two incubators full of guinea and turkey eggs is due to hatch in just a few days, got some lavender, brown, white, slate, and buff guineas in there as well as black spanish, blue slate, and bourban red turkeys in there as well and we used the old worm house to create a turkey coop.
We are also preparing to plant the begginings of our small orchard, a variety of pear trees that we successfully grafted will be planted early next week.
This year we are undertaking a massive sweet corn growout, right now there are over 20 Open Pollinated varieties in the ground and many have already germinated.
This Saturday is the opening day of the Salem Indiana Farmers Market located at the Washington County Fairgrounds in town, from 8:30 A.M. until 12:30 P.M., we expect to have lettuce, onions, kale, raddishes, alpine strawberry plants, tomato plants, pepper plants, cabbage plants and a ton more there. If you live locally then please come visit us, we and our other friends at the market would love to see you!
Next Saturday we will be at the annual market at The Lost River Market and Deli in Paoli Indiana from 11:00 A.M. - 1:00 P.M. Lots of good stuff going on over there including a cook out featuring organic beef and hog! Come check it out!
Hope everyone is doing well my friends!
3 comments:
In your earlier post you mention "farm fresh eggs for $1.75 a dozen". I wonder how your make any money at that price?
Would you care to share you feed/production numbers?
EJ
Hello EJ,
I don't have the numbers off of the top of my head, however at the time of the posting this was in relation mostly to my bantam flock which was laying pretty heavily, they are great foragers once the grass is green and I grow/shell/crack corn for them as well as ocassionally feeding them laying mash, since the fertilizer is from compost here on the farm and I save my corn seed every year, the food production is cheap minus time, which I have plenty of during the cold months (until this winter when we will be building a pig pen, fencing in the farm, cuttin wood, and producing maple syrup which will take up much of the time, along with butchering turkeys, guineas, and chickens). So the price of maintaining that flock is relatively small, on the larger sized Salmoln Favorell and Ameracauna/Easter Egger Flock we sell eggs at $2.00-$2.50 a dozen depending on the market, fortunately both of these breeds and subsequent crosses are also excellent foragers, spending little time in the coop and much time in the pasteur. I hope that answers some of your questions. We feed maybe a 50 lb bag of mash a week at $10.00 a bag, so we only have to sell 5 dozen to break even.
I LOVE the growing season but it does make for quiet times in the virtual gardening world.
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