We put up a greenhouse this year. Partly as a source for some additional farm income, and mostly so that I don’t have to start my seeds inside, where I have no room.
It went up fairly quickly but getting the heat plumbed in took a bit longer. We are using our Central Boiler wood furnace to heat it and got a couple of old cast iron radiators to put inside. The greenhouse itself is a 16×32 kit from www.growerssolutions.com. They are very helpful and friendly and I would recommend them to anyone looking for a small or large backyard greenhouse.
Our plants are getting really big and I am going to begin going to the local farmer’s markets to sell starting this week.
You can see the “barn raising” here:
As you can see, many hands make light work. We had a lot of help to get it going but am sure glad for it.
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We had a new little heifer calf born this morning to our smallest Jersey girl, Daisy.
She is bouncing all over the pasture already. It is unclear if she will stay here on the farm at this point. If she does end up going to a new home, she won’t be far away. Our neighbor, who is also Matt’s sister, and her family will be giving her a new home.
“Our rich raw milk comes from Jersey cows fed a predominately grass/hay diet along with alfalfa pellets, Fertrell minerals and kelp meal at milking time.”
Pasteurization destroys enzymes, diminishes vitamin content, denatures fragile milk proteins, destroys vitamins C, B12, B6, kills beneficial bacteria, promotes pathogens and is associated with allergies, increased tooth decay, colic in infants, growth problems in children, osteoporosis, arthritis, heart disease, and cancer. Vital nutrients like vitamin A and D are greatest in milk from cows eating grass.
The more milk a cow produces, the more dilute the vitamin content of her milk
The goal of the commercial dairy industry is to coax the maximum amount of milk out of each cow through a high-tech combination of selective breeding, confinement housing, synthetic hormones, and a high-energy grain diet. It has succeeded admirably. Today’s super cows produce as much as 17,000 pounds of milk per cycle—20 times more milk than a cow needs to sustain a healthy calf. Unfortunately for consumers, the cow transfers a set amount of vitamins to her milk, and the greater her milk volume, the more dilute the vitamin content of the milk, especially vitamins E and beta-carotene. According to the journal article cited below, “It follows that continuing breeding and management systems that focus solely on increasing milk and milk fat yield will result in a steady dilution in the milk fat of these vitamins and antioxidants…”
Dairy cows raised on pasture and free of hormone implants produce less milk than commercial cows, but the milk is therefore richer in vitamin content. This is one of those times when less is more. (Jensen, S. K. “Quantitative secretion and maximal secretion capacity of retinol, beta-carotene and alpha-tocopherol into cows’ milk.” J Dairy Res 66, no. 4 (1999): 511-22. )
Excerpted from Jo Robinson’s website, www.eatwild.com
It has been too long since I posted a blog update. Canning season is hitting me in full force and haven’t had much time to spare. The apples have started to be ready to pick now and school has also started. I picked a bushel basket full of acorn squash yesterday and our very first watermelon. It was delicious! We grow all heirloom varieties so we will definitely be saving seed from that one.
The zucchini is relentless this year. It usually doesn’t grow this long into the summer before the squash bugs destroy it. I have enough shredded zucchini in the freezer to make 120 loaves of zucchini bread and they are still flowering and spreading.
Both our Jersey girls are bred for Spring 2009 calves. Yippee!! They are both bred to a Select Sires AI bull: Sunset Canyon Maxentius. Hoping for a couple of more heifer calves but we shall see soon enough. Lily will be bred this winter for a late fall 2009 calf.
There have been lots of new babies here in the past few weeks. We had our first piglets born here on the farm a few weeks ago. I will try and get some pictures posted. They are the absolute cutest things I think I have ever seen! Also, our Muscovy hen hatched out a clutch of 12 ducklings.
We added another 26 pullets to our group of layers and are starting to get our first pullet eggs. This brings our laying flock up to 51 hens. Our next batch of broilers should be here at the end of the month and will be processed here on the farm the first week in November.
I am going to strive to post something here at least once a week if not more often.
Rachel
It has been a busy month here. The garden is doing so well, unfortunately so are the weeds. We are really depending on our garden for our food for the winter. This is what we have planted so far:
Five 35′ rows of green beans
100 Tomato Plants
25 Cabbages
36 each of Broccoli, Cauliflower, and Brussel Sprouts
Four 35′ rows of corn
Two Watermelon hills
4 Acorn squash
4 Zucchini
4 yellow squash
25 Pepper plants
20 Jalapeños
16 Basil
8 Dill
Carrots
Lettuces
Beets
Peas
We have been picking peas, beans, yellow summer squash, and zucchini from the garden already. In May we picked strawberries at a local U-Pick fram and now blueberries and blackberries are making their way into the house. I still have a lot of lettuces that are doing well and we harvested our garlic yesterday. I ended up with about 100 nice large garlic bulbs.
In addition to all the harvesting, we are also trying to get our tomatoes trellised. We have about 1/2 of them trellised so far and the other 1/2 will get done this evening (hopefully). We have been using a small mantis tiller between all my rows. It has been a very mild and wet spring and hard to keep the weeds at bay. There is a never ending list of this to do out there.
Pictures will be coming soon!!
Our next intro on our cow tour is Lily, who will be aka Heart’s Gamboge once I get around to sending her papers in. She was our first calf born here on the farm. She was born on December 29th of 2007. I found her about 3 am while I was making yet another trip to the barn to check on Heart. She is quite the beautiful little heifer; and she is LITTLE! She was about 35lbs at birth.
This is a picture of her taken in early March:
She was sired by an Old World Jersey Bull named Munifordia’s Gamboge. He is a direct descendant of Oxford Lass, one of the greatest Jersey cows, and a great paper on his breeding can be seen here: http://jersey-.dk.dk/Breeding.htm
We will be breeding her this time next year for a Spring 2010 calf. It seems like a long wait now but her first calf will be on the ground before we know it.
I would like to introduce our herd to everyone, one at a time. First up is Heart, our herd queen. She is pictured on the homepage to our website. She is registered with the AJCA and her “real” name is Larklund BFW Hearts. She will be 6 years old next month and has had 4 calves. She gives us lots of rich creamy milk and is the best cow we could have asked for. She is truly a pleasure to own.
She was bred via AI on May 16th to Sunset Canyon Maxentius, a Select Sires bull. She should be due to calve on February 22nd, with hopefully another heifer calf. Her first calf with us was born in December. A beautiful little heifer that we named Lily.
Our new jersey heifer had a little bull calf on Tuesday. I was able to make it home from work early enough to watch the birth. He was born a little early and has loosey goosey joints. We gave him a shot of selenium on Wednesday. We’ve been bottle feeding him colostrum from his mother because he couldn’t stand up to nurse the first two days. He is starting to come around now though and is getting a little better on his feet.
I built the new chicken brooder from some sketches I found on the Mother Earth News website. Our broilers will now be on grass from day one. Coupling the early pasture and Fertrell Nutri-Balancer should greatly increase the health of the chickens and add to the nutritional value of the finished product.
I finished the brooder April 21st just in time for our second batch of broilers.
Our daughter Clara loves the new baby chicks.
The second batch of chicks are off to a good start.
