Our four winter pigs were loaded out of their yard and into the trailer Wednesday morning for the trip up to the slaughterhouse. These were another round of great pigs who thrived on the farm for the winter and who put to good use the extra milk and weeds and harvest waste from the hoop-houses, and they grew beautifully. They loaded up nicely, and we’re sorry to see them go, but the next round of piglets should be arriving on the farm in a couple of weeks. Work has begun to re-cover their yard with old straw and hay, and we’ll build an electric fence around the perimeter to train the new batch to respect the fences before we send them out to the wood for the summer. We have had great luck raising winter pigs, and it seems like this was another successful effort.
The onion starts that had been dominating the table space inside the greenhouse finally moved out this week, and they have been planted in beautiful rows in D3 on the east side of the Flat Field. This is a big project every spring, and the onions, our pioneers on the move from the greenhouse to the fields, will be a major part of our harvest and storage work this fall. We were hosting a group of big strong eighth-graders from the Driscoll School this week, and they did some great work completing this significant plant-out. More crops will follow the onions on the journey outside, and the weather over the next ten days is looking pretty good for spring in New England. Though the overly rainy weather that we experienced in April seems to have ended, our soil is still plenty saturated and it looks like there is a bit of cool rainy weather coming next week. Despite accomplishing our first fields planting of the season, work with the vegetables still included a lot of hoop-house projects this week, more set-up in the wash/pack shed, and further work on building the irrigation system. We harvested bok choy, claytonia, lettuce mix, and spinach from the hoop-houses this week, and the wash/pack shed is set-up enough that we were able to use that space to process these greens. A new and improved deer fence went up around the Flat Field this week as well, and we hope to turn it on next week and to start trying to convince the local deer population that our veggies are not worth the shock. We’ve tried a few versions of deer deterrent fence over the past few years, though none have been particularly successful, and this year’s version is taller and more significant than past efforts.
Both cow herds are on pasture now, though both are still coming back to their winter yards for some hay supplementation and water at this point. The dairy herd got their first full section of pasture Friday afternoon when they headed down to the lower section of the Old Sheep Pasture just south of their barn. They’ll have access to that acreage for three or four days before switching to the upper section of that pasture, and then they’ll have to start walking out the front of the barn to cross the driveway and access all of the pastures out behind the Bunkhouse. The fences and water system out on that side are almost finalized, and I think we’ll have all of that ready in time to hold the herd in the second half of next week when they’ve finished in the Old Sheep Pasture. The beef herd has been getting small pasture sections this week to transition their rumen function from winter hay over to spring grass, and they’ll get their first full pasture section of the season Monday afternoon. I’m sure that we’ll be finding and fixing little problems with both fence systems over the coming weeks, but things are looking pretty good out there ahead of both herds as the pastures respond well to the wet spring and initial grazing.
Farmer Grace candled the eggs developing in our incubator this week, and found that about 75% seem to be growing successfully. I’m not sure what an average success rate in an incubator should be, but we were pretty happy with these initial results on this first experimental attempt. We’ll keep checking progress as we move through the incubation period, and hopefully in a few weeks we’ll be able to report on some healthy viable chicks hatching out.
The Farm School Manual 