We finally added a couple goats to the farm. This was a long time coming, but was just one of those things I didn’t feel like dealing with yet. Until it became easy. We currently have about 60 sheep that we graze across our pastures using intensive rotational grazing… sheep are moved to a new …
Here are a couple photos from a garden area next to our house… what I am calling our Showcase Permaculture Garden. It’s only a couple seasons old, so there is still a lot of growth and development to come, but I thought it would be fun to share it so far. This garden has multiple …
We have two 40-foot x 40-foot garden beds cleared on the hillside where we have our annual vegetable garden. This year we decided to install raised beds. There were a number of reasons for this, but the big one is that when gardening on a hillside, everything wants to slide downhill… our garden beds have …
My small farm is a tiny breeze blowing against the hurricane that is coming. But I will not sit idle knowing it is my children and grandchildren that will have to deal directly with that hurricane when it hits. Our society keeps passing the bill for “cheap food” on to the next generation, and the …
We have finally planted the majority of the foundation trees and shrubs in our forest garden. These trees and shrubs make up the “bones” of our forest garden/food forest. Most were planted in the Fall of last year, and the rest were planted late Winter/early Spring (within the last month or so). We have planted …
We occasionally find a volunteer squash or melon on the farm. “Volunteer” meaning we didn’t plant it… well not on purpose. Over the last few years since we’ve been on our farm, we will collect Fall pumpkins and squash from friends and neighbors. We then feed them to our animals. The pigs enjoy them, but …
We have been managing our pastures with rotational grazing for the last few years. I was out moving our ram lambs this morning and took a few photos that I thought I would share. Rotational grazing is not a difficult thing to learn or to do. It is more time intensive than open grazing (i.e. …
More Results of Rotational Grazing at the Bauernhof Read More »
I have finally gotten around to putting together a list of the products we use on the farm. We raise Katahdin Sheep with rotational grazing/holistic management. We raise mixed heritage breed pigs on pasture. We raise free-range, mixed heritage breed laying chickens. We raise Cornish Rock Cross broiler chickens on pasture in Salatin-style “chicken tractors”. …
We recently had some of our ducks and geese killed overnight. This happened last year as well. But we were never able to determine who the culprit was… fox, coyote, raccoon, opossum, owl? I had found various piles of scat (animal droppings/manure) around the pastures, but they were too indistinct for me to tell which animal …
I never ate eggplant growing up. It was just not a vegetable we used. But when I lived in Turkey for a few years, I was surrounded by eggplants. I learned to appreciate these versatile vegetables… technically a fruit, and even more accurately, eggplants are berries! Actually, I really fell in love with eggplants. They …
