Every year is a new adventure on the farm. Every summer brings it’s own challenges and joys.
What’s up this summer? We’re still raising our chickens out on pasture in mobile chicken tractor pens and giving them GMO free feed along with the grass and bugs. We’re still raising Mangalitsa pigs out on the pastures Mark plants for them. (See this YouTube video for more on that). We have a big garden this year.
This summer we do have rabbits, which is a renewed adventure for us. We’ve had rabbits before and they always have untimely deaths. We’d given up on them. But this year it seemed like the time to try it again. We came into a buck and a doe and will hopefully have little ones soon. At our farm in Montana we raised rabbits for quite a while. The meat is very lean and tasty when cooked right. We’ve tried smoking rabbits and that’s a really great way to have them. They’ve escaped a few times, but the kids are getting to be experts at finding and retrieving them. And at making sure the cage doors are securely closed!
Our other adventure this summer is sheep. We inherited some fabulous wool breed sheep from a friend. They aren’t expected to be here permanently, but for now they are. It’s taken some time for them to get into their pasture and be comfortable being out of sight of the farm buildings. They are adapting, though. We look forward to passing them on to another friend who raises sheep already and will turn the wool into felted products. Check out WoolyMama for a sampling of what the wool will be used for. It’s pretty amazing!
Hope you like the video of some of the scenes from the farm this summer. It’s been a beauriful summer with all the rain, which let up just long enough for Mark to get the hay in.