Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 15 June 2023…
Hey Y’all!
Good evening and happy Thursday from Air2Ground Farms! It was a warm, dry day today. We definitely need to water the garden tonight. As expected, Stella is less happy with us today than she was yesterday. Her digestive system seems to be doing better with hay and a bit of dairy ration. Betty gets to check on her twice a day when she is being milked and that seems to appease her. Our main project today was working the sheep. We gathered the flock into the pens and started the process. We brought small groups into the pens and separated the new lambs from the rest. We put them into a side pen and went to work on the ewes. We checked their hooves and trimmed a couple. We helped those that were shedding get rid of some wool. Finally, we gave them a selenium supplement as it is deficient in our soil but required for their health. When we got all of the ewes through the pens, we had all of the lambs separated into a small pen. We gave each of them a CDT vaccine booster. We didn’t vaccinate the lambs last year and we lost over 50% of them, which, after more research, we learned is common if you don’t vaccinate against CDT. We chose not to do that again this year. It was very disheartening last summer to go out in the morning and have 2-3 dead lambs, for days in a row. We decided not to castrate the ram lambs at this time, maybe next time we work them. We counted and recorded the sex of each lamb. We have 21 ewe lambs and 9 ram lambs. The other animals are doing well. We are still troubleshooting, to no avail, the charging issue with the old truck. If anyone knows a PowerStroke Diesel expert, I’d love to chat with them!
We recently took a step back and refocused on one of the main reasons we chose this lifestyle…good food. We realized that we are staying so busy raising good food that we aren’t enjoying eating good food. This week, we grilled a pastured duck we bought from Lazy Duck Pastures. They have a booth across from us at the Ava Farmer’s Market and are raising amazing GMO-free pasture-raised ducks, just like what we do with the beef chickens. We scored the skin on the breast, seasoned liberally, grilled it in a roasting pan on the Weber charcoal grill, and added a bit of pecan wood for flavor. With the duck, we had greens from the garden cooked with bacon ends from our hogs. We also had a salad with lettuce and cucumbers from the garden. It was an amazing meal! None of us realized we liked duck that much. So much, in fact, that we started looking at purchasing meat ducks to raise ourselves. Maybe in the near future? Or, maybe that would just add to the workload that keeps us from enjoying the good food we’re raising. We’ll see! I encourage you to take a moment this week to fix yourself an amazing meal and pause to consider all it takes to make that amazing meal happen. For us, we appreciate Lazy Duck Pastures and the love and care they have for their amazing ducks.
Local Farm Report for 14 June 2023:
Harvest:
21 Chicken eggs
0 Duck eggs
0 Goose eggs
6 3/4 Gallons of milk
Cheers!
Psycho & Shelley
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