Spring Happenings 2015 and a BIG Announcement...

So much to do and so little time is our motto this spring... maybe that is every farmers motto in the spring but it seems especially so this year! 

First our BIG announcement!

We are the proud new owners of the Whitakers Farm Stand on Rt.16 next to Leavitts Bakery!

This has been a local family run farm stand for over 30 years and has a very large customer base. The Whitaker family was ready to retire from the "farm stand" life and offered the stand to us. This is a huge opportunity for us to grow our little farm and we are very excited to do so!

We are renovating the farm stand building and are hoping to open mid June. Besides our own veggies, honey, maple syrup, eggs, and broiler chickens we are hoping to have berries, meat, cheese and other local products. Stay tuned for updates on our grand opening date and hours of operation. 

Second, we are putting up a new High Tunnel! 

This one is twice as big as our other 2 tunnels and will help us to provide plenty of ripe and juicy tomatoes to the new stand. 

The day the tunnel was delivered the pieces lying on the ground are like a giant puzzle!

The guys putting the bows into place:

Once all the bows were in place we started on the perlings (the horizontal bars at the top).

The end walls are now up and we will be ready for plastic soon! Look for more pics coming this week.

And last but most definitely not least is the veggies! 

We have been non stop seeding and planting in order to get ready for the new stand. This is our earliest year yet for almost all of our crops and we have never had this much in the ground by Memorial Day! 

Besides planting we have been tilling up ground all over the farm to make room for all the little seedlings. Here is a freshly tilled area for all our carrots and onions:

The first little tomatoes are just starting to form up!

Check back for more updates coming soon...

We're Now on Etsy! Update...

*Update 2/7/15
Our farm store on Etsy is taking a break, 
we will let you know when our syrup will be available there again.
Meanwhile our syrup is always available at our farmstand.

You can now purchase our maple syrup jugs with the NH logo at our Etsy store!

We have four sizes available and can also customize the small size as a favor for your special event.

Other products in our store include some beautiful hand made bags and other crochet items. Be on the look out for more items being added to our shop soon!

 Check it out by following the link below:

Grand View Farm Etsy Shop

Memorial Day Work Weekend 2013

We had an "all hands on deck" work weekend that ended with just the right amount of fun! Check it out... 

It was a wet and soggy start to the weekend but the ducks were loving it! They even found their Canada Geese friends had come back for a visit.

Our tomatoes have grown A LOT since this post and were needing to get into the ground in the worst way! We finally had all the plastic mulch and drip tube that we needed to get them in.

The beds were made and the drip tube was laid.

 Then came the plastic mulch. We decided to give the red mulch a try since it is supposed to help tomatoes grow stronger stems and larger fruit.

Next came the tomatoes! They were so big they already needed to be supported with the strings and clips!! On the outside edges we will be adding in some herbs and maybe hot peppers.

The farm stand got a fresh coat of paint, inside and out!

We are still working on the trim but it's looking pretty good.

Here is a view of the inside, honey, maple syrup and pastured eggs for sale each and every day until we start adding some produce as the season progresses. Check out our For Sale tab above for more info.

We also spent some time moving this low tunnel greenhouse which we constructed last fall as an extension to the winter chicken coop. We decided to use it to plant the peppers in. That would allow us to have more space in the high tunnels for tomatoes and cukes.

The broiler chickens also got moved to pasture this weekend. Here they are all snuggled together in one corner... not sure how any one bird will get to the water except by walking on the others??? Crazy birds!

 And finally came the fun! After a family barbecue and dessert we waited for dark and then the fireworks!! Jason our resident fireworks expert brought a Chinese lantern. It was a blast to watch it float really high and then slowly back down.

Our family firework experts are becoming quite good at putting on a great show! Had some amazing fireworks right in our back yard! 

 Can't wait until the 4th of July for the best firework show yet!

Moving Day for the Pullets

The day has come to move our new laying hens on to pasture! The new chicken tractor is ready and so are the pullets! We tested a new moving method this time since we have so many birds (83 to be exact). The back of the pick up truck with a piece of the broiler pen as the top worked pretty good. They really had too much space and were pretty jumpy in there...

 Once we got them moved in they seemed to adjust really quickly! On a sunny day like this one they seem to stay really close to the coop and venture out more when the sun is going down.

Our laying hens were also moved  to the pasture area from their winter home across the street. They are loving the new grass!

They found a compost pile we had dumped in the field and totally tore that thing apart! Guessing there was lots of tasty worms in there!

We wrapped the electric netting around the old hay rake... hoping they take to using it as a roost so we can snap a pic :-)

The extra electric netting we purchased this year gives us a much larger area for the hens to graze. It reaches from the woods line all the way to the road. Right now we have a divider fence between the new pullets and the older hens so that they can get use to each other. Soon we will remove the divider and let them hang out together. Our plan is to eventually use only the new chicken tractor/coop to hold all the laying hens. 

Early Spring Update 2013

Things are really picking up now on the farm! Here is a few of the things we've been up to...

Our newest laying hens are really getting too big for our small brooding coop and their new home is just about done! Here are a couple of photo's...

We still need to add roosts and egg boxes but it's looking really good!

It has been very dry so far this spring but because the ducks love the water soooooo much we usually fill the turtle pool once a day for them to splash and play in. They are so fun to watch!

Our rhubarb is just getting going, we hope to have a bumper crop this year!

Our tomato seedlings have just been transplanted into large soil blocks. We are keeping the in the green house with an extra layer or two of row covering over them at night just in case. 

Outside we have lettuce, broccoli, and cabbage in. We are using row covers on these also, mostly to keep away those pesky cabbage loopers.

Our first batch of broiler chickens have arrived. Also ordered three guinea hens to help keep the tick population down.

2013 Maple Syrup Is Ready!

We have been busy the last few weeks boiling sap and bottling syrup and now have some delicious syrup for sale! You can check out our For Sale tab above for prices and more info.

Winter Update: New GVF Babies Arrive

 Things are pretty slow right now at the farm. We have our vegetable seeds ordered and are waiting their arrival. Some of the guys have been working on our sawmill but quickly came to realize that frozen logs do not cut well! We are also about to start tapping trees for this years maple syrup run. We are praying that it is a great year for sap so that we have enough syrup to sell in our farm stand all season.

 Most of the excitement right now is coming from our order of 100 Rhode Island Red chicks! We are trying to keep ahead of the demand for our pastured eggs come this summer. Right now we are just barely keeping up! We ordered them to arrive at the start of February so that they would be laying in June.

They are so cute and fun to watch at this age! They are living in a large box in the house for now but will be headed to a coop once a few more of their feathers come in. Then once the snow is gone and the grass is in we will move them to the chicken tractor.  The kids are loving having them inside the house!

 We will most likely add another 50 chicks in the summer so we will end up with a grand total of 200. We hope to be able to offer our eggs at a local natural food store! Stay tuned!

Processing Our Pastured Broilers

We wanted to share some photo's of processing day! We processed our first batch of broiler chickens on August 11th 2012 and it was such a great experience that we are already planning for next year. We will be posting a sign up sheet for anyone who is interested in purchasing whole broiler chickens starting next summer. Here are some photo's from our day...

Here our broiler chickens have reached the 8 week mark! They are looking really plump and healthy.  We are excited and hesitant at the same time...

None of us have ever raised an animal from baby to table. It is bound to be a day of learning and excitement.

We ended up with an okay day for the job, a little gray sky and drizzle for the morning and then warming up later on. We started out with 50 chicks and lost 2 during the 8 weeks of growth. We added 4 roosters that came with the laying hens for a total of 52 chickens to process that day.
Here is the chicken tractor with the roof pulled off and what's left of the broilers. We are about 3/4 of the way through in this photo.

Our three pretty Rhode Island Red boys awaiting their fate. The other rooster "George" (not pictured) was from the Kelley's house.

Our set up was pretty simple, the broilers went from the killing cones, to hot water, to defeatherer  to cold water tank, to the processing table. It was all hands on deck at the tables! 

An upclose shot of our borrowed plucking machine. This one worked great! So fast and clean!!

From the plucker the heads and feet are removed and then the broilers go straight to a cold water tank to cool them down. 

Another job after coming out of the plucker is to remove any feathers that did not come out. See those long tail feathers to the right. Those are the easy ones, it's the tiny little stray pin feathers that we needed the needle nose pliers for! I have excluded any photos of the evisceration process but there are tons on youtube if you really need to know :-)

And finally to the table! This was our first one and it tasted great! 

Thanks so much to everyone who helped that day!!! We could not have had such a great experience with the whole process without all of our helpers! A special thanks to our friend Dick who taught us all he knows!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

Update: October 2012

Things are winding down on the farm. James the oldest grandson in the family got his first lesson in tilling the fields today! He did a great job!!! It was such a beautiful fall day too, sunny, blue sky, fall colors, and a view of the mountains! Under the row cover we have some broccoli and cauliflower still growing.

We even got a smile out of him in this one! Who doesn't love riding on the tractor right???

In house one we pulled all the cucumbers except a few experimental ones that we started way too late but decided to leave them in and see what happens. The peppers are still hanging in there and actually have blossoms forming and peppers still growing! 

These may be the only cucumbers we get from these plants, the growth has slowed way down and although they have new blossoms they are growing VERY slow!

We also have some greens growing in this house. They are loving the cool temps!!! It seems like every time you walk in here they have gotten bigger! 

House two is another story... these tomatoes have finally succcumbed to the late blight that is so rampant this year. The greenhouse protected them for quite a while but in this photo you will notice towards the top the browning and dead leaves. On closer inspection it's a mess in here!!!

We still have some good reds here and there and lots of greens too. Maybe some green tomato mincemeat is in order???