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...

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!!!

Our New {Old} Farm Stand

The skies were darkening and the wind was blowing hard so we made the decision to take down our tent/farm stand. We collapsed the tent and put away all the veggies and other goods preparing for the storm. What seems like only minutes later... the skies were clear??? That's fall in NH for you! 

Setting the tent up again seemed futile since the forecast was very iffy. Sooooooo...... even though the milk house (see this post) was not quite ready yet... we moved in anyway!

It was a great move! It is now much easier to open up and close down and we do not have to worry about crazy fall weather blowing our tent down. 

Here are some shots of the inside. It needs a fresh coat of paint in there but at the same time feels like a rustic farm building. Very quaint!

Still a great assortment of veggies left! Although this is the last of the tomatoes and eggplant, get them while they last!

Our new honey shelf! Check out the ribbons from the Sandwich Fair, Best in Show for the frame of honey comb and  a blue ribbon on the jar!!!

 Also had room in the corner for some Lizzie-Tish Designs bags and other items! We have some great re-usuable snack bags and mesh produce bags for sale!

 Come check out our new {old} set up! :-)

Pastured Eggs For Sale

We finally have eggs for sale! Our beautiful Rhode Island Red Hens are laying up a storm and we are now ready to sell some at our farm stand. To the left is our new egg box label that you will see on our boxes when stopping by.  

Here are the girls happy to see us as we head to the coop to pick up eggs.

 The back of the chicken tractor/coop is where we added on the egg boxes. You access them by opening these double doors on the back.

WOW! An amazing 34 eggs today! The most laid so far!!!

As you can see above we have ten boxes shared by 46 hens. They seem to have gotten the hang of it now. Occasionally we will find an eggs laid on the ground inside, we are guessing this is from a hen who has just started laying and has not found the boxes yet.

 Our little helpers today were so excited to count all those eggs!

 If you've never heard the term "pastured eggs" and are wondering why we use it you should know a few facts about them:

Fact #1 - Pastured hens are raised on pasture! Unlike factory hens who are kept in confinement and fed primarily grains. Fact #2 - Pastured eggs contain up to 20 times more healthy omega-3 fatty acids than the factory produced eggs. Omega-3's are healthy fats that are anti-inflammatory and good for your heart. Fact #3 - Pastured hens eat lots of bugs, earthworms, and other such critters that makes their eggs better tasting and more nutritious. Fact #4 - Pasturing hens is far more humane. The hens have lots of space to move and run and explore unlike the factory hens who have no fresh air to breath or space to move. Fact #5 - Pastured eggs also have higher vitamin's A and E and 10 percent less fat and 34 percent less cholesterol than eggs obtained from factory farms.

Stop by to try some of our eggs today! Our eggs are fresh, clean, and delicious!!!

The First Eggs

We were so excited to find three eggs this weekend! We were about to give the house the old heave ho when we spotted one. It was laying right on the ground in a little hole the hens had dug! Next thing we knew we had found two more!! We were relieved to have spotted them before moving the house, our first eggs could have been scrambled!

Thanks girls! No egg boxes or anything!! Now to get those boxes done and attached to the back.

Our Broiler Chicks Have Arrived

 Our first adventure in raising livestock for food has begun! We are excited about being able to raise our own food and really want to include meat in that category. 

  We ordered 50 White Jumbo Cornish Rock Cross broiler chicks and got the call today that they had arrived at our local feed store.

It is amazing to think we are going to eat these little fuzz balls! They literally were the cutest chicks we had ever seen! The spitting image of a fuzzy little yellow Easter chick. Irrisistably cute and very hard to make the connection to food at this point. Oh well, guess we will enjoy them while it lasts. The grown up version of these little cuties is NOT cute!

Our First Livestock Arrives

 Our newest additions arrived at the end of April, 50 Rhode Island Red chicks and 6 Cayuga ducklings! They came packed in this little box via the U.S. postal service, all of them were safe and sound. We are so excited about having them on the farm. The chicks will be in a movable "chicken tractor" once they are old enough to tolerate the lower temps. The "tractor" will be moved every day within a fenced area and then the whole fence will be moved every few days to ensure they always have fresh pasture and lots of new bugs to eat. They will be laying beautiful brown eggs starting this fall which we hope to offer in our farm stand. 

The ducks will be our garden helpers! The love to forage for slugs and other garden pests. This breed originated on Cayuga Lake New York and is therefore hearty for this area. They are a quite and docile breed which will lay approx. 150 eggs per year. We are not sure how many males and females we have yet since they came to us as a straight run (not sexed from the hatchery), but we hope to also offer duck eggs in our farm stand at some point. Duck eggs are slightly larger than chicken eggs and are sought after by bakers for the excellent results they produce. 

Here they are checking out their new home under the brooder lamp. They will stay here for the next 4 weeks or so until it is safe the put them on pasture.

So cute!

 And here, less than two weeks later are the ducklings on their first outing into the yard. They were so much fun! They pretty much think everyone is a duck and easily followed the kids where ever they went. They nibbled on grass and dandelions and had a blast in the little bucket of water we set out for them!

Sorry no updated chick photo's yet but they also are growing fast and already have wing and tail feathers growing in! We will try to post updated pics as they grow.

St. Patricks Day at Grand View Farm

 What a crazy winter we are having this year! March 17th when we are usually buried in snow, we are enjoying an early spring! The crocus' are out and so are the...

 ...bees!!!

Our birthday boy, Mr. St. Patrick himself with the bees, we had to add this one just for the record books! It was in the 70's and is predicted to be the same all week!  Instead of making maple syrup today, it looks like we are making honey!

And what were the bees in such a "buzz" about so early in the season? 

The silver maples had just blossomed! This huge tree is just in front of the hives, as soon as you got close to it you actually could hear it buzzing! It was an amazing sound!!! Something we have never witnessed before!

The high tunnels got a dose manure and soil amendments today too. They are now ready for spring planting!

Sugaring Season!

This is our first year making maple syrup to sell! Last year we had about 25 taps and this year we have about 150!  We streamlined the operation by using tubing and tanks and it has made a big difference! 

Here are some pics of the process:

Tubing going up.

Monitoring the mainline...

 

The first taps going in! We taped on February 13th this year! Amazingly early for NH, it was sooooo warm we couldn't pass up the early sap run. It has been a very warm season and unfortunately makes it a short one too!

We also put up some buckets, sugaring is not the same without those metal buckets hanging on the trees!

The first drop!

Here is a photo of last years "sugar house" and "evaporator"...

 

 ... and here is this years "sugar house"... yes we are moving up in the world... still not a real sugar house but better than last year!!!

 

 This years evaporator has improved too! We purchased this one on Craigs List from a man who moving south and was selling all his supplies.

 A couple of photo's of our set up, sap is pumped from a holding tank outside into this pre-heating pot. Then the sap makes it's way through the copper tubing and into the pan. By the time it gets there it is steaming hot and prevents us from losing the boil in the pan.

Our sugar tent house filled with steam!

 

 Checking the temp!

 

You can really see the difference of color in the sap here. The sap on the left almost done!

The first syrup going into the jars!

We love these glass jugs! They will be for sale in our farm stand this summer or you can contact us using the "for sale" page to purchase them before we open.