We re-opened our farm last week and have started doing farm tours! For $20-30 sliding scale, a family of up to four people can have a private tour with a lovely tour guide, that’s moi, and meet all of our animals and have your questions answered. Tours last one hour to an hour and a half depending on heat and attention span of children. Bigger families are welcome to come too for an additional fee as a second guide will be required.
I did not realize how popular my tours would be and I posted in two mom groups online to find that within two days my schedule was completely filled for a week and a half.
It’s clear people are bored out of their gourds right now after all the quarantine (things opened up last week here) and I know many parents are going crazy with littles home all the time, too.
While I can say that I actually love having the kids home all the time I am also willing to admit that I have it much easier since we have land that kids can roam and animals that kids can play with. No one gets bored on a farm, that’s for certain!
Some farm updates: The baby goats are growing up fast! The full size goats we bought from the dairy nearby are down to one bottle feeding per day. Next week they’ll be a good age for wethering (castrating) which is a project I actually don’t mind too much. I’ll go over that process next week for those who want to learn how to do these things yourselves.
We have sold two of the doelings (when they are weaned at the end of May they will head to new home together) and have decided to keep two of them. I’m willing to sell three adults we have (the family of Nigerian Dwarfs) and our two bucklings born here, but Christine gets very attached to them all and has a harder time saying goodbye.
We have four lambs coming, two ewes, a ram, and a wether. They are a breed called Katahdins, and they are a hair sheep which essentially means a) they shed like a dog instead of getting wool which makes sense in Texas b) they are more parasite resistant which is good since it’s so humid here c) they don’t taste like oily lanolin, bleh and d) we can try to use them for dairy, too; this is one of the few hair breeds that can be “easily” (it’s relative) milked. Our two females will be our mama sheep some day and the ram will be the dad, while the wether we will be eating. The male babies (ram lambs) born on our farm will also be meat.
This past week Christine finished out the new chicken coop that will house approximately 15-20 of our chickens (with a run when they are big enough to not get eaten by snakes). Right now the 12 babies (the four meat chickens live outside so they can eat grass–they’re too big to get eaten by a snake at this point) live in the coop and they are loving it.
Our remaining piglets arrived this week. We were expecting three, two gilts and a barrow, but the breeder contacted me last week and told me that one of the gilts was growing slower than the others and I decided not to take her. So two piglets arrived at midnight the night of the full moon (hiring animal transporters is something else!).
Snake season has begun! We have seen probably 7 snakes in the past two weeks, but fortunately all non-venomous so far this year. We’ve never gone this far into the year without seeing any copperheads or rattlers! We’re loving it!
However we have had a big burst of scorpions this past week; 7 spotted in two days either in our house or on our front porch. That’s the most we’ve ever seen in such a small time span and I’m definitely concerned. I’ve put down Barn Lime outside in hopes that deters them. It’s hard not to use chemicals AND to not be able to use essential oils because of the indoor cats. Unfortunately Christine got stung the other day just rolling over in bed while she was reading. I swear all the bad Texas things happen to her! She still wonders why she left New York but I keep telling her it was the ticks spreading Lyme to everyone up there. Now just to be clear, these scorpions are not the deadly kind they have in Arizona, they are simply an annoyance similar to a bee sting (unless you happen to be allergic).
Back to the farm tours, I am getting the funniest responses from kids so I have to share. One of my friends brought her boys over and the second they stepped out of the car the third grader said to me, “Leah, I love your farm.” <3 Later I was telling their family about my llama coming next month to our farm and about how he was unusual because he has one blue eye. The third grader looked at me and said, “You have so many unique things on the farm. Even your kids are unique!” OMG hilarious! I love it, though I did wonder if his mom was dying inside as I would have been prior to having a kid with special needs and having my own child make a comment. But honestly I feel like this kid gets me. That’s true…I actually DO love unique things and I do think uniqueness is so much more fun than “normal.” This same kid did not want to leave the farm which I think meant the tour was a big success.
Another friend came for a tour and her older daughter also did not want to leave the farm. She insisted she was not going to leave!
I am so happy that we are able to give children good experiences. The only thing that has happened so far that’s thrown me off is that I was mentioning to one parent that the lambs would be food and the third grader (same one as mentioned above) almost cried and he said, “You’re going to eat your lamb?? But why? Can’t you just get one from the grocery store?”
Yes, sweetheart, we could. But we don’t want to do that anymore. We don’t want to live our lives thinking that that’s all this meat ever was, just food on a grocery store shelf. We want to know that it had a good life and was well loved and fed the best food. But will it ever be easy? Probably not.