End of Fall Update

Late fall and winter are our least busy times of year here at Long Creek Farm. We don't pasture rotate or milk through the winter, so our chores are much easier. The cold weather and short days also make it hard to get many outdoor projects done.

Goats

We are still letting our herd free range, and although we are giving them hay, they still spend plenty of time outside eating fallen leaves and little bits of grass that are still green. We are expecting kids the beginning of March.

Pigs

We have started to feed our bottle piglet a lot more fodder in hopes of being able to process her in the spring. Millie is definitely not having piglets this month, so we will just have to wait and see when she does.

Chickens and Ducks

For a while we were getting about 18 duck eggs and 8 chickens eggs a day, but now it is really random, some days we get about that much, and some days we hardly get any.

It may be because we have been having some really cold days and nights (down to about 15 degrees one night), and then some pretty mild days and nights, so maybe they are getting stressed by the very cold weather? I don't know...

We have also been giving fodder to them, and they love it! I think the reason the ducks didn't like it in the spring was because they had so many other greens to eat but now that pretty much everything is dead, they will eat it.

They still don't like it as much as the chickens but at least they eat it.

Pecans

Our pecan trees drop most of their pecans about this time of year, so we have been harvesting lots of those!

The goats also like them, especially Eva who will come up to you when you are outside wanting you to crack them for her since she is too small to crack them like the other goats.

Hunting

We have got four deer off our property so far (around 200 lbs. of meat!) so we have been experimenting using it in different recipes. We have also started selling the organ meat to a dog trainer that we sold milk to in the summer. He makes and sells dog food and treats.

We planted about 1/2 an acre of our front field with cereal rye for the deer and they seem to love it! In the picture the rye is the green beyond the tall brown grass (which we planted as screening for the food plot, so the deer feel safe eating there).

Hobbies

Our shorter chore time gives us a lot more time for our indoor hobbies. We have started trying to sell some of our craft projects at an indoor farmer's market in Collinsville OK.

We have a contract to sell there for six months, so we will be trying out a variety of things to see what sells.

In addition to piano and violin some of us have started learning classical guitar with a very talented teacher, (and composer, arranger, and author) who is currently based in Florida but runs an online school https://creativeclassicalguitarist.com/ which I highly recommend for anyone interested in any kind of musical instrument or learning how to compose your own songs! We had a lot of fun giving a recital there recently!

We have also been enjoying photographing the birds that come to our feeders and into our yard. We don't get many birds come to our feeders in the spring and summer, but in the winter, we get so many!

Is the other meadow lark getting in trouble?!

Pets

Not much has changed with our pets, Apricot was doing a great job catching mice and voles for a while but now they seem to have either gone into hibernation, or she's killed them all, because she hardly brings any back anymore. She used to bring us about 2-6 every morning, or I think she would get them in the night we would just see them in the morning.