Enter: LAMBS

Please join us in welcoming three new farm hands, Feste, Bottom, and Speed. Introducing: our new pasture management committee. They came to the farm on April 1st and are thus named after good fools*. Currently residing in a strawbale nest arranged in the north bay of the garage, these little ones will eventually, this summer, be pastured out in the orchard. We’re looking forward to employing their services for mowing and soil fertility in rotation ahead of the broilers. The lambs will be rotated through the pasture in a fenced area, trimming the grass/weeds/etc. and adding their natural fertilizer, spurring new tender green growth and insect activity. Then we’ll move the birds through in chicken tractors, giving them more ready access to soft tender shoots and tasty bugs. The lambs will help provide good pasture and forage for the chickens and will provide us with happy, healthy meat.

These guys are now just over one week old. Bottle feeding is getting easier, especially since building a bottle stand.

They are everything adorable and lively and lovely and loud. We have a new anthem at the farm these days: Baby, don’t you tear my clothes. We’re very much looking forward to the end of their early, frequent feeding schedule and the renewal of our sleep schedule. Neither of us has experience with livestock beyond the chickens and worm wrangling. We have been studying up with stacks of library books and online guides. All helpful, but really, we are most grateful for our tremendously supportive mentors, the Barnaud’s and Kelly Knispel. Thank you for your sage advise and encouragement.

In other news: Pace is quickening with these longer days. We laid out thick mulch in the walkways between beds in the front field to help suppress weeds (the mulching formula: a base layer of imbricated barley bags from our neighborhood brewery, with a thick overlaying mantle of chipped wood mulch). The fruit trees are almost all pruned. We are beginning to prepare beds, planting peas, favas. We’ve resumed cobbing work in the greenhouse. Readying ginger to presprout in the basement. The house is bulging with germinating seed trays. Garlic has sprouted. Jeremy is scooting over to Bozeman to pick up potatoes from the Kimm’s (who grow excellent seed potatoes, hire handsome farmhands, and offer inspiration for land stewardship). The chickens are enjoying the thawed earth and recent surge of available protein; Polly, in particular, enjoys hopping over the fence and eating Jeremy’s field pea cover crop. We are scheming Spearfish Bike Week, ag land preservation options, and outdoor kitchen/vegetable prep area.

*see Shakespeare. Feste, the clever, free-range fool in Twelfth Night; Bottom, the weaver, the comical braggart from A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Speed, a fun, mischief maker in Two Gentlemen of Verona.