Hello all,
January has been a mix of busy days, and winter rest. Working with the seasons, we often have some quieter days in the winter. The sun rises later and sets sooner, and the daily workload is such that we are able to come in and sit by the fire and read for an evening.
The largest development, and it’s 40 feet long and 10 feet tall, is a new walk-in freezer unit we moved to the farm so we can store all our beef here onsite. Now, instead of storing most of our inventory in downtown Boise, we can have easy access to it for customers coming to the farm and to bundle for deliveries.
We are glad to note that we have slots reserved with our processor, Northwest Premium Meats, for all our beef this year. It was a little questionable around the first of the year, whether they would have any space for us. All the local butchers have been run off their feet with a massive increase in demand for their services in the wake of the upheavals brought on by 2020. However, things seem to be steady for now, and we are planning our first harvest in June.
It looks like spring is beginning to stir. There’s increased warmth in the sunshine and on my daily rounds I have been seeing more birds coming back. I noticed the Collared Doves came back a couple weeks ago to scout nesting locations, this week we saw skeins of Canadian Geese flying north, and on Friday I saw two geese paired off, as well as flocks of Starlings singing fit to beat the band.
Several of our heifers are looking closer and closer to calving, stay tuned on the IG/FB pages for photos of baby calves!
My mother, Susan, is excited because her garden seeds arrived this week, she’s planning the layout for this years garden and ready to get her hands in the soil. She is also reading Gabe Brown’s “Dirt to Soil” and finding encouragement and new ideas for inter seeding and cover crops to strengthen our already vibrant pastures, we’ll see when I get sent to borrow the local extension office’s no-till drill seeder to start experimenting.
We feed hay once a week, and our cats, and my border collie Ragnar, have discovered the haystack is a target rich environment to catch a mouse or three for a quick snack!
All the best, and feel free to look us up for some tasty nutritious beef!
Aaron