It must be almost spring!

The weather may not be cooperating but the we got to see the first progeny last night from our Percheron stallion Joe, a baby mare born to one of our Amish friend's Standardbred mare.

We should be getting a run of babies here soon when our sheep start to lamb and we also ordered a bunch of meat birds that are actually real chickens instead of those grotesque Cornish x Rock hybrids that explode into critters that are so heavy they can barely walk. The Red Rangers are slower growing and designed to thrive on foraging so we will probably butcher most of the males we get at around 10 weeks and keep a dozen or so of the females and a couple of roosters so we can get eggs to incubate and hatch. I would love by the end of this year to have bought my last "store bought" chicken and eat nothing but chicken we raise ourselves, adding chicken meat to the list of milk, butter and eggs that we raise ourselves.

Other projects include breeding our dairy cow back to a Jersey so we can get a calf and keep her milk production going and finishing up the horse stalls. In the next few weeks we will breed our older Morgan mare the same Percheron stallion that fathered the foal above to get a foal next year in late March.

In flora news, we are looking at replacing some of the grass in our pasture with native grasses that will thrive in our heavy clay, flood prone pasture. I would also like to get some heritage fruit plants, blueberries/raspberries/strawberries etc. I don't really want a commercial hybrid even if it meant getting more fruit.

Now, if it will just warm up a little bit....