livestock – Sunrise Farm Project

Winter Blues

What do we do on the farm in the long winter months? Oftentimes, the brightly colored seed catalogs litter the coffee table, taunting us with thoughts of sunshine and warmer weather. Many nights I can be found flipping through a catalog with a pen and notebook next to me, sipping a cup of hot tea. Dreaming of summer harvests helps, but it can be hard to fight the monotony of the cold winter months.

It can be especially bad in January and early February, when it’s too early here in Michigan to start sprouting seeds. Earlier in January, we had been on something like 3 straight weeks without sunshine, and it might have been the worst.

This year, we stumbled upon an alternative to brightening the winter months: baby chickens! With a small tabletop incubator in hand, we have started the process. Part biology class experiment, part life lesson, we are working with a few of my teacher coworkers to hatch chicken eggs from our farm.

Diving in head first, I have been researching the genetics of chickens, trying to find a potential combination of parents to get a sex linked chick. I’m learning quite a bit about the color patterns of different varieties of heritage birds and making lists of potential birds to buy down the road. At the present time, we are just working with our current three chicken varieties- Ameracuanas, Australorps, and Plymouth Barred Rocks. They are great for laying variety, as we currently get both brown and blue eggs. I would love to eventually have a breeding group of Marans, and we may likely end up with a batch of “Olive Eggers”.

Hatching our own birds offers us more opportunity to grow our chicken flock without worrying about potential supply issues. We are able to collect and hatch our own eggs without any delay. Really the only problem we are left with is when do we upgrade to a larger incubator.

2022: A Year in Review

Our year was clearly quite busy, as evidenced by our radio silence these last few months. Between the garden harvest and the early winter weather, our schedules have been quite full. Here’s a brief review of our 2022 on the farm, as we gear up to do so many new cool things this year!

January– Many woodshop projects, including a number of beer flights and cutting boards

February– Trying out our hand at wood burning as well as the creation of new benches for different spaces around the property.

March– Seed starting! Many varieties of tomatoes this year.

April– Getting started on the new 1 acre garden. Abnormally cold temps led to slow growth on the early spring veggies. Pigs came home at the end of April and really filled our days!

May– We brought in a new batch of laying hens. The hops started to establish themselves again.

June– Finally our spring veggies produced something! And we ordered more hens!

July– The veggies start rolling in– first turnips, then the first harvests of zucchini and beans. We harvested our first pig late in the month.

August– The flower season is at its peak in August. So many blooms! Tomatoes think about producing, and zucchini is giving us a bummer crop.

September– Apples start to roll in, and our first batches of applesauce are processed. Veggies continue to roll in, and the flowers still look amazing. We had a surprising harvest of watermelon too. And we dealt with escapee livestock, as the remaining pigs got out several times.

October– We added several new tools to our meat processing arsenal, and had a successful attempt at bacon curing after the first too salty batch.

November- Settling in for the cold weather- early snow hindered our clean up process.

December- Weather turned mild again, and we were able to do more yard clean up. Our youngest birds laid their first eggs.

The second half of the year is full of busy tasks that don’t always seem worth talking about. As per usual, you’ll catch a bit more from us through our Instagram page.

Thanks for sticking around, if you’re still here!

Rolling into Summer

Busy with vegetables, pigs, and chickens.

After an unseasonably cold April, May hit us like a ton of bricks and we scrambled to get a huge variety of projects done quickly. From the vegetable garden to the pig pasture, we ran all over the property this past month.

Our one-acre garden plot is way more than I anticipated, and it took all month to slowly get plants and seeds in the ground. In the end, I accepted defeat, and we seeded half of the acre for green manure. That still leaves us with nearly two thousand linear feet of vegetables, a giant undertaking after my 100 foot plot of years past. We have multiple root vegetables- new to me this year, three new varieties of beans- plus three from last year, 6 winter squash, 5 summer squash, 3 watermelon, and assorted peppers and tomatoes. With the new produce, I’m hoping that we’ll be able to preserve a variety in addition to sharing the bounty through our roadside stand.

We added some new chickens to our flock to offset the decline of our older hens. They are a great source of entertainment to the kids, and make short work of the compost we generate in the kitchen. The chickens are still all enclosed- several coops with outdoor access via a covered, fenced run. It’s not a perfect model and we are working toward more of a free range style to help with soil improvements, but it is a long term project that will need regular reassessment and adjustment. We are still working to determine the role of our chickens in the cycle of farm life, and that will dictate how we develop our chicken systems in the future.

The pig acquisition was an adventure, and continues to be a learning experience. They are really friendly animals, and their tilling abilities are unparalleled. Following the pasturing model from Out of Ashes Farm, who followed a scaled down Joel Salatin model, we realized quickly that our field is relatively inadequate for feed supplementation. However, the electric pig fence has proven to be an invaluable investment, and we are slowly working on pasture improvements. This lesson is helping us realize the healing that still needs to take place on our land, and we are making other adjustments as we go to speed up the process.

We are excited for the summer ahead of us, and watching how all our projects develop.