Later in March

My grandmother use to say about March weather "In like a lamb, out like a lion" or vise versa.  March began with heavy rains and it looks like we'll end with heavy rains.  In between, we had just showers mixed with sun.  As of this morning we have had 5.1 inches of rain for the month.  I have an Oregon Scientific weather station that my kids got me for Christmas in December 2009.  Until this month, the most rain I've recorded in a month was December 2010 - 3.8 inches.  Last March I recorded 2.1 inches.  YTD we are 172% of last year.

Stonebrier Farm in Oak Harbor

This last Sunday afternoon I took our little doeling, Windy, up to Oak Harbor to have her disbudded.  As I have written before, we do not want our dairy goats to have horns.  It hurts them but they recover in minutes after it is completed.

Ron and Arline Stone, owners of Stonebrier Farm in Oak Harbor are long time goat breeders.  They raise both Nubian and Boer goats.  They sell the Boer goats for meat and also show them at the County Fair.  Last year they won Grand Champion for the Boer goat they entered.  I put the link to their farm website on the link section at the top of my blog page.  Really great people and I love to talk with them about goats.

Little Windy disbudded

Pam has next week off for Spring Break so I'm going to try and take most of the week off.  My business partner is taking her children to Disneyland in LA, so I will need to cover for her, but most of my time is going to be spent building our new chicken coop.  I can't wait to have it completed.  It's going to be 24 feet long and eight feet deep, with four sections.  The largest will be for our layers, we'll have two brooding sections, one for chicks and one for turkey chicks, and a section for the adult turkeys.  Our goal is to build a new fenced pasture on north end of the coop for the turkeys.  We hope to have that pasture completed for the 2012 year and raise four or five turkeys for meat.  Probably sell one or two and keep the others for our freezer.  Our new batch of chicks are scheduled to arrive April 15th, so I have no time to waste.

Windy in the truck ready to go back home to her brothers

Pam will help me get our spring garden planted.  The snow peas are ready to put out and it's time to plant potatoes so I have to get those beds ready.  I have the bed for our greens ready to plant so we'll get our spring greens in.  All of the fruit trees are pruned as are the berry plants.

Monday evening I taught a class on organic pest control for South Whidbey Tilth.  It was fun, I love talking in front of groups about farming!  We'll probably have our farm on the summer SW Tilth Farm tour this year.  We did it a few years ago and it was fun.  Each year we tour three of our members farms and then end the tour with a potluck dinner at John and Molly Peterson's CSA farm in Langley.  They have a huge walnut tree that we all eat under.  It's always well attended and fun talking to other farmers.