Cathy's Farm Blog

Sorry folks, no fresh pictures my camera's broken.

I promise next time to put up pictures of the completed rabbit hutch. Read More...

Winterizing the farm means finding warm places for the animals to sleep. Winterizing the business means taking advantage of the slow months to generate ideas for the next phase of growth. Read More...

Here's a week in the life of a busy farm executive.

Friday night (our week starts on Saturday): Sort out party schedule for the weekend, decide which crew will be going to which parties, and which animals will be needed for each trailer. Print Mapquest directions from home to party 1, party 1 to party 2, party 2 to party 3, etc, for each crew. To bed by 10:00, if lucky. Read More...

When we first started this business, the idea was to *maybe* get the animals to earn *some* of their keep. Perhaps earn enough money doing occasional weekend work to help pay for food, a modest goal. Two years ago, when we launched it, they were literally eating us out of house and home (although we weren't as keenly aware of it then as we are now). We had moved out here as a hobby, which had become a lifestyle, and eventually a money drain.
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Today we learned how to castrate a calf. Trigger was born about in October, and his mother died during calving. That was how we came to raise him. A friend knew we wanted to bottle-raise a calf so we were on call when there was an orphan. You have never seen anything as cute as a baby calf (unless you've seen one). They are extremely clumsy, and not just when they're a few days old and their legs are wobbly. This poor fellow sometimes falls down if you look at him cross-ways. He's got long top and bottom eyelashes, a soft nose, and likes to be petted on the throat and cheeks.
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I remember years ago seeing the title of a book by the Foxfire publishers called "I wish I could give my son a baby raccoon". I was too young to "get it" then, probably about 15, browsing in a book store at the mall. I had some vague sense that it was anti-establishment, or just nostalgic for a time when a larger percentage of young people had a chance to split wood, milk goats, drive a tractor, and see stars. Ok, maybe that's just me, superimposing my own anti-establishment bias on a casual spotting of a funny book title I had seen as a kid. Read More...