Pigs can be archaeologists, too

Pigs dig

Farming in a changing climate is weird. Normally by December each year the ground is frozen and the pigs can move to larger pastures for the remainder of the winter without doing permanent damage. This winter we had a hard freeze in the middle of December, just like normal, but nothing has really been normal since then. The ground has not remained consistently frozen and we have very inventive pigs, so they've developed a new landscaping project: digging very deep, wide holes. We've never seen this before, but they're happily plowing through yards of soil, disturbing the root beds, and munching on the results. They started just before the extremely cold 36 hours we had at the beginning of February, so we thought they were building themselves a shelter to keep warm in and certainly the first hole they dug was big enough for all them to bed down together, but as the winds really kicked up they ended up retreating to the human-made shelters we provide for them. 

The coolest part of this (still) ongoing project is the communal nature of it: during the day, a group of pigs will work together to dig for an hour or so then take a break, at which point a different group will take over this obviously important pig-task.

New this week: Meatballs

Per usual, Nick is having ideas and one of them was to make heat-and-eat packages of meatballs. We regularly make meatballs for ourselves to eat with red sauce and pasta, as meatball parmigiana, or sometimes just straight from the oven, unadorned, into our open maws. Because we have access to the cooperative commercial kitchen in Willimantic, CT we can (relatively) easily transform our ideas into ready-to-sell realities. So last week we got ourselves some kitchen time and cooked up our first professional batch of meatballs! They contain our pork, eggs, and breadcrumbs from bread we made, plus grassfed milk, cheese, hot pepper flakes, a surprising amount of fresh parsley, and salt. They're vacuum packed and frozen but will defrost quickly (and pair well with our egg pasta!) to whip up a quick weeknight dinner.

Also new this week: BOTL Farm website

Although the old version of our website wasn't bad, we've meant to get around to re-vamping and expanding it for the past year or two. 2023 was finally the time when we said new year, new me, new website and got to work. Okay, we actually started last November, but writing a big website takes a long time. 

We're happy to report that the new version is now live! It contains a lot more info about us, what we're doing, the goofy situations we get ourselves into, and a glossary! We're such dorks that we tried several glossary add-ons before finding one that mostly works for us. 

Although the site is live, we are still fixing things, doing some word-smithing (thanks, Mom!), and making formatting consistent throughout the whole thing, so be patient if you see something that doesn't quite seem right. If you see large issues or want to be an editor, let us know! We're taking comments. 

We've spent almost all of our writing efforts this month on the website, so if you notice this newsletter is a little shorter than normal, click over to the website to get your BOTL Farm fix for the month.

Organic animal feed

Remember that we're resellers of New Country Organics super-premium animal feeds? As we head into spring, it's chick season. We're encouraging ya'll to think about how many chicks you're getting, mostly so you can tell us how much starter feed you're going to need! If it helps, our most recent flock of day-old chicks ate an average of 3.5 lbs starter feed per bird and that brought them through to 4-5 weeks old, when we switch them to grower feed. 

We don't normally stock starter feed, so we need advance notice to get the number of bags you need. Also keep in mind that starter feed comes in 40 lbs bags. 

All the feed we carry is freshly milled, but we try to be even more careful with starter because the young birds seem to benefit so much from the probiotics, enzymes, and fresh vitamins. Think spring!

Find us this month

On Farm Store Hours: Tuesdays noon-2pm, Sundays 2-4pm

Coventry Winters Farmers Market: March 5 and 19 from 10am-12:30pm