We’ve had five litters of our heritage piglets this spring on the farm.
Spring is in the air, even if the weather has been a bit unseasonable lately! Though the farm never totally slumbers, things certainly slow down during the winter; now we’re on the cusp of spring and you can feel the dormant life of the farm stirring and rousing itself.
The most obvious signs are the births we’ve had - five litters of beautiful, happy piglets born to our mother sows. You may have heard about them already (or seen the pictures folks have been sharing on social media) and we’re so lucky and grateful to have their presence at the farm. They’re still in pens under the barns (our resident ducks have taken to hanging out nearby) but once they’re big enough to fend for themselves, they’ll move out into pastures and forest borders where they can roam, romp, wallow, and play.
Our first meat bird chicks arrive in just 3 weeks - more life to stir on the farm! Before long our daily chores will be back in full swing. It’s hard to imagine that we’re only a month or so away from our first birds heading out to pasture.
While the sows have been nestling with their newborn piglets in soft hay under the barn, many hardy volunteers have been bustling about the farm, braving the cold (and the warm) temps to harvest that local sugar source - maple syrup! This hardworking team, coordinated by Board Member Steve Hoenig is collecting, hauling, and boiling hundreds of gallons of raw sap into thick, amber syrup. With these unusually warm days it’s been a challenge to predict the sap flow but the rapid swing from frosty to warm days has been really great for getting the sap to flow, and we’ve been gratefully receiving the benefits!
As things get busy, we’re going to need your help too! We have our Spring Work Day coming up soon, and we’ll have to unload our new layers from the truck when they arrive from the breeder - a busy chore of unloading over 1,300 birds from a truck that ventured here all the way from Pennsylvania. Contact me if you’d like to be added to our volunteer list, and we’ll send you more info as we get closer to those dates.
If you have any other thoughts, ideas, feelings,suggestion, opinions, poems, farm-themed jokes or anything else that you’d like to share, you can reach me at jon@codmanfarm.org. In the meantime, thanks for supporting your local farms, and I hope to see you around here sometime soon!
Until then,
Jon Mayer
Education, Outreach and Volunteer Coordinator