Adding On

Now that we have completed our first year of selling meat at the farmers' market, we have learned a lot about how many animals we should be raising and which ones are better to raise than others. We really caught on to the fact that there is a high demand for lamb meat. I see why, its so good! And its a little harder to find it at market. Our whole family agrees that we would like raising sheep the most out of all our meat animals.

Since we only have 4 adult female sheep and 2 lambs we obviously had to get more sheep. So Saturday we went to the Norwood sale barn to get some more sheep there. We ended up getting 5 rams for butchering next year, and 7 pregnant ewes. They are all due this month. I am really hoping most of them have twins! And our other 2 original ewes never did have any babies, so that was pretty disappointing. So now we want to get a ram in there with them again. Hopefully within the next couple of weeks.

Pigs were going for really good prices there as well, so we ended up bringing 6 piglets home in addition to the sheep. They are the cutest little things!

We put them in the garden so they could get a spot ready where we want to plant stuff for next spring. That makes a total of 9 pigs for us now!

And Izzy has also been trying to get into the meat rabbit business for quite awhile now. Back in April or May, she got her first set of rabbits. A male and female. She waited a few months to breed them and then as soon as she was going to breed them, her male dug its way out of the pen and ran away. As you can imagine, she was pretty upset about that. So she went to a swap-meet to get another male. This time, she got an older one so she didn't have to wait for it to grow up before she could use him for breeding. She got her female rabbit bred and the next day she dug her way out of her pen and ran away too. She learned the hard way that you must have a floor to a rabbit pen. So she got one on and just kept the male rabbit she had.

Saturday she brought home 11 rabbits from the sale barn! 2 males and 9 females. Then of course all of the cages to house them all in. The way she has it set up in the pol barn, it looks like the rabbit display at the stock show!