Winter Markets and Farm Updates

Winter Farmers Markets

Miss us? We miss you too. Come see us starting this Saturday at one of our two new markets, which go through the end of March!

Asheville City Market
Saturdays 10 am – 1 pm
161 South Charlotte Street, Asheville (same location as summertime, just indoors!)

YMCA Woodfin Market
Saturdays 10-12:30 pm
Building 41 of Reynolds Village at 40 North Merrimon Avenue, Asheville.

Join our CSA!

We’re taking new customers for our February-April 2014 CSA season! More info and a sign up form are here. We offer home delivery! Signing up as early as possible really helps us plan, so please do! It also ensures you’ll get a spot in the CSA, which tends to fill up quickly!

Farm Updates

Happy New Year! 2014 sure made an awesome entrance! Winter on a farm presents some challenges. And zero degree temperatures cause some stress all around, for us and for the animals! Having 50-gallon troughs of water freeze through is never fun… having your well freeze is even less fun. But we made it through and all the animals did too!

Quite a bit’s changed since my last newsletter. In the interest of your time, I’ll illustrate those things with pictures.

Shoulder-deep grass for finishing lambs! We moved the last of one batch of hogs off their field and planted it with oats. About six weeks later, the last 20 lambs had their final feast for two weeks. Finishing them on such lush grass makes for some amazing meat, so come buy some and taste the difference. Our plan is to continue seeding pastures behind the hogs to pull up some of that excess nitrogen and phosphorous and to fatten up our lambs in their last few weeks.

I’ve included the last picture to illustrate how well our pastures bounce back, even when a rainy July means that the pigs do an excellent job tearing it up!

Not the best picture, but all those wooden posts on the right side of the driveway are new, and now we have a new 2,000 foot long stretch of fence that will keep the sheep on the road when we move them, and in the right field when we don’t want them to move!

The pigs are back in the barn. We have our 17 breeders in our big (7,500 square foot) metal barn, with lots of straw to root in and big communal pens so they don’t get lonely. This barn has big sliding windows and doors. We were happy they were in here when that arctic front came through. The barn stayed at about 25 degrees when it was below zero outside, which likely kept our eleven six-week-old pigs alive! Dry, warm, happy pigs!


Our truck turned 200,000 miles old! Happy mile-stone, truck!

What happens when you have a very rainy, exhausting market and put a cooler full of eggs in the freezer instead of the fridge? Hoggy heaven! These growing pigs will be in these winter quarters until they go to market in February. They’ve got a big building to go into for shelter and a nice outdoor spot in which to root and sunbathe and cement spots for feeding. Happy pigs!