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!

I’ll take more pictures through this month. That’s it for now. Happy New Year everybody!

That’s right, y’all! We’ve got lots of bacon again! Come and get it at one of our three markets (see the “where to buy” link for locations and times)!

Want a consistent supply of your favorite meats? We’re starting a “wait list” for the next season of our CSA (Nov, Dec, Jan). Be the first on the list! Just email wendy@dryridgefarm.org and let me know you want to sign up for it! More information on what you get from the CSA is at the “join our CSA” website page. You can fill out the form to be added to the waitlist too.

Now, enough of the “buy our products!” plugs. How bout some pictures.  The past month, we’ve been focused on lambing season and getting our new laying hens into their new home. Lambing wasn’t quite as fruitful (or lamb-ful?) as we’d hoped, but we’ve got about 50 little ones bouncing around on our pastures with their mommas. They provide a lot of entertainment whenever we visit their pasture, chasing each other around, or getting confused and going from one ewe to the next asking “are you my mother?” (only to be nudged away time and again). And on occasion, all the lambs seem to get riled up all together, and take off across the field in a tight, 50-lamb flock, turning and bouncing in unison. There’s little that brings more joy than watching them dash back and forth.

Lamb photos so far. I haven’t been great at taking pictures this month, so I’ll post more when I take them!

Lots of lambs

Looks like a comfy spot

Our first grandchild. This ewe is the little brown lamb that is our FB profile picture! One of our first lambs last Spring, so now we’re grandparents!

Our first bottle baby

Our bottle babies had weird scabs on their mouths. We think scabby mouth, and we think they got it during farm tour (from hands that touched another farm’s infected sheep and brought it to these guys). Why from Farm Tour? Because none of our flock has it, just the bottle babies, and it’s super contagious. Live and learn. No lamb petting next year!

I love this little ram lamb’s coloring!

Only two bottle babies this round.

Getting our new layers into their new egg mobile! They’ll double our egg production this Spring!

First steps. Pull off hay wagon flooring, add chicken wire.

All framed out

And done!

Time to get the girls in their house!

All ready for them

Already happy to have roosts!

And out to the field! This is the first little guy who ventured out for his first taste of the great outdoors.

An Americauna, future blue egg layer (with a black cuckoo maran contemplating the jump to the ground).

Foothills Butchery Now Open

Our friends, Casey and Meredith McKissick, at Foothills Farm and Butchery, opened their new meat shop this Wednesday!

Find them at 1196B Old US Highway 70 in Black Mountain. And click here to go to their facebook page to like them and see what’s cooking today!

They were all set up when I dropped off eggs in the morning, and man, it is GORGEOUS in there!  They are the ONLY butcher shop in the area that focuses on offering local, well-raised meats and dairy, and we’re super excited their shop’s officially open!! Along with our chicken and eggs, stop by the shop for LOCAL (they have the farms listed in the shop) and PASTURED beef, lamb, pork, milk, yogurt, goat cheese and more! AND they’ve got precooked meals for you to take home for dinner! They had some awesome looking pork ribs, meatloaf, and meatballs yesterday, and change it up regularly.  A delicious new addition to the Asheville and surrounding areas’ food community.

Asheville City Market – Downtown… here we come!

Big news y’all! Starting THIS Saturday, you can find Graham and I and all of our Dry Ridge Farm products at Asheville City Market on Charlotte Street! Yippee!

Being able to participate in this market is a bit of a game-changer for us, and it couldn’t come at a better time! With 30 lambs just about ready to go to market, and exactly 50 little pigs scampering through our pastures (that’s more than we’ve processed total to date!), and 400 new laying hens in our brooder (which will double our flock), we’re ready to keep your breakfast, lunch, and dinner plates full of delicious Dry Ridge Farm meat and eggs! Getting to become a part of your weekend routine stroll through Asheville’s best farmer’s market is delightful!

Thanks for all your support through our first year and a half! It’s your support that’s made us able to offer our products at this Saturday market, and we’re looking forward to offering more and more delicious food for you!

Farm Tour – Sept 21 & 22

For this one weekend, from 1-6pm both days, 31 farms in Western NC, including Dry Ridge Farm, will open its doors to visitors interested in seeing how and why we do what we do!   If you’d like to spend one or both days touring farms, get your tickets now by going here: http://asapconnections.org/events/asaps-farm-tour/ (and scroll to the bottom to hit the “next” button).   It’s only $25 per carload, for both days, so pack all your friends in and make a weekend of seeing where your food comes from!

Volunteer at Dry Ridge for Farm Tour! (pretty please?)
Want a FREE FARM TOUR PASS? Want to learn the ins and outs of Dry Ridge Farm? Want to coddle newborn lambs? Then, reply to this email to let us know you’re interested in volunteering with us during the Farm Tour!   You’re welcome to volunteer one or both days, and if you volunteer for one day, we’ll give you a free pass to go visit other farms on the second day of touring. Farm Tour is a super fun weekend, but it’s a very busy and tiring 5 hours, so please be ready to share lots of energy as a volunteer. It’s a great way to get to know us, the farm, and a bunch of other farm lovers in the area!

You read that right… 50 piggies are now roaming our pastures.  Of those, 19 are from the litters we had three months ago… which means that this round of farrowing brought us 5 litters, for a total of 31 new babies (there’s a word to expand your vocabulary; sows giving birth = sows farrowing)!  The not-so-great news is that, for 5 litters, 31 isn’t such a great average.  We had two sows that had some trouble keeping their whole litter and have ended up with 3 babies a piece.  That does mean that we had good, large litters from the other 3 sows!  Enough with the numbers, Wendy, time for pictures!

In case the last three videos don’t work (I have a lot of trouble inserting videos in posts or newsletters), check them out on our facebook page to see what piglets running, eating, and playing in mud looks like!

Check out our Facebook page for a video of our eggwasher in action too! (Just scroll down the status updates or go to our photos)

Lambing Nears…
So, I just took our Kubota mule for a little picture-taking (quite possibly my favorite part of my job, though one I could improve on), and I did so explicitly in the hopes of getting a picture of our first lamb of the September 2013 lambing season.  Sadly, no dice (or lambs).  Today’s the first possible day we could have a lamb arrive, and apparently our ram was a little lazy during the first day he spent with our girls.  Fear not, though. As soon as that first little lamb makes an appearance, we’ll post the picture on our facebook page.

On that note, have you liked us on Facebook yet? We’d appreciate it if you would! Click here, then hit the like button!

That’s all folks. See you on September 21 & 22 for Farm Tour!! Come on out and see all our babies, the egg washer, all the new fencing that’s up, our new laying hen chicks, and more!!…