Where Have You Been!?!?!
It’s a question I often got from my mother as she stared at me in disbelief as an appendage was contorted in the wrong direction or I had some mysterious dark matter all over my nice clothes. I figured it would be a good question to answer since I haven’t done a blog posting in... four years! Well, here is the cliff notes on what we’ve been up to at Coombs Farm:
We bought a new farm!
Our farm in Fremont was a great place. We had great neighbors and a beautiful setting reminiscent of something from a Norman Rockwell painting. Unfortunately, we only owned 16 acres. While we were leasing about 80 acres on top of that, we didn’t own that land and fields we would put lots of effort into suddenly would have a nice crop of vinyl growing the following year. We had been looking around when 90 acres became available in my hometown of Kingston, NH. The house and barns were in need of, well, everything. I was starting to get that “you are insane” look from Karen until we went to the fields and she saw what I saw. Pastures that could be vibrant again with the right work and in the end that is the best place to start. And away we went (Yeah, we wish it was that easy).
The farm hadn’t had any love for quite some time so that has been the bulk of the last three years, making a home, putting infrastructure, and picking up trash (I’ve got a bread bag story to share in another posting!). By last count we’ve hauled 143 dump trailer loads to the dump so I’ll let that number tell the story. We are finally gaining and actually have a decent place for us and the animals to call home!
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| Pretty awesome sunsets here! |
We no longer have sheep:
Unfortunately, the sheep are no longer part of our operation. We were up to 63 breeding ewes and they decided that electric fences were no longer enough to keep them contained. It was a lovely moonlit nite at 3am when they escaped for the fourth time that day heading for the state highway in what had been the norm for four months. Around then, we came to the realization that sheep were not in the cards for us for the time being. A good friend of ours fortunately was looking to expand his flock and they are doing very well in his well fenced land!
We have Cows, as always we have pigs:
If you've followed the facebook postings, I'm sure youve seen our cows and pigs so this isn’t really news but we are raising Hereford beef cows. They have been growing in numbers and are taking over the duties of the sheep renovating our pastures back to green. We are looking to have beef available for sale at the end of January. The pigs are assigned to our pig-a-till duty where they are taking the overgrown fields and rooting them up and fertilizing as they go. When the animals do the work for you the results are always rewarding, especially given the price of diesel!
We’re still open for business:
Perhaps the thing we miss most is our retail shop from our old farm. It was always nice to have a place for our farm friends to look at our different products and chat with them about how things are raised and produced. We are currently renovating the old post and beam New Englander barn and hope to have it complete by spring. However, we are always available by appointment (fair warning, we are still under construction). In order to make ordering easier, we’ve created two different offerings that allow customers to try a few different pork cuts without having to buy a half pig. Also, we still have some turkeys left for Thanksgiving that will be available for pick up fresh on Monday, November 19th. Price is $5/lb.
We’ll be doing a blog once a month:
Facebook is great for posting whats going on but people often have questions that this blog allows us to answer and share with all of our farm friends. If you have anything you’d like to know about on the farm, please let us know so we don’t go four years without a post! As always, thanks for your patronage and support of Coombs Farm.
