The last frost date for this area is February 15! Shortly after we took the plastic off the greenhouse and it rained for two days straight! My greenhouse plants soaked it up! Last year, we had a pretty mild winter — didn’t lose any plants to cold, although we did lose an entire litter of piglets. They were born just before the coldest day of the winter, and between the cold and the rain they didn’t survive. Our Christmas Eve piglets decided to nurse off the new mom and give their mom a chance to recover.
We moved their mom to a bigger area, not so wet, and gave her extra food as she had gotten very thin. She recovered and has three of her female piglets with her. The remaining three are males and were moved into the boar (male pig) area. We also moved our two August piglets in with the other girl pigs, so they are no longer hanging out with the chickens.
One of our goats, Ms. B, had her kid in February 2024, which we are calling “Little One.” Baby goats are very springy creatures, bouncing around when they are not getting milk from their moms. Her mom was protective, so when I attempted to milk her mom I had to keep Little One with her. After Little One was weaned, I got more milk from her mom without any problem.
Our second pregnant goat, Ms. G, had three boys in March, which we named Brownie, Blaze and Smidgen. Smidgen was the runt, so we bottle fed him for a few months and then moved him and his brothers in with his dad.
I was very surprised by my tomato patch of Everglade tomatoes. This is a native tomato, about the size of a blueberry, but very tasty. They found a place to grow that must have what they need because the tomato patch got bigger and produced a lot of tomatoes! My pepper and pineapple plants also did well.
We kept track of the number of eggs we got from our chickens and ducks. The new chickens, white leghorns, have produced eggs daily since October.
Our ducks, on the other hand, had decreasing production over several months, starting around June of last year. I queried another Silver Appleyard duck owner with a website about what might cause this. He suggested making sure they had oyster shell and were getting the right feed to produce eggs. Sure enough, after we gave them a regular supply of oyster shell and changed their feed, they started producing eggs again! We now get nine eggs daily and consistently – five from our chickens and four from our ducks.
We don’t sell our eggs, but we do share them and try to use as many of them as we can ourselves. One of my favorite recipes for using lots of eggs is blueberry-ginger clafouti. This is a French dessert, somewhat like a custard baked into a cake. It is hard to explain, but very delicious. I make four pans at a time and it uses up two dozen eggs! We eat it for breakfast or for dessert or for a high-protein snack. I will share the recipe in a future post.
