The Freckled Farm Soap Company

Category: What’s up Wednesday

  • What’s up Wednesday – June 3rd

    I’m sorry I missed last week’s What’s up Wednesday. The busy season for the soap business, photography business, farm, and garden are all in full gear… at the same time. We are so incredibly grateful to be this busy. I hope it stays like this!

    So much has happened on the farm in the last two weeks. Four of the eight goat kids have gone to their new homes. They all went to good homes and we couldn’t be more thrilled. We still have 3 bucks that we are trying to sell. Selling bucks is no easy task. Farms only need one or two to breed to their entire goat herd and from what I am hearing from other farms there have been an unusually large number of bucks born this year. We were lucky to only have had fifty percent bucks… not many in this area have been so lucky. I am hoping these sweet boys at least go as pets to someone. They are all so gentle and have amazing personalities.

    We moved the the bantam chicks outside into their new coop! They were getting tight in their brooder and we were getting tired of having the clean it twice a day… chicks create a lot of dust and dirt. We purchased a coop last year to use for our free range chickens to sleep and lay their eggs. It ended up being a really poor quality, even though we paid a pretty penny for it, so we decided to move the free rangers back into the sturdy coop where they were safe. The “free ranger” coop sat empty for a long time. We weren’t sure what to do with it. It would be a waste to just throw it out, but we were pretty sure it would just fall apart should a dog or other predictor decide to jump up against it. When our friend Rachel brought us the bantam chicks we knew we needed to find them a home once they were done with their brooder, so we decide to reinforce the coop and make it into a tractor, allowing the chickens to help us with pest control around the farm. We removed the entire bottom of the coop… meaning we pulled it away because it had basically wasted away and had already fallen through twice from the weight of the chickens (see… piece of junk). We sat the coop directly on the ground and used the run area the coop once sat on as a run for the front of the coop. It was just the right size considering they are only bantams and will be moved daily. We totally removed one set of nesting boxes because they too had fallen apart (we had half the number of chickens in this coop than it called for by the way). Kevin reenforced or replaced all the areas that were falling apart or felt weak. It has made a cute little chicken tractor! I am so glad we were able to use it and it won’t go to waste… I hate waste.

    Chicken Tractor - The Freckled Farm - The Freckled Farm Soap Company

    In soap news, our Summer Goat Milk Soap is on the curing racks! I am so ready for this soap to be done! It is so wonderful for summer skin. I used it all last summer and I’ve missed it so much. It’s made with green tea and aloe, so it’s soothing for skin that has had a lot of sun exposure. It will debut on the first day of summer later this month!

  • What’s Up Wednesday – May 20th

    Whew! It’s been a hot week around here. I am really having to work hard to keep the plants happy. The goats have been going through several buckets of water a day… Where they normally need to be filled once a day, maybe twice, we are having to fill them at least three times a day and the girls are walking around panting. It’s May! What is August going to be like? I deal with the heat better than most (I love it actually) and even I have had some moments in the last few days where I was uncomfortable… Then I think back to the winter and I remember that this weather is much preferred!

    All of our tomatoes are finally in the garden. I haven’t counted yet, but there are well over a hundred plants out there. We also have a one hundred square foot bed of sweet peppers completed. We are working on prepping the other sweet pepper bed now. That will hopefully be done by tonight or Thursday at the latest. We move on to the eggplant and okra bed after that.

    The honeysuckle is blooming all over the farm. It’s one of my favorite scents of all time. It immediately transports me back to my childhood. I have always wanted to make a soap that is scented with honeysuckle, but because we only use essential oils we have never been able. A few years ago I attempted to make a honeysuckle infused oil, but made a few mistakes so it turned out horribly. I am trying again this year… so here’s hoping I can make it work. If so, we may be able to make a small batch containing this amazing spring scent.

    At the end of this week the baby goats start to go to their new homes. It’s bittersweet to see them go, but they are going to great homes where they will be spoiled and loved!

    Finally, we will be back at the West End Farmers Market this week! So Saturday you can find us there and at South of the James. There will only be a handful of weekends this summer where we will be missing from West End, so Kevin and I can photograph a wedding together.

  • What’s Up Wednesday 5/13

    What a week it has been! We sold an outstanding amount of soap! There are a lot of mommas out there that received our goat milk soap for Mother’s Day. I hope they enjoy it!

    As for me I had a wonderful Mother’s Day… It was also my birthday. The kids and Kevin spoiled me with great food and we got to spend the day with our friends at the GrowRVA Bunch Market. It was a great day!

    At the end of this week the baby goats will be weened down to only one bottle a day, and then come next Friday May 22nd they will be ready to go to their new homes! The two farms who are purchasing four of our goats are going to give them wonderful homes. They are very lucky goats and I know they will be loved and spoiled. We still have three buck kids that need good homes. If you are interested in them visit the “Goats For Sale” section of our blog.

    On side note… We will NOT be at the West End Market this Saturday and our friend, Lauren, will be manning our booth at South of the James (please stop by and say hi to her… this is her first time running the booth alone!). Kevin and I will be photographing a wedding together for our other company Neilson-Hall Photography. We will be back at our normal booths next week!

  • What’s Up Wednesday – May 5th

    We have had a wonderful, busy week. We are settling into our Spring/Summer schedule and getting things done around the farm.

    The garden expansion is starting to look more like a garden and less like a mess of dirt and weeds! It’s so much fun when projects start to look like the plan you have had in your head all along. The big change to the garden this week has been structural… We plan to “stake” our plants a little differently this year. Instead of caging or staking individual plants (since we will have hundreds of plants that need this) we are putting poles at the end of several of the beds and running fence down the center. We can use the fencing to tie up tomatoes and to allow climbing/vining plants to do their thing. We will have five beds that have this set up this year… Three tomato beds, one cucumber bed, and one bean bed. All of the beds will eventually have poles staked at the ends and the fencing will detach and move around year to year as we rotate our crops. Watching this process come together has made the garden expansion seem like it’s actually going somewhere. It’s strange what a few poles will do.

    Don’t forget… Mother’s Day is Sunday and our goat milk soaps make a great gift! You have five opportunities to purchase our soaps at farmers’ markets… including one on Sunday if you are a serious procrastinator. Our soaps are also in quite a few stores around Virginia! You can find our schedule and stores that carry our soaps here.

     

  • What’s Up Wednesday April 29th

    Where did April go? This year is FLYING! We have been staying so busy and it’s all going by in a flash. This week really kicks off market season for us. Four of our five markets are open as of this week and the fifth opens next week. Today is our first time at the Wednesday Aw Shucks Market! In fact, three of the markets we are doing this spring/summer are completely new to us. We are so excited to bring our goat milk soaps to new customers throughout Central VA.

    This past week hasn’t exactly been an easy one… for several reasons. This week was the big spring cleaning of the farm buildings. During the winter we deep bed, which helps create heat that keeps the barns and coop warm during the winter. When the spring comes along, and the nights are consistently over 45/50 degrees, we have to muck (clean) out the deep bedding. Which is NOT fun! The barn in particular. The bedding in the barn is several feet deep. The top few layers are mostly clean (which is how you manage deep bedding… it’s important that the layer the animals are laying on is clean), but the layers below, especially the bottom layer are rough. Most years cleaning out the deep bed takes maybe five or six hours with one of us doing the job… this year however it took us nine hours!! NINE HOURS!! And there were two of us working. Why the big jump? Well, the three additional goats played a part… thats the urine of three more animals soaked up in that bottom layer. It was awful! There were also more pregnant goats this year than last… again more urine. They were also stuck in the barn more this winter with all the snow that stuck around for so long. The chicken coop and buck barn weren’t as bad, time wise at least. It’s a necessary chore, but one we dread all year. From now until mid-November, when we start deep bedding again, the barns and coop will be mucked on a very regular basis and these cleanings are much easier and go much quicker!

    IMG_4970

    This week was also difficult because our dogs went missing for two days. Annabelle, our bassett, has become a runner. She hasn’t always been this way. She is eight years old and only in the last year has she started trying to escape every chance she got. We have done whatever we could to contain her but nothing works. Occasionally she has gotten out and gone running, but the longest she has ever been out was four or five hours. She won’t go far unless our other dog, Frankie, is with her and Frankie won’t run at all unless under her influence. This time they got out together around 3pm when we went out to do afternoon farm chores. When we finished farm chores and were coming back inside around 7:30pm they we still gone. We spent the entire night calling them from the back porch. They were gone the entire next day. I posted their information on every Facebook pet group in the area and called animal control. Kevin drove around looking for them and we took turns calling them from the porch the entire day. We went to bed that night still not knowing were they were. I had a meeting the next morning and needed to run errands, so I was away from the house. That afternoon, when on my way home, Kevin called to say our neighbor saw them about four miles up the street in a church parking lot. I went home to get the truck and went searching for them… and there they were, lounging in the shade by the church. They were covered in ticks, but were perfect fine otherwise! After two days I had lost hope in finding them. I am so happy to have them home… now to keep them from escaping again!

    IMG_5011

    This week wasn’t all bad though! In fact, aside from those things it was actually a good week. A friend of ours, from Chickenberry Farm, brought us bantam chicks! Chicks have so much personality and it is so much fun to watch them grow! These little chickens will live in a chicken tractor in our garden and will help us control the pest. A few of the roosters will live in the pastures with the goats and in our yard as free rangers to help control pest in those locations as well.


     IMG_5104

  • What’s Up Wednesday – April 21st

    We are gearing up to start our farmers market season. We’ve been making lots of soap, cleaning up and reconfiguring our display… and getting excited for a really busy market season! We have been at South of the James through the winter and will continue to be there every Saturday, but this weekend is also the start of the West End Market on Saturdays! Next week starts the Wednesday Aw Shucks market. Then the following week is the big kick off and all five of our 2015 markets will be open! We are so excited to see all of our regulars at the West End Market and bring our goat milk soap to a whole bunch of new people at all of the new markets that we will be vending at this year.

    Tina, our doe who is due to kid in June, is starting to show. Normally she is quite slender but now she has a little stomach that pokes out. We didn’t ultrasound her for confirmation because if she didn’t get pregnant on the first try we weren’t going to breed her again this year. A June kidding is already going to be difficult (with the flies and everything) and I wasn’t willing to put her, or her kids, through a July kidding, so we figured that it would become obvious that she was pregnant and that would be confirmation enough for us. In the last week or so Tina has started to fill out, and considering she has never gone back into heat, we are positive at this point that she is pregnant.

    The Freckled Farm Soap Company - Tina PregnantThe Freckled Farm Soap Company - Tina Pregnant

    The garden continues to grow at a rapid rate. We are barely keeping up and the garden doesn’t exactly look pretty at the moment, the pathways are over grown, and the weeds are catching up with us already, but beds are getting prepped and the plants are making it into the ground and are growing… so that is all that matters. I have been going out through out the day for 15 minutes increments to pull weeds, then we spend 3+ hours in the garden each afternoon. The cabbages are getting huge and the broccoli is chugging along. The potatoes are all over the place and the peas are getting quite tall. One of my big focuses recently has been working on building perennial beds throughout the garden to give the beneficial bugs a permanent home while giving us beds that will provide food year after year without us having to replant. Currently I have a bed (4×25 feet – 100 sq. ft.) half way filled with strawberry transfers from our other garden and from our friend Toni’s garden. We plan to put in a bed of artichokes in the next few weeks, and we will have many perennial flowers, like chamomile and echinacea, scattered everywhere. In the fall I hope to put in a bed of asparagus… my favorite vegetable.

    Well, that’s all for this week! I hope to see all of you out at South of the James and West End Farmers Market this weekend!

  • What’s Up Wednesday – April 15th

    The garden has exploded this week and we are doing everything we can to keep up! The cabbages are getting huge and the broccoli is moving along. The turnip, beet, and radish sprouts are poking through the ground and starting to get their second set of leaves. The potato plants are starting to surface here and there. I am trying to get the strawberries, which have been overgrown with clover because of neglect from a busy end of year last year, prepped and thinned out. I am hoping to have enough transplants to fill a bed in the big garden. I would love to have a whole 100 sqft bed of strawberries… you can never have enough strawberries! My plants that are still in our friend Toni’s greenhouse are getting huge and I am dreaming of fresh tomatoes and peppers! The farm is so beautiful this time of year. The trees are blooming everywhere, the grass is finally filling in, and the mud is finally going away! I love spring so much!

    Last week we started a new afternoon routine where we now eat dinner at 2pm before going out for farm chores. Before this change we were going outside to do afternoon farm chores at 2pm and we weren’t getting inside until almost 7pm to start dinner. We were all starving by then and it was making the last 2 hours of farm chores miserable. Also, the kids were eating these large dinners then immediately going to bed… which is not exactly a healthy habit. Eating an early dinner allowed us to just focus on our chores and we didn’t feel rushed to get in at any certain time. So now we are eating dinner at 2pm, going out for farm chores by 2:30/3pm, we work in the garden until 5pm, then do all the actual farm chores with the animals, milk the does, and feed the babies, and then weed and work in the garden until it gets dark. When we finally come in we have a very light meal, like a salad and/or leftovers, and the kids go to bed. Our morning farm routine has stayed the same in all of this. It has been a huge and interesting adjustment, but so far so good! I might write a full post about the effects it is having on our schedule, and health after we have been in the schedule for a while.

  • What’s Up Wednesday – April 8th

    We are in hyper drive around here. Making soap, making laundry detergent, caring for the farm, working in garden… It’s crazy!!

    We are preparing for Spring Bada-Bing and South of the James this week. If you’ve never been to one of the Craft Mafia Craft shows I am here to tell you that they are fantastic. The quality of vendors is outstanding and they always end up being really big days for us. Then of course there is South of the James, where we are every Saturday. The market is really picking up (not that it was ever really slow) because of the warmer weather. More vendors are coming and a lot more people are showing up! That market is full of life and the vendors are amazing. We plan to sell a lot of goat milk soap this weekend!

    The garden is quickly coming together. We are having to prep beds in the big garden as we are transplanting. We have things that need to go in the ground already and 24 4’x25′ beds that needed to be prepped. Each bed takes around 2-3 hours to do as we break up dirt clumps, pull weeds and even out the dirt. Since this is a new area that has never been gardened before clearing out the weeds and grass is a big chunk of that time. There was just no way we were going to get all the beds prepped and done before the plants needed to go in. So we are going bed by bed, prepping then planting. So far we have a ton of cabbages, potatoes, and broccoli in the ground in the new big garden and potatoes, cabbages, swish chard, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, beets, turnips, radishes, strawberries, peas, and spinach in the smaller raised bed garden that we have been planting in for years. We still have hundreds upon hundreds of plants that need to go into the big garden, many that are still in our friend’s green house that we are using. It’s hard not to feel incredibly fortunate as you are putting nourishing, healthy foods into the ground. It’s a wonderful feeling.

  • What’s up Wednesday – April 1st

    It’s April!! Spring is really starting to settle in and temperatures are rising slowly. The trees around the farm are starting to bloom, the garden is coming together, and we have lots of babies running around. It’s a wonderful time to live on a farm!

    Last Friday Hillary finally had her babies. She was actively in labor for well over 24 hours. All day Thursday she was panting heavily, and had several very strong contractions. We sat with her from 9pm-11pm because we were sure it was going to happen any second. She was up and down, and having contractions here and there. Finally after two hours without much progression we decided it would be a good idea to get some sleep… because as we all know a watched goat never kids. We had a restless night with all of the moaning and movement coming over the monitor, but nothing changed, and when morning farm chores came along she had not progressed at all.

    Kevin went to check on Hillary around 8am and she had started to push. It wasn’t long before a little doe was born and a second kid was on the way. The second kid’s kidding wasn’t as easy. He was coming out head first, legs back, and he was huge… nearly as big as our 2 week olds. She pushed for quite a while and I had to aid a little, but he finally came out. Lastly, with very little effort, Hillary had another doe. Everyone is doing well! We are officially done with kidding until June, when Tina is due. 3 Kiddings, 8 Total Babies, 4 Bucks and 4 Does

    Baby Goat from The Freckled Farm

    Production has ramped up around here. We’ve been working hard to prepare for our busy season starting in less than two weeks. We are of course at South of the James every Saturday still. Next weekend we have Spring Bada-Bing, which is our biggest craft show of the spring. The following weekend we have RVA Earth day… and then after that market seasons start to kick off! It won’t be long and we will be in 5 markets a week! This means lots of soap and laundry detergent needs to be made. I really love this time of year!

  • What’s up Wednesday – March 25th

    Another week has gone by and Hillary is still pregnant (or at least she is as I am writing this post on Tuesday)! As of Monday the babies lungs were developed. We made it! She could go any day now and has really started the processes of building up to labor. Her ligaments have loosened up again, and she is quite swollen. I think she is actually waiting until I go out of town on Thursday so Kevin has to handle her kidding alone… you know to stir things up again, because thats what goats do. She is so huge and uncomfortable that I am hoping she kids sooner rather than later for her sake. Either way there will be new babies by next week’s What’s up Wednesday.

    The babies from the first two kiddings are getting so big. They grow up so quickly. It’s hard to have a bad day when you get to spend time with these little cuties:

    2015 Goat Kids at The Freckled Farm(By the way… This image is from a post documenting the first day of Spring on the farm. Check back Saturday, when that blog post goes live, to see more)