We’ve tried this once before– with clearance bin garlic bulbs… and it did not work. We never got a single bit of real growth, which I knew was a very good probability. So this time, we’re going about it completely differently. First- we did set up the patch in the same way, lots of alpaca…
The Cost of Raising Pigs for Meat
This is the second in our “Cost of” series- a bunch of blogs I am compiling to record the real cost of growing our own food, running our homestead/farm startup, etc. Today’s topic is PIGS! Piglets – This is a time of year thing- spring piglets are between $75 and $125 each. We purchased ours…
MOFGA’s Common Ground Fair -2018
This last Sunday, we had the chance, once again, to go cruise around the annual Common Ground Fair, in Unity Maine. This was our 6th year attending, and we made a pretty valiant effort to tour the whole place in spite of my very progressed 36+ week pregnancy. The morning started off chilly and clear,…
Town of Danforth – Halloween Decorating Contest 2018
Its that time of year again- Time to celebrate the end of summer and harvest and to ring in the beginning of fall! To celebrate the changing of seasons, and the arrival of Halloween, Gillis Fuel, LLC is sponsoring the Halloween Decorating Contest for the Town of Danforth. Just like last year, we are going…
The Cost of Raising Chickens For Meat
This was a summer of firsts- and one of the most important ones was our first time raising our own chickens for meat. We went big, raising enough for not just our expanding family for a whole year, but also raising a years worth for my parents. We are very excited about how the whole…
Protecting your Chickens from Heat Stress
I’m an extremely inactive member of a lot of homesteading related forums & social media groups. I lurk, some might say, rarely posting anything more then comments offering bits of my limited wisdoms. One thing I see people posting a lot of is heat related ills and woes. Especially this last summer with record breaking…
Raising Meat Chickens- Lessons Learned
We are less then 24 hours away from sending our first batch of birds to the butcher and I’ve had some time to reflect. This was our first year raising our own meat- we tend to never do anything halfheartedly so we started out big by raising 120+ meat Cornish Rock Crosses and 4 pigs….
Turning Fiber into Money
Part of our homestead dream is for our animals to basically pay for themselves. This has been a bit of a trial and error deal with the chickens (best money so far is in pickled eggs by far, but it is a time intensive and smelly process). With our herd of alpacas, we are hoping…
Wild Chamomile Aka Pineapple Weed
Wild chamomile (aka Pineapple Weed) is a herb that grows abundantly around the northern hemisphere. The little yellow bulbs pop up late spring into the late summer. It grows pretty much anywhere, but especially loves areas where the ground was disturbed recently, or is gravelly in nature. We have a large patch growing where are…
Open Farm Day – July 28th 2018
The last weekend of July, we’d like to invite you all to come visit our farm! On Saturday, July 28th from 8am to 6pm, come on down to Gillis Gardens off of Maple St in Danforth. This is the same weekend as the Annual Summerfest, so there is going to be a whole lot going…
