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
1. Cold clean fresh water – as many times a day as necessary, replace your chickens water with cold fresh water to encourage them to keep drinking 2. Electrolytes – When we’ve had a heat wave, I always make sure to dose my flock with homemade Electrolytes in their water. Heat is more stressful on…
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…
How We Are Raising Our Meat Chickens- After the Brooder and into the Tractor
A few blogs ago, I published one about how we were starting our meat chickens off on the right foot. Now I am here to tell you how they will spend weeks 3 thru culling in Mid August. We built ourselves some chicken tractors -we used rough cedar boards (yes I know CEDAR IS BAD…
Expanding our Alpaca Herd
Big news on the farm- We’ve adopted 6 new female alpacas! This last Sunday, we were fortunate enough to be able to borrow a livestock trailer from a local cow/turkey farmer and we took the long drive to Justa Alpaca Farm in Farmington Maine and picked them up. She was rehoming her entire herd, and…
Raising Pigs for Meat
This last winter, I published a blog about why we had decided to raise our own pigs for meat this summer – Well I am proud to say, we are! Early May, we brought home 4 Tamworth piglets- a heritage breed from the UK known for its long, lean body, red hair and hardiness. And…
