Pigs in pasture are good for your health!

Have you every had the pleasure of pasturing a pig? Their enthusiasm is contagious. And it’s great to watch them eating thistle and other highly nutritious but often-avoided greens. The secret is to limit the time they are in the fields. This keeps them grazing only and avoids overly disturbing the pasture. Some disturbance is…

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2023 Collaborative Market-Style CSA

With this springtime rain and sunshine, our gardens and pastures are green and growing, and a new season of local food is upon us.   Wild Edge Farm, The Sawtooth Ranch, and Hidden Penny Farm invite you to join us for another year worth of our Collaborative Market-Style CSA and enjoy a diversity of local farm products from May-December.   The…

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Growing our local food system

In the Wild Edge household, we regularly eat the freshest of fresh food, one of the perks of managing a farm.  We spent a couple days recently butchering cockerels as part of forming our next flock of laying hens.  Our younger son Jake started dreaming of chicken burritos as he plucked, and by dinnertime he…

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Babes in Winter

Our barn is full of babies, from the 5 new litters of piglets, to the 38 chicks that hatched in our incubator, to the 3 litters of bunnies born unanticipated in the rabbit hutch. They all grow so fast! We were happy to share the baby love with several families with young children who were…

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Heritage resilience

You’ve gotta love our heritage Tamworth pigs! We have been creating new spaces this year in the barn for winter housing of our livestock. You may have seen our previous post “High and Dry,” where we moved the Tamworths up the hill in time for December’s heavy rain and snow. They are a fit and…

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High and dry

With all the rain these days, we have been grateful for our sturdy barn. We’re giving our pastures a break during these heavy, wet rains. We’ve generally used our high tunnels for livestock during the winter. This year we had late squash and tomatoes still growing as the rains descended on us, and decided to…

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It’s piglet time!

Morning sunshine makes for tender moments. And many piglets make for playful activity! One more mama to go! How many babies to you think this sow is carrying?

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An evening stroll

Yesterday Jacob and I were quite surprised as we arrived back home at twilight. Right in the driveway near the house was one of our sows busily grazing the edges of the driveway with a little mob of piglets all around her. She had busted through her pen in the hoophouse and made her way…

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Helpers

I’ll bet you wish you had helpers like these to mow your yard and improve your grasses! With the mix of sunshine and rain that we have been enjoying this month, the grasses in our pastures are shoulder high. We are grateful when we can count on our animals to eat it down. Here at…

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Hog heaven

We have been letting our animals out to graze this week as the Earth warms and the rains slow. When the soil gets a chance to dry a bit it lowers the risk of compaction to the soil or damage to the grasses. We are as eager as the hogs and cattle. It brings such…

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