To Market, To Market

We’ve spent three weeks at the Fairport Farmers market on Saturdays from 7 till noon.  It’s a great place to bring the family and meet and make new friends.   After 3 weeks, we’re almost sold out of products. Soaps take about a month to age, so we’ll be fully back into soap sales in mid June.  As usual, we’re pricing our products at a very attractive price.  Yes, we have the best soaps around, and the other products are great too.  Eau de Lavande?  Still some left.  Even though we can sell products at the market, our material and production costs are so high, that there is virtually no return.  Labor?  It’s free.  How do these full time farms do it?  Can’t pay the bills.  Don’t think I’ve hardly ever paid $4 for a bar of soap, but now that I know whats in it, maybe a different story.  That goes for milk and everything else coming off the farm: under priced and under paid.

Lavender plant sales have been strong, and our plants are very healthy.  These plants were left over from last year.  We lost about 40% that we overwintered in the garage, due to lack of watering I think.    The ones that survived, have been growing well.  Recently I’ve started to slow them down and need to repot them.  Price will go up soon.

The new lavender planting have taken hold this year.  They like the dry weather. Recall last year, it was very wet.   We lost a large percentage of our new plantings.  So I planted even more!   Now, we’re faced with the challenge of pulling weeds.  Even though we plant on plastic, the weeds are everywhere.

We will be ready for an open house this summer, we just need a little break to recover from all the excitement around here the past month.

Maybe we need to just stop and smell …the  Lavender.

Meet the Kids

Yes, we have 5 kids as of now.  Eating 4 times each day, at ages 12 and 6.   Their mom’s are milked twice a day, at 6.  No breaks it seems in the foreseeable future, and certainly not during milking time.  Genka and Geneva are finally working into a bit of a schedule.  Genka’ s milking great, but Geneva’s holding back a little.  We’re getting a combined total of about 1 gallon per day.  The kids are consuming more than that,  so we are mixing with milk replacer.  40 oz/day for the twins, and 32 oz per day  for the others.   Some of the comments on the internet say replacer can be an issue, so far, so good for us.  We are very strict with our formula, and rationing the feeding, and it’s working.

It get’s crazy with 5 kids all trying to eat at once if you are feeding them by yourself.  Using the replacer, we are getting some milk for ourselves and are storing it.  Our soaps will now include their milk from the farm.

Their horns were removed last week, and Marc get’s banded in a few months.  Sorry about that Marc, no other choice since we want to keep you.