Here comes the sun!
Well, it’s a sunny day in March and the farm is starting to wake up. I saw a spider skitter across the snow yesterday, and the sheep are finding patches of bare grass on the pasture. We just seeded our onion and leek transplants.
While there’s not much outdoor farming going on over the winter, we kept busy educating ourselves and others. Tarrah recently spoke at the Guelph Organic Conference, and the first ever Bring Food Home conference in Kitchener.
Our animals fared nicely over the winter as well. We winterized our hen house by applying an earthen plaster to the interior walls, making it draft proof, but also quite attractive! 
Whether it was the warmth or the interior décor, they rewarded us by laying nicely all winter long. We keep a diversity of heritage breeds of hens that are adapted to our winter climates, and lay gorgeous eggs of different hues of brown, pale blue, grey-green.
Our sheep amazed us with their love of winter. Although we always offered the option of eating hay in the barn or out, they much preferred the great outdoors. We would find them outside after nightfall with an inch of snow on their backs not at all interested in coming inside. They grew thick, wooly coats, which they are now shedding. Yes, shedding! We raise Katahdins, a fairly rare, “hair breed” of sheep that actually shed their wool rather than require shearing. I will tell you more about them when we get closer to lambing season in May.
More photos of our heritage hens, and our sheep can be found on the winter edition of our Flickr page. And if you want to stay automatically updated on Green Being goings on, sign up to our RSS news feed.
