Tag: farm

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Cultivating Success™ At Quillisascut Farm

Introduction to Small Acreage Sustainable Farming
April 30 to May 4, 2014 at Quillisascut Cheese Company

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Interested in getting your hands in the earth and your feet on the ground? Learn from experienced value-added producers through a hands-on, multidisciplinary, immersion course in small scale sustainable farming!

This course offers a unique opportunity to spend time at Quillisascut, a picturesque goat dairy located 85 miles northwest of Spokane and 45 miles south of the Canadian border. Lora Lea and Rick Misterly, operators of Quillisascut, have been milking their goats and producing their artisan cheese on 36 acres since 1987.

This fun, informative, and inspiring course will give you actual hands-on farm experience while you gain awareness of the skills necessary for successful farming.

Gain experience in:
– gardening
– composting
– building a raised bed
– transplanting garden starts
You’ll also learn about small livestock care, how to milk goats, how to make four types of cheese, and more.

Leave with the skills to assess your farm goals, personal strengths, soils and site, and product marketing models.

Tuition is $895 includes food, lodging, course materials, and farm tours (transportation to and from the course not included). Early Bird Discount $795 sign up by April 1

For more information or to sign up for this course, visit
https://quillisascut.com/workshops/intro-to-farming/

Or contact Hannah Cavendish-Palmer, WA Program Coordinator at hacp@wsu.edu

For more information about Cultivating Success™, visit the website at www.cultivatingsuccess.org

This program is supported by the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, USDA, Grant #2012-49400-19575. To find more resources and programs for beginning farmers and ranchers please visit www.Start2Farm.gov.

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New Beginnings

Farmers don’t need an active imagination to see the beginnings of life, everywhere we look we see evidence of the dream of the world. Spring brings us full circle, we have gone through the darkness of winter and now looking right, left or straight ahead, we see new life.

Green shoots of fresh grass, a few crocus blooming over there, ducks getting it on, eggs are filling up nest boxes, life is renewed. I feel it rising up in me and flowing like the seasonal spring in our lower pasture. I feel refreshed for a new beginning, anything is possible. Do you feel it, too?

Seasonal creek runs through Quillisascut lower pasture

In late February the filbert trees take a lead in the sexual gymnastics on the farm. The male flowers (catkins) begin to stretch out and turn bright yellow and if you look close along the branch-lets, you will see the tiny red hairs emerge from the female flower. The wind stimulates the male catkins, moving pollen to female flower. Here we see evidence that the dance of nature is fragile, yet goes on and on.

For you, here now, captured live the sexual exploration of the day, the beginning of a nut.

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Cranky

Cranky It is the end of December and Cranky is the only chicken laying eggs.

You might remember reading about Cranky earlier this year. She was the little chick hatched by a duck. The mother duck would have nothing to do with her, so it was up to us to care for the baby chick. We put her in a box with a light, some chicken feed, clean water and kept her in our house. Cranky complained, she made mad little chicky peeps, hence the name Cranky.

Eventually, Cranky moved outside with the Red Broiler chicks and spent the summer moving around the farm in a mobile pen, until the day all the Red Broilers went to freezer camp.

Cranky was set free to make friends with Mr. and Mrs. Pretty and Billy Jean, the Quilli flock of free range Naked Neck or Turken chickens. Now she spends her days clucking about the farm and building nests in the haystack. Maybe next spring she will hatch some little Crankies of her own. (with some assistance from Mr. Pretty)

What is your chicken story?