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What summer farm activities should you be planning to keep your farm or homestead running smoothly?
As Spring turns to summer, it will get hotter out and all of the outside activities seem to head into full swing. Summer is usually a very busy time on a farm.
Here are a few summer farm activities we do every summer:
Taking care of animals
Yes, of course there are animals to take care of all year round. However, summer is when there are a large volume running around outside.
During the summer, we have some baby goats still here who aren’t old enough to go to new homes yet, lots of chicks as we are in full chick hatching season, growout pullets and all of the normal animals. So, outside feeding times usually take much longer during summer.
Gardening
Other than the animals, gardening is probably where we spend the must time on summer farm activities. We have already finished all the garden planning and transplanted all of your started plants and now it is time for harvesting, weeding and other gardening tasks.
Preserving
This is a product of gardening. With gardening (hopefully) comes lots of fruits and veggies.
Not only will we be using them for cooking and eating fresh, but many of them will get canned, frozen or preserved in some other manner. We like to make lots of salsa and pickles.
We also like to freeze zucchini and other squash varieties, like spaghetti squash, so that we have a supply to last the whole year. In addition to freezing squash, we also like to freeze blueberries. And all of those additional eggs our chickens are laying and the milk we are getting from the goats that just freshened? We freeze milk and freeze eggs as well!
Regular Maintenance
We always try our best to save big, planned out projects for the Fall when things are cooler and a little slower. However, things inevitably need regular maintenance throughout the summer.
With the extra animals around and the gardening supplies being used regularly, things get a lot more wear and tear.
Goat Breeding Planning
Didn’t we just finish up goat kidding season? Well, yes. But now that all the kids have been on the ground for a few months and are leaving or have left for their new homes, we like to plan ahead.
We usually start breeding our goats in August or September for December or January kids. So, it is important to take a good look at everyone’s strengths and areas of improvement and get the kidding schedule worked out before it is time for the goats to start coming into heat and getting bred.
These are the things we will be working on here this summer.