Our Mangalitsa Heritage Pork Shares are now open! We know feeding your family healthy foods is forefront in your mind. By selling a limited number of Heritage Pork Shares each year, we desire to offer our community local alternatives for high-quality pork. A Heritage Pork Share is a great way to fill your freezer with [...]
We are excited to announce that the Ranch is now listed on Hipcamp, a company that partners with landowners to create new places to camp! Ferry County offers so many wonderful things to see and do- lakes, rivers, endless miles of hiking, unparalleled stargazing in our dark sky nights- all on or very close to [...]
Our website is under construction, so please excuse the dust! We have updated existing web content and added new pages with more content and photos to come. Here are the new pages: Australorp Chickens Delaware Chickens Chicken Trivia Egg-cellent Recipes Palais de Poulet Mangalitsa Pigs Fermented Feed for Livestock Home Dairy
After several years of wanting to add pigs to our multi-species fold, we are pleased as punch to welcome the noble Mangalitsa to the Ranch. And it hasn’t taken long to fall in love with these charming pigs full of personality! Mangalitsa (pronounced mahn-ga-leetz-ah) is a rare heritage lard-type swine breed developed in several countries [...]
We rely on our livestock to provide us with nutrient-dense food, so giving them the best nutrition possible is high on our priority list. Enter fermentation. If you know us at all, you know how highly we esteem the health benefits of traditionally Lacto-fermented vegetables and bread! Those health benefits can be translated directly across [...]
It’s time to update you on how the chickens have been doing! As chicks, they were brooded with zero electricity. Instead, we used a cold brooder and a Mother Hen box (you can read that blog post here). It has yielded some interesting anecdotal results, most notably: The Delaware and Blue Australorp started laying eggs [...]
This is Miss Kitty Mae, our new Ranch cat! And is she ever a sweetie pie. I have never known a cat that loves dogs the way she does either! Can't really call her a barn cat because we don't have a proper barn, but rodent control and feline friendship are her duties all the [...]
In 2021, we needed to start a new laying flock. Living off-grid with only a small amount of solar power, we needed to learn how to brood chicks with very little- or preferably zero- electricity. We saw kerosene set-ups to provide heat. In pondering over it though, for one thing, Krystal is highly sensitive to [...]
Vultures have been visiting the Ranch recently. On this particular morning, these two alighted upon the 100' tall lightning strike pine tree behind the cabin to sun and preen themselves. Needless to say, the Sheppies did not appreciate their presence! I'm not sure how I feel about them myself. On one hand, they are nature's [...]
The melodic songs of the mountain bluebird and larks have returned as the voice of spring in our highland mountain home. And last week, we spotted the first Swallowtail, Spring Azure, and Mourning Cloak butterflies. There are lots of baby animals on the Ranch: Alpine goat kids, Shetland lambs, Delaware and Australorp chicks; with Satin [...]
