Savor the Simple Life with Exceptional Food

Hello from the farm! Winter is not the most favorite time here on the farm, but we're pulling through. Lots of hay and new shelters and heat lamps and wool socks. Rachel says she's seeking sponsorship by Smartwool. Several days this week were in the 40's and 50's which felt pretty luxurious. Lots of new things - piglets on the way, 11 new chicks, new farrowing shelters and tractor. Feels like progress toward our farm goals - making things more sustainable and better for the a

Greetings folks! We've had a super busy summer and can't believe it's almost over. Lots of piglets, lots of markets, a fair amount of sweating! My dear friend Leanne Camps (@lleannecampsphotography) visited us and took some sweet photos of the menagerie. I'll share a few! Beautiful images, right? She did an amazing job! All is progressing nicely on enclosing our barn. Formerly a simple hay barn, we've added a cement floor, electricity, running water, new trusses and patches o

Happy Sunday to you folks! A busy Saturday for Porch Swing. We did the LR River Market for the 1st time to good success. Check us out at the market on our Instagram - @porchswingfarmers. Lots of folks out and about on a stellar day in Arkansas. Aaron ran the affair beautifully and had several very capable assistants in his charming sister Cassie and the lovely and talented Sloane and Charlotte. We sold pork, special dog treats and our pecans and will be there with more stuff

Hey all. Hope you're making it through this nice springy week. Aaron and I both teach so this time of year means that we are wrapping things up at school. We both only have one more teaching day and then off to the finals. It's been a strange semester and has us both thinking more about the nature and intent of education, especially higher education. We both think things are bound to change but we're not sure exactly how. Anyway - you are not here for college talk! You're her

Happy Monday to you all. Anticipating a lovely, warm week here with a little rain. Lots of gardening, hopefully - planting all sorts of stuff for the pigs and chickens. Part of our master plan is to rotate the pigs around the property, reseeding the land behind them. We're learning on the hoof here - how long to leave the pigs, what to reseed with, how to reseed. But we're learning! We're seeding this spring with ryegrass and daikon radish and so far, so good. I think it's go

Happy very late Easter! We had a beautiful, super fun day here on the farm. Aaron's folks and Cassie and Jason and the kiddos all came out and brought beautiful things. Cassie made the table beautiful. And then Barbara brought even more pretty things. A wealth of riches. Cassie had come across images centerpieces with chicks in them in a book by lovely designer and fellow chicken lover Christopher Spitzmiller and we thought "Why not?". Cassie found these lovely glass tanks a

Hello dear ones. We made it through the night, all safe and sound. -2 degrees is really cold here. I would GLADLY take 100 degrees - that I can manage. But what do you do with the cold? It did look beautiful today, and I think (fingers crossed) we're over the below zero portions of the program. Still no Maybelline piglets. I'm hoping for tomorrow when it is forecast for 25 degrees - a real improvement. She's really dragging this out - also possible that I'm not the patient pe

Snow Day! Those of you with feet of snow right now will laugh at us. But - it did come with ice too so it was actually pretty treacherous. The creatures are handling it well. The temps were still in the 20's/30's and they can all handle that pretty well with their shelters and bedding. We are battening down the hatches for Monday, though, when it looks like the low is 0. Gross. The chickens all got a little extra grain today. They were out working in the cold, seeing what the

Good evening fellow travelers. Chick week behind us, we're now thinking spring thoughts here on the farm. Piglets to come soon, more chicks (and hopefully geese) in a few weeks, planning for planting the pastures (so many beets!), getting a new kitchen together for the sausage making to come. Busy! Important to enjoy the present though. Of all the things on the farm, this is an easy one. There is ALWAYS something to enjoy. The opposite of the tiny tragedies, I think, are the

Happy February from the farm! A little chilly but dry today. I've never been as concerned about the weather as I have for the past year. What I'm doing on any given day depends heavily on the temperature, amount of rain, etc. I have a whole wardrobe of socks for any set of weather conditions. Remember when I wasn't sure if we had any girl geese? Now I know! At least 2 I think, the Chinese (all white and a bump on the beak) and the Toulouse (the all brown one - I think that's

When I have computer work to do that doesn't require all of my attention, I'll play a TV show in the background. Mostly they are pretty trashy choices (I see you Top Model). But - I'm now listening to/watching Victorian Farm on Amazon. Not trashy. It may be too interesting, though, because I keep finding myself fixated on their horse plow or coal range or crumbling plaster. They are doing such cool things. It does look like hard work, for sure. Loving it. Also, I'm going to h

Hey folks. Greetings from the little farm. I was feeding the soon-to-be mother pigs tonight and enjoying spending time with them when it occurred to me that maybe other people would like a little taste of the farm days. I often collect the highlights from my day - who moved to what pasture, what field we seeded, how many eggs, etc - in a notebook but I thought, for the foreseeable future, I'd include them in the blog. So let's see what happened today! So according to my metic