Chickens will be available May, August and October with turkeys for Thanksgiving and Xmas. I might try to do the Pekin ducks again, we will see what the availability are for all the chicks after the avian flu hit the Fraser Valley.
The soap has been an exciting experience, we are still waiting for it to finish curing to see how well it works but the back bedroom smells really nice. We have orange ginger marmalade, lemon poppy seed, grapefruit, mint, milk chocolate mint, rosehip, and plain. Once I figure out if it worked, I'm going to try felting some of the soap so you have a built in loofah sponge.
Daisy is producing 5 gallonsof milk a day so we are making cheese every second day. Darryl and I built a dutch style lever press which works phenomenally better than the screw press, so the cheese is starting to stack up. We have gouda, harvarti, alpine, gruyere, feta, mozzarella, yogurt, labneh, brick, monteray jack and many others. I've bought 4 cheese recipe books but my favorite is Debra Amrien-Boyes - 200 easy homemade recipes.
The seeds are slowly arriving from Stokes, Johnny's, Vesey's, William Dam, Richters and a new one this year Seed Savers exchange. The seed write ups in the Seed Savers Exchange catalogue are very interesting. eg Brought over on the Mayflower, saved from Aunt Margaret's garden in the 1700's, etc. Darryl's just itching to get the rototiller into the garden.
The 11 ewes should start lambing within the week and the 5 calves are due after Valentine's day and Britty's itching to start up the incubators.
While organizing the freezers we found a lot of fruit that we saved over the summer when it was really busy so we have been making jam. Lots of jam, we have; strawberry, strawberry rhubarb, rose hip jelly, bumble berry, and blueberry. While reading the canning book I saw a recipe for apple jelly and spiced peach jam, so those are next on the list of things to do.
Looks like it's going to be another screaming busy year. All the best Windsor Farm