Welcome Daryl!

Welcome back ya'll! I'm so excited to share that we have a new addition to the farm! His name is Daryl (keeping with my Walking Dead theme) and he is a hair sheep. They are good for breeding and also are meat sheep. They don't have wool so we don't have to worry about shearing them either. He's still a baby and is so cute! He's about the size of a young Lab to give you a comparison. We should be getting a couple ewes (females) soon to start breeding with as soon as they get old enough. Get ready for super cute lamb pictures in the future!

We've also been tryin to figure out why Carl isn't growing. We've ruled out parasites and anything like that so I think he's just the runt (he was a triplet). Our other two little girls Judith and Maggie didn't seem to be growing either so after a lot of research we think we figured it out. Judith and Maggie are dwarf Nigerian goats so they are going to stay small and hence we probably won't be able to bred them with Billy. Billy and Daisy are Alpline goats, which is what Carl should be as well since we know exactly who he came from. Now we need to decide where to go from here, stay tuned!

And Last but not least we think Peppa is pregnant so we should have little piglets here in an few months! Life on the farm, never a dull moment!

Daryl

Goats, Pigs, and Chickens Oh My!

Hey Ya'll! It's been a scorcher this week! I was just out feeding and filling all the water for the animals earlier and thinking about how hot its been and how I haven't even posted about them yet. We currently have 10 chickens, 2 guineas, 1 duck, 2 cats (well 3 but the kitten is going to his new home soon), 3 dogs, 3 pigs, and 5 goats! Whew...It started with our oldest Charlie who is a Brussels Griffon and grew from there. Then came Haven, a black lab, and Zoey, we think either a lab/pit mix or lab/boxer mix.

Charlie with Madelyn

Our Goats are Billy, Daisy, Carl, Judith, and Maggie. If your a Walking Dead fan you'll notice I've started naming our goats from characters on the show. Billy and Daisy are our adults right now that we breed and sell the babies. We just bought Judith and Maggie to increase our herd so when they are bigger we can bred them as well and will have three breeding females. We had an interesting experience when Carl was born this year. He wasn't able to nurse so I ended up bottle feeding him. He lived in our laundry room and is now more like a dog than a goat. He's my baby! Follows us around and is very loving and social. We also learned how to milk a goat so look for future post about making goat cheese and soap!

Carl (he's grown some now of course)

Daisy with two babies we sold.

Our pigs are name Miss Piggy, Peppa, and George. If you have small children you'll know where the last two names came from. We just Miss Piggy has become a pet so she most likely won't go into the freezer but hopefully the offspring of our two younger pigs will keep us supplied with plenty of pork so we can cut costs at the store. Similar situation we with the chickens, eat and sell the eggs. Which, if you haven't tried farm fresh eggs you are missing out! The guineas are actually really good watch dogs and keep the bugs down. They are so loud when something new comes near its almost super annoying. Between them and the dogs no one can sneak up in this yard! Anyway on with the rest of the day! Thinking about taking the kids to the pool since its so hot out. I hate being cooped up inside. If anyone has any ideas about how to keep two almost 4 year olds entertained in this heat send them my way! Have a great day!

Garden Beds?

Hey all! Let me first say that gardening does not come natural to me at all. I don't know why since my mom and my grandfather all have green thumbs, I guess it decided to skip a generation. Frank however has always been into it and has gotten me into it as well. We've been growing different vegetables for years and now that we just bought our first house in January we decided to build our "forever" garden. Although we're already talking about expanding and changing things up next season. Anyway, for anyone asking themselves if they should start a garden I say go for it! It can be as big or small as you want and there are a ton or websites out there to help you go in the direction you want to. We picked the best spot in the yard to get the most sun and started there.

Then we just measured out how big we needed it to be to accomadate the amount of raised beds and buckets we would need to plant in. I'm not going to go into the actual amount of work and how we built all the beds in this post, i'll save that for another day. However we did need to get 2x4s and cemented them into the ground and bought the fences from Home depot and just screwed them in. Again not going to go into all the measurements etc. After we got the fence up came the garden beds, buckets, and then the planting started. This whole process took a couple months considering we could only build on Frank's two days off and all the rain we got. 

These 3 beds are all full of potatoes.

The far beds are lettuce, beans, and strawberries. The buckets have tomatoes and peppers.

Pre Plants

And this is what they look like now. We are about a week away from harvesting potatoes and starting again!

Here is a great link for lot's of different idea's for raised beds, have fun!

Raised garden beds

Hello!

Welcome to Miller Love!

A new blog dedicated to all things family, farms, gardening, and plain simple living. We have a small "homestead" as my husband calls it located in Beaverdam VA. Let me introduce myself; I'm Heather Miller along with my husband Frank, and 3 year old twins Madelyn and Baylor we strive for enjoying life simply (as simple as life can be). Through this blog we'll strive to let you into our life of constantly moving parts between working, farming, gardening, cooking and just living life to the fullest! I'm so excited to join the blogging community and can't wait to see what this has in store for us! Talk again soon, off to feed the animals!

Madelyn an Baylor with one of our goats Carl