Sunday, October 16, 2011

Many hands make light work

Today was a good day on the farm because I was able to share the farm chores with my family (this job is usually just done by either my husband or I doing the chores by ourselves). My husband and I were able to walk the fence together (we found a few areas that needed fixed), feed the hogs together, and enjoy the gorgeous fall day while doing all of this enjoyable work. I was able to teach my daughter how to feed the horses (she's a great farm hand). My youngest son excitedly collected the eggs. My oldest son fed his rabbit and then then chopped away with his little hatchet on the logs waiting to be cut up into firewood (that work will be have to wait for another day). My 3 oldest children then helped my husband spread hay all over to soak up all the mud from the rain while I went inside to take care of our sweet 4 month old baby who had awoken from her morning nap. I loved doing all of this together as a family.

This is why we started our little farm. We wanted another income that we could add to our household but we wanted something we could all do together. We have found that something and we love it.

We ended our morning together giving our newest large black guilt Mrs. McTavish (pictured below) lots of attention with belly rubs. She loves having her belly rubbed and she'll lay right on her side for you to give them to her. (I'll have to take a picture to show you.) She's a sweet girl.

Working together as a family makes the many tasks manageable and gives us free time to play together after all the chores are completed for the day (we just got a new hunting game for the Wii and I'll admit it's a lot of fun). :)

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Welcome to our farm! :)

Hello and WELCOME to our farm! :) We're the McGee family... David, Julie, Dakota, Emma, Wyatt, and Abbie. We own McGee Family Farm in the beautiful Hocking Hills of Ohio. We are an all natural pasture farm. We raise pork, large black heritage registered pigs, free range chicken and eggs (the meat birds move around our acreage in move able chicken tractors while the laying hens have free range to wherever they would like to go), and we have honeybees (hoping to have our first bit of honey this fall). We raise our animals with an all natural non-GMO grain, lots of room for them to root around for yummy nuts, grass, and anything else they can dig up in the woods and lots of attention and love from my family. We have some happy piggies. :) We also have 5 horses (4 are mini's), a donkey, 2 black labs, a rabbit, and we just added a mama cat with 3 of her kittens.

We've been farming for about 2 years (what made us decide to get into all natural farming will be in a later post) and learning a lot as we go along on this adventure in our lives. My husband is a full-time firefighter in Columbus and I'm also a stay-at-home mommy. We have 4 beautiful children 7, 5, 3 (almost 4), and 3 months. I wanted to share what farm life is like for our busy family (things get to be pretty funny around here at times) and the ways we try to still keep things simple. I love to cook, bake, can (peaches and apples :) have been in season), and I have a passion for photography (there will be lots of photos).



I hope you will check back often to see what we're up to at the farm. :)