As we wrap up another year, we are grateful for another good year at Winfield Farm.  All of the summer garden crops are up, including a second crop of mystery potatos from an old potato bed.   The goats and sheep have been bred for kids and lambs to begin dropping around March 1.  Two pigs have now taken over that garden and are trying to win the battles with the wiregrass that we lost over the past three years.  The biggest happening this year was the new house on the hill designed by Kristy took root.  It will be dryed in by the new year and hopefully completed next year just in time for Rich's parents (also known as Papa and Mimi) to move down to the farm.  We picked up 8 more Southern heirloom apple trees yesterday, some of which will line the yard around the new house as we look forward to settling in.

Our chickens are started in brooder pens under heat lamps shown above.  From there they move to a small chicken barn were they have the range of the barn and continued access to heat lamps.  Once they are hardy enough to be outside they are raised on pasture in mobile pens such as the one shown below. We move these portable pens to fresh grass and legume pasture twice a day.  The birds are also provided a grain feed that is hormone and antibiotic free while they are on pasture.  When birds are housed in the pen a blue tarp covering half the pen shown below provides shelter from the sun or rain.

We are not doing chickens for sale any longer, but occassional run a batch for ourselves. 

The Community Farm at Chestnut Ridge Camp & Retreat Center

Carolina Farm Stewardship Association

Pittsboro Farmers Market

Seagrove Community Garden

Anathoth Community Garden

"Of the Good that Has Been Possible in this World: Lawyering in Port William": an essay on the work of lawyers in the fiction of Wendell Berry found in Wendell Berry and Religion: Heaven's Earthly Life  (edited by Joel J. Shuman and L. Roger Owens), available from the the University Press of Kentucky in fall 2009.