Baby pigs arrived today!

8 weeks old and super cute!

These piglets are a cross between two different pig breeds--Poland Chinas and Berkshires--and were born at Hunnewell Farm in Wellesley. They will be here all summer and will be trained by our 4-H pig club, the Muddy Buddies. In August the Muddy Buddies will bring them to the Marshfield Fair (and hopefully win lots of prizes!).
If you'd like to come meet them, we're having our first Open Barnyard of the season next Saturday, May 3rd, from 10-2. Open Barnyards will continue all summer on Saturdays, so you have lots of opportunities to come check them out and meet the lambs too!

In other farm news, our second apprentice arrived this week and has been working with us doing more seeding, potting up baby seedlings, and some other projects around the greenhouse. Here's Joe making friends with some of the new arrivals!

Eye candy from the greenhouse

Farm apprentice Sophie comes to Weir River with an impressive skill set, including some awesome photography skills. She brought her camera into the greenhouse yesterday for some closeup shots of our seedings, which I have to share with you--

green cabbage 

chard forest

red lettuce

red cabbage

Sophie and I spent the last few chilly days building a bunch more greenhouse tables to fit our ever-growing family of veggie babies--carpentry skills are another talent Sophie can add to her collection. We have more table-building lined up for tomorrow and this weekend and then it's out into the field next week to do some seeding and maybe transplanting some onions!

New faces around here

We have several new members of our farm family! Lambing has started in the barnyard and we have four new fuzzy baby lambs. These are Shamrock's babies--healthy, happy, and beginning to explore the world. If you'd like to meet them, we're having an event on April 25th--Earth Day with the Animals from 10am - 2pm--when you can get up close and hang out with all our new lambs.

Up in the veggie fields, we have another new face, farm apprentice Sophie, who comes to Weir River from Sweet Georgia Peas in Vermont. She's been seeding and seeding and seeding in the greenhouse, but we took a break this week to mulch our garlic crop with straw. The straw will help keep down the weeds this summer and add some extra organic matter to the soil as well.

And we couldn't resist shooting some video of the baby lambs. This is Sophie, holding one of the as-yet-unnamed new lambs. Our 4-H'ers will have the honor of naming all the babies soon!

Spring is springing on the farm

Lots of signs of spring popped up this week with the warmer weather. We spotted the first snowdrops of the year growing along the river bank, which is swollen with all the rain we got last weekend.

first snowdrops of spring

Inside the greenhouse, our work over the last month seeding millions of tiny seeds is coming to life! We have a tiny onion forest and some baby lettuces showing strong color.

baby red lettuce

mini onion forest!

And most exciting of all, one of our farm apprentices started this week. Sophie's been working steadily in the greenhouse seeding even MORE flats, as well as around the farm doing the odd jobs of spring cleanup that need doing at various corners of the farm. I'll introduce Sophie properly next week, along with some other new friends on the farm.