August 2025
The summer has been a crazy one, and it’s hard to believe it is almost over! When one season ends on the farm, another begins. Some crops have been harvested, and some did not make it to harvest. The new chickens have started laying, while a few of our older girls have retired and will live out their golden years peacefully on our farm. The swarming season has passed and we have switched from catching bees to harvesting honey. And now that the alpacas have been shorn, we are working hard spinning their fleece and knitting products (including some new ones) for the upcoming craft fair season. The cyclical nature of farm life has a lovely rhythm that keeps beating along. Soon this season will end and another will begin. What a joy to experience it every year!
Craft fair season has officially begun! Our first craft show is behind us, and we have several more scheduled. Aside from Facebook Marketplace and orders from our website, our main avenue for selling our quality products is participating in craft fairs. Since most of our products are made with warm & soft alpaca fleece, and since spring and summer are very busy times, the best time of year to sell at craft shows is fall & winter. Our first show was August 23, at the End of Summer Craft Fair & Music Fest in Blanchester, Ohio. This event is held very close to the farm, is pretty low-key, and affords us a great opportunity to get everything ready and organized for the season. Our next event will be October 25 at Christian Village of Mason. You can find all the craft fairs we will be participating in, and any events we will be hosting, by visiting our Events page.
We have been busy crafting additional products to offer for sale! New this year is our hand-crafted goat milk soap. Made with raw goat milk from a local Ohio farm, each bar boasts a lovely color and a refreshing scent. Unlike many homemade soaps, ours are not melt & pour, where you just melt a pre-mixed bucket of oils and add color and scent. Those soaps do not hold up and are not as high quality as fully cured cold processed soap such as ours. In addition to our soap, we will be making more lip balm & lotions from our beeswax, natural & chemical-free beeswax fire starters, hand-knitted drink cozies made from our quality alpaca fleece, felted alpaca fleece dryer balls & one ounce beeswax bars. You can check out (and order!) any of these new items on our Products page. And make sure to follow us on Facebook so you don’t miss out on any new products.
We have had 2 honey harvests so far this year, one in June & one in August, totaling 375 pounds. We only have a few bottles of our spring honey left (the quarts have sold out), and we anticipate our summer honey will be sold out soon. Make sure to visit our Honey page. There you will find a link to the Beekeepers Corner, where you can learn more about harvesting honey and what it takes to be successful and sustainable beekeeping. You will also find the prices of the various sizes of honey we offer.
We had a fantastic garlic harvest, which helped offset the disappointing sweet corn harvest. The rain and other factors were just too much for the corn to overcome. But the garlic, which is planted in October and over-winters until spring, did very well and not only survived several early spring freezes, but also the record rainfall that followed. We cured the garlic, a hard necked strain, in the barn for several weeks. Since this is such a hardy variety, it will store for about a year. What we don’t sell will keep and get eaten by us hungry farmers all winter long!
Remember—Life is short…live happy!