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With turkeys behind us, it’s time to start talking standing rib roasts for Christmas.

A standing rib roast is the same cut as a bone in ribeye steak. But instead of steaks, we have the processor cut a juicy, amazing roast. Usually you order by the pound or number of bones. 3-4 lb roasts are the norm but we can do larger.

The real takeaway is that we only have so much ribeye to go around. We sell out of these things every year. So if you want a roast, you need to order it earlier rather than late because once the 3-4 roasts per cow are gone, they are gone!

The price, as always, is the same price as our ribeye steaks, which right now are $26.00 per lb.

To order, call the store, 919-322-1097 and put a deposit down. Yes we can take your deposit and order over the phone if you call during the week. On Saturdays we often have one of the kids working and they don’t really do credit cards over the phone.

Once we are sold out, we are done so get your order in early.

Jeanette asked me to spread the word for our turkey folks.

Tuesday, 22 November is the day that turkeys will be available for pickup. We’ll be open from 2pm to 6pm so everyone who ordered their fresh, never frozen turkeys can stop by and pick them up. Of course we’ll be open for regular business as well if you need something to go along with your turkeys.

Jeanette has also called around to everyone to tell you the same info, but in case you are like me and never get your voicemail, now you know.

With all the change we’ve had over the past few months, with our main milk farm having to shut down temporarily, and then us being able to lease a new farm just as we were wrapping up, to then having both farms up and running for a few weeks, to now having just the one, new farm up and running, we’ve had a lot of ups and downs on milk availability.

But this week we are starting to hit our new normal. Pictured above is our milk cooler after today’s delivery of milk. We have about 30 gallons of milk in the cooler right now, all cow milk. We’ll be restocking on Friday with another 15 gallons or so, meaning we now have a steady supply of raw milk and we’ll be restocking more than once per week.

Since we started with the two milk farms, we have lifted restrictions of milk purchases. You can now get all the milk you want when you stop by.

We are open today, tomorrow and Friday 2-6. Saturday 9-1. Stop by and get milk, beef, pork, etc.

We’ll be open today during the hurricane. We still have plenty of raw milk available and on sale still with buy one, get one half off till Saturday.

I never thought we’d have a sale on raw milk, but having two farms pumping out milk is causing us to overflow.

From now till Saturday, it is buy one, get one for 1/2 off. This lasts till the hurricane shuts us down, or we run out of raw milk.

We still don’t know how long our one milk farm is going to be milking so again, if you ever wanted to freeze some raw milk now is the time.

Or make cheese.

Or make butter.

Or ice cream.

You get the idea. Come enjoy our boon on raw milk, before its all gone.

Some of you have already put your $40 deposit down on turkeys this year despite us not knowing what the price will be from our turkey farmer. Good news, even with record inflation she’s only gone up $0.25 per pound this year so our price is $8.75 per pound. As someone who buys two turkeys every year, I’m thankful for that!

The process will be the same as previous years, a $40 deposit to be paid in store. You tell us if you want a small, medium, or large turkey. Then we will receive the turkeys a few days before Thanksgiving, the day she tells us they are ready.

We will have a mad scramble to figure out where all these turkeys will fit because they are not, nor have they ever been frozen so we have limited space for them. That means we’ll be asking you to get here ASAP to pick up your bird.

The weights will be plus or minus what we are expecting. Some years, they are bigger, some years they are smaller. Welcome to small farm farming. Growth depends on the weather, if this hurricane hits us this weekend, if there is another one between now and Thanksgiving. Stuff like that.

Also as usual, we will be taking deposits until she cuts us off. We don’t know when that is. We just get the “no more turkeys” text at some point and that is it, we are done. We can take people on a waiting list as sometimes she figures she has a few extra after all the craziness, but that is all we can do.

And no, you can’t have my turkey. My wife would murder me. That girl loves her some turkey.

Jeanette has informed me that we are having a buy 5 lbs, get 1 lb free sale on hamburger this week. I think my lack of buying her a new freezer is the root cause. I’ve been promising one for months, but I keep getting bogged down in other stuff and not getting her a new freezer.

In my defense, the one we are replacing IS the new freezer, which has already had more repairs than the other freezers combined. And freezers are heavy. And my boy is off at college so I can’t use his muscle. And the sun was in my eyes… Yeah, ok. I need to get a new one. Till then, hamburger is on sale in the store this week. Come help us make some room in the freezers for this next cow.

Finally, till our first dairy farm shuts down, we are running TWO DAIRY FARMS at once!

So we have PLENTY of milk this week. Next week, dunno. But if you’ve ever wanted to freeze some milk for when we inevitably dry off, now is the time. You can get as much as you like when you come in this week.

In my last post, I let everyone know that our milk farm manager was going to need surgery again. Meaning we were going to be out of milk shortly.

But a wonderful thing happened. Jen, from Jen’s Elderberry, one of our long time partners in the store, reached out to a friend who is also milking. Several phone calls, texts, and meetings later, we’ve entered into an agreement with another local producer to lease her farm and farm production. This means several things, all of them positive.

We will not stop having milk in the store in a week or so as we previously thought.

We will be picking up milk from the new farm on Friday as we ramp up. That means fresh raw milk is now in the store on Wednesdays AND Fridays, meaning you don’t have to be here Wednesday afternoon at 1:59pm waiting for the store to open.

We will be able to lift the limit of one gallon per customer as we are effectively doubling our production. Meaning you can now stock up on milk. Not sure we’ll let 5 gallons out the door with one person but we can certainly be less restrictive and still be fair to everyone.

Long term, with two farms in production, hopefully we can finally not have a dry off period where we are out of milk during the winter.

Our pricing is not changing.

This is all great news. I hope this is a welcome change to everyone and reason to come and see us more days of the week than just the rush we have on Wednesday.

In about 3 weeks we are going to stop milking at our dairy farm. That is about 2 months earlier than we normally stop for winter time drying off. Our embattled dairy farm manager, who was finally getting back on her feet after all of her health problems the last couple of years, has just discovered a new major health problem. This one is unrelated to the previous ones but is just as serious and requires surgery and recovery.

As a one woman dynamo, when she’s down, we are down. We’ll milk right up to the surgery date and it will be a bit fluid on when that date is depending on when she gets scheduled. I’ll post again when we have a final stop date confirmed but right now we expect within a few weeks she will be out of commission and milking will stop, meaning no more raw milk in the store for the remainder of the year.

So thats the bad news. If you are upset, remember this is a person we are talking about. A good person whom we love. Her health comes first, and if we work her to death (an actual possibility with what is going on) then we’ll never have milk again so safety first.

The good news is, we have six lamb at the processor being picked up today, along with the beef from the latest cow so lots of restocking happening today. We also have more lamb coming over the next couple of months so we should have good lamb availability for at least a few months. I know it is hit and miss on lamb. Our two farmers who raise it for us do it on the side and production is a bit up (sometimes like now) and down (the rest of the year).

These days my time spent working on the website can be measured in minutes per month. I put a lot of time into building an online presence over the years but as we’ve matured as a farm, and our business model has changed, the website just doesn’t get the attention it deserves or needs from me.

With that said, I do need to go in and just clean up things that have changed and I finally got one done. We still get requests to conduct tours of the farm. They have always been popular and something we enjoyed doing. Especially for home schooled kids who “aren’t socialized.” If you are a homeschooler, you know that old story. In fact, a large part of why we have our farm operation the way it exists is we wanted our kids to have the chance to work before Chick-Fil-A would hire them. We wanted them to grow up knowing how to work.

When the kids were little, and farming was all they knew, it was a fabulous place for them to be.

Handling cattle, eating what we grew, and generally being able to run out the door and come home when you were hungry made for a pretty free lifestyle.

Learning to work with animals, to care for them when they were sick isn’t just something that is special at the moment, it also teaches them how to handle critical care. How to react when something needs attention NOW.

Not everything happened on the farm of course. We were involved in the Civil Air Patrol and deployed to several hurricanes and many events. Spork even traveled to England as part of CAP.

But we always came back to home base, the farm. Where we could work, or play all while learning the skills to be an adult. Part of that was always working the store, or giving tours, or herding cattle. But always something.

Heck we even built an airplane and flew it on and off the farm. Well I flew it on and off. Spork is smart enough to fly to and from airports where it is safe.

But in 2022, Carter (aka Spork) graduated from high school, already well into his college classes. He’s a better man at 18 than I am at 50 and we are excited to see him go into the world. Well “see” if maybe an overstatement since we can’t “see” anything through the tears, but we are proud of him and look forward eagerly to his future off the farm.

With that said, I’ve taken tours off of the website since we no longer have a tour guide.