Still Heron Farm

07/17/2024

We got a bit lost in fencing the new sheep pasture the last few weekends, so in preparation for the next heatwave we spent the evening shearing up Silver, one of our guard llamas!
This little gem lives with the dairy goats, and plays grandma to the weanlings while keeping an eye over things. She will be 20 years young this year, and actually used to be a show llama! Now she thinks she is a bit too feral for that- but is a pretty darn good gal. She has set a pretty solid standard for what we expect out of a llama between tolerating goat kids crawling all over and around her, and quick to alarm call and go inspect anything suspicious.

05/12/2024

Zoomies continued!

04/29/2024

This past week, we got our first Doberman, and it's a ewe! A week into it, only 7/25 ewes have lambed. We still have a ways to go, this upcoming week may prove itself to be a busy one! 😁

04/23/2024

Lambing 2024 kicked off in the wee hours this morning, with a total of 3 sets of twins in the last 15 hours!

Gina, one of our commercial ewes, started us off with a ram/ewe pair. Next up, our first Painted Desert of the year, Salsa, gave us twin ewe lambs! A good sign for what's to come we hope🤞and balance out all the ram lambs from last year.. 😅
Lastly, another one of our commercial ewes, Delilah, with another ewe/ram pair. 😁😁🐑🐑

04/15/2024

The calm before the storm...
Lambing 2024 - one more week and we're on! 🐑🐑🐑🐑

03/05/2024

It’s that time of year again! We ran a small test batch a few weekends ago, and now have a full incubator we set this weekend. This year we are hatching chicks not only to raise for meat, but to add to our current group of laying hens, as well as selling some at 'point of lay' later in the summer.

We have been experimenting with some breeds to find what is working best for us. We need a good dual purpose bird, that not only holds a decent amount of meat, is cold hardy and lays well, but has excellent foraging capabilities as we free range heavily. We have a mix of Barred rock, Wyandotte, and some Western rustics we kept back from last years meat bird group. Along with some Ameraucana’s for some fun egg colours!

This year, we are hoping to dial in on what breeds work best with our set up, and what breeds we may want to run pure bred lines in.

Spring is coming! Happy hatching everyone! 🐣

02/15/2024

Well, she hung on to them right to day 155, the tail end of her due date window- but they are here! One buck one doe. Cherry’s got everyone up and dry and full of milk 😊

01/28/2024

With these beautiful sunny days and lots of time outside, we felt it was time to start highlighting how valuable the crew around here is to us! They deserve a bit more credit than simply being part of the ‘animal collection’ a lot of people tend to see. They really are the foundation for us, as we learn our way through building different skills, and strive to create a more self sustainable farm, with most of the animals being productive in their own niches.

One of the biggest assets we felt we have added this past summer is Nubians, mainly to support our bottle lambs, but also for our own use. We have begun making yogurt, a few cheeses and soaps, and this upcoming summer we hope to step into making some butter and ice cream, and expanding our knowledge step by step on the dairy side of things.

This summer Cherry covered a lot of our dairy needs, and excess went to the chickens and pigs. This spring we are planning for her to support a handful of bottle lambs. Not only is this cheaper than milk replacer- but the quality is higher and we are hoping to see better growth rates on the lambs. We have fallen quite in love with these guys and their personalities. Challenging as they can be, Cherry has been a gem for us as we learned to milk, and dove into the world of goats.

Cherry has been dried off from milking the last two months of her pregnancy. She is due February 10. We are pretty excited for our first set of kids to hit the ground here! This girl is getting pretty big, and has started bagging up. We are very curious to see how she does for her second freshening, and are feeling ready to step into our second year of milking!

01/14/2024

As is no surprise, Canada showed up with a bang! 🥶 The snow we have been missing, and dropping temperatures, coupled with higher humidity, makes this years cold snap a tricky one for sure!
It always makes for a stressful time, double checking everyone, hauling extra feed, straw, and water, but the resilience of these creatures is amazing in these -40 temps!
The humidity and unusual wind from the south have kept us on our toes this year. Our Chickens struggle with the humidity, especially our big roo, Pinky, who has quite the comb. Despite the insulated, draft free coop, frostbite for him is a real concern.
Our auto waterer is holding steady so that is always a big win. With extra straw and feed for everyone we are hunkered down and riding out the cold the best we can. Thankful for our beautiful sunny Alberta days to cut the edge off the cold. 🌞
A shoutout to everyone out there with livestock. The chores add up fast as the temp drops, and little problems can get big quickly in these unforgiving temps. For those calving, kidding and lambing right now, the ‘farm stress test’ is on. Our warmest thoughts go out to everyone, hope all has been well, and you've stayed ahead of things. Soon the cold will break! ❄️❄️❄️

01/04/2024

❄️ Still no snow, but a bit of winter finally decided to show up for us on this frosty morning.

11/28/2023

Boys headed into their breeding groups this weekend! Our first year with both homebred rams, as well as ewes.
We have Tim, a pure painted desert from our lamb crop 2 years ago covering our commercials. This guy we did not register as he doesn’t meet what we hope for in horn growth, but he has great feet, straight legs, a nice deep body and he has great parasite resistance so far.

On the Painted Desert side, we are running Shady Acres Elliot, and Still Heron Geo. Geo is from this years lamb crop and is showing great promise in both conformation and horn growth. He is out of Shady Acres Odin, so is taking his place this breeding season. Elliot is headed in to his second year with us. We gave him our ewes we believe have the best horn genetics.

Also new this year is 4 American Blackbelly ewes, split between the two painted desert rams. Their lambs will be registerable with the Painted desert sheep society, and these girls give us the opportunity to diversify the painted desert bloodlines slightly. We are very excited to see what next year brings!

09/11/2023

Back in 2019 we applied to get on the waitlist for the loop program, and 4 years later we are in! For anyone not familiar with loop. It is a program focused on utilizing food waste from grocery stores that cannot be donated, and using it to feed farm animals, anything that then can’t be fed (corn cobs, items too far gone, etc) are then used for compost. Both ‘closing the loop’ on food production, and keeping food and produce out of landfills.

We are thrilled we made it on and can help take a step in reducing the amount of garbage headed for landfills. It was very eye opening loading our stock trailer this morning with 91 boxes of food that was one days waste from one single grocery store. It is wild to us that this is a daily occurrence in grocery stores all over Canada

So here we are, so thankful for the opportunity to work with Loop, but so astounded at how much food goes to waste, and how much packaging material is used for our convenience. Today we unwrapped over 40 salad premix packages and just want to toss out a friendly recycling reminder/have a thought about how much packaging goes into our everyday items . We filled 3 huge plastic bags to take to recycle with plastic packaging materials alone.

Admittedly our first loop load was rather overwhelming. Both to sort, as well as how best to use, and feed it all out among our stock. But it was so great to take boxes of beet tops, pineapple cores, apples, tomatoes cabbage, strawberries, breads and bagels, yogurt, and so many more things out to feed everyone.

We are very thankful to have to opportunity to make a dent in our feed bills while offering the stock a pretty great diet. We will have some very fortunate creatures living on greens all year round! And a huge shout out to all the grocery stores for meeting loop and it’s farmers halfway by not only offering the food, but saving all the kitchen scraps, as well helping get us all loaded with some friendly faces. The animals didn’t know what hit them today!

Loop takes farms of all sizes, and can match you with a store load to suit your size needs. If you have any questions please reach out! Loop is growing and they have stores looking for farms to get started with them all over Canada.

If you are, or know someone with a farm we strongly urge you to look into loop!

08/27/2023

We have a long overdue announcement! We welcomed ‘Kevin’ to the farm early this spring. He is a drake that showed up quite literally out of nowhere early in April. Pretty beat up, missing a lot of feathers, hobbling along, and seemed to have an injured wing he could not stretch out. We gave the poor guy some feed and a dish of water figuring when he felt better he would be off and on his way. He lived under our horse trailer, and eventually started following us around and quacking when he got hungry. Often chatted to us as we went out on our nightly lambing checks. 2 months later we gave in, figured he just may be here to stay. We named him Kevin and got quite attached to him, and began the search to find him a little wife. We are now duck people I guess!

Not sure if he fell from the sky, or wandered down the road but we have quite the soft spot for him now as he wanders around picking peas from the garden and eating all the grasshoppers🦆

There just may be a sign at the end of our driveway that we aren’t always the best ‘farmers’ but that is alright 😅 it’s how the donkey showed up, and a few freeloaders are ok with us.

08/23/2023

We have 4 Silkie Roosters looking for some Ladies! 🐓

4 silkie Roos available, 4.5months old, crowing and dancing for the ladies. $15 each Located very close to Rich Valley. 1 hr NW of Edmonton.

07/31/2023

😅

07/14/2023

We have chicks available! Hatched Canada Day 🇨🇦

Hatched Canada Day Ameracauna roo with Blue & Black Laced Wyandottes and Barred Rocks Unsexed Located near Rich Valley AB

06/25/2023

Well, after a lot of research and questioning we took a leap we never thought we would this year! Introducing BNH Livestock Cherry Bomb. Cherry is a purebred Nubian, and giving us a great intro into milking goats. We opted to bring some milking does in to support our bottle lambs, as well as for our own use.
We chose nubians both for the large volume of milk, as they produce 3-4 litres/day on average. And they have one of the highest butterfat contents second only to Nigerians. Great for cheeses and ice cream!

Cherry came home this weekend, and is currently in milk. This is her first freshening, so we are excited to see how she does in the coming years. A huge thank you to Strawberry Fringe Nubians for passing this doe along, getting her milking, and hanging onto her for us until we got back from Ontario and were ready to start milking!

Following in Cherrys footsteps is our little nutcase Penny! Penny came home early March as a bottle kid, her and her wether pal Leonard have been hanging around the farm convincing us goats maybe aren’t so bad 😉

Lastly is Strawberry Fringe Ranger. This guy is currently 4 months old, will be our herdsire for a few years. Once again- thank you to Strawberry Fringe for setting us up with guy! He should offer some great milking genetics to future does.

It’s been a learning curve, we aren’t really sure what we are doing quite yet on the milkstand, but are learning quickly! We are looking very forward to seeing how well the bottle lambs do on goats milk, and diving into the world of soaps, cheeses and all things dairy!

06/20/2023

Have some Ameracauna Roosters looking for their own hens!

Pure Bred Ameracauna Roosters Hatched on Easter weekend. 10 weeks old One grey one black $20 each

06/01/2023

Remember when we said our last ewe was a couple weeks out? Apparently we were mistaken! Genora decided she felt left out and gave us a single lamb, black with a white hat. Looks like we finished off lambing with one final ewe!

Shady Acres Genora X Shady Acres Elliot

Our final count out of 15 ewes:

30 healthy lambs on the ground
10 ewe lambs : 20 ram lambs

Feeling pretty happy and thankful for these great ewes, that gave us a great second lambing, and eased us into learning a bit more this year. ☺️

Check back shortly for an updated website and for sale page!

05/30/2023

It was worth the wait!
Calypso surprised us today with triplets! Would you guess... another 3 rams! 😅 She gave us our flashiest set yet.

One more ewe to go, likely a couple weeks out

We are quite thrilled about the ram with the black mask. We are excited to see how these 3 mature and will likely keep at least one to grow out.

Calypso is one of our best ewes, and first painted deserts to come home. She's quite friendly and will likely spend the rest of her years with us. We are looking forward to retaining our first lamb off of her.

Big Rock Calypso x Shady Acres Elliot

05/27/2023

05/26/2023

After another 2.5 week lull, Quinn had two healthy ewe lambs last night! It also looks like we have a yearling ewe we thought was open, beginning to bag up, so two ewes still remain.

Seems to be Elliot took his time getting his girls covered, but we are quite happy with the lambs he is putting on the ground! Especially thankful for some ewes!

Shady Acres Quinn x Shady Acres Elliot

05/13/2023

Check out the link! ⬇️⬇️
We have updated the website with Odin's 2023 lambs. Still waiting for the rest of Elliot's and will update his page and the For Sale page once lambing is done.

If you see anything you're interested in don't hesitate to contact us!

https://www.stillheronfarm.com/shady-a

05/09/2023

After a week long lull, we finally have our first Painted Desert out of the red ram we picked up this fall!
A very large single ewe lamb out Shady Acres Zoey x Shady Acres Elliot.

Two more PD ewes left to go! Both bred to Elliot.