Half-Pint Hollow Farm

10/12/2022

Shiitake are ready, available, and super delicious! Send us a message if you like to get some from this harvest before we sell out again.

09/15/2022

We are excited to announce that will be present (with snuggly critters) and teaching about small scale heritage animal farming and natural soil and pasture management at in Raleigh on Saturday, September 24th!

08/30/2022

If you’ve been to the farm for a tour or a class this year and have seen “the logs”, you might be almost as excited as we are. It’s MUSHROOM TIME and they are delicious!!! Currently we have Italian Oyster, Shiitake, and Golden Oyster mushrooms available. Send us a message to place your mushroom order and we will have them ready for you to pick up and enjoy.

08/03/2022

Happy 14th Birthday to Oliver!!!

He is such a kind, amazing, and hard working kid. He is our master gardener and can almost always be found checking on his plants, starting new seedlings, or harvesting amazing goodies for our family and customers. If he’s not in the garden, you will find him snuggling our AGH crew, listening to farm/garden podcasts, being an amazing brother, or watching documentaries about soil management.

07/21/2022

It’s tomato time! We’ve got big ones, little ones, red ones, yellow ones, pink ones, orange ones, and a few fancy ones. Nearly all were started from seeds from and they are some of the strongest, healthiest tomato plants we’ve ever grown. I love tomato with just a bit of salt, Lilly makes a mean tomato, mozzarella, basil, and balsamic glaze salad, and we all love a good BLAT (bacon, lettuce, avocado, tomato). We are always open to suggestions if you’ve got any delicious ways to consume tomatoes, feel free to share 😊

06/27/2022

Roasted organic heirloom beets from the garden. It’s what’s for dinner.

06/09/2022

When piglet snuggles turn into nap time for all involved 😂 Macy wants to snuggle these new piglets every chance she gets. Their mama is so comfortable with us and good natured that she just takes a break to play in the mud while her babies are looked after. We absolutely love the temperament of the American Guinea Hog!

06/08/2022

Final piglet tally is three! Two boys and one girl. The third piglet was an early evening surprise many hours after the first two. All three piglets and their mama are doing great!

06/07/2022

What a wonderful surprise during the farm tour this morning! Brand new American Guinea Hog piglets being born. So far the piglet count is at two for this first time mama and she’s doing great. Even if you’ve come for a farm adventure previously, like our group this morning, there is always something new and exciting to see. Send us a message to schedule your visit and meet the newest, tiniest members of our farm family.

05/30/2022

Sometimes you just need an ice cream break when it’s hot and you’ve been working hard all morning.

05/16/2022

Mother Nature decided to have a rave in our fields tonight. For the past few nights we have seen one lone flashing light. Tonight they were everywhere!!! We practice catch, show, and release on the farm, so no bugs were harmed in the making of great family memories. The big question is what do you call these critters? Fireflies or lightning bugs?

05/15/2022

We candled the eggs involved in our Hatch Off to see how many appeared to be fertilized and starting to develop. Candling involves placing the egg over a light source in a dark room and looking for areas of growth.

Historically, eggs were checked over candles, hence the name, but we chose to use the integrated light on the incubator for the incubator eggs and a headlamp for the eggs under the hen. I couldn’t make a determination on two of the incubator eggs so I went back a few days later and checked those two again.

The incubator appears to have 22 of 22 eggs starting to develop and the hen appears to have 19 of her 20 eggs developing.

Even though there is movement and growth, nothing is viable at candling time, it’s just bunches of developing cells. Beyond candling for development, we have to wait and see what happens at hatch time.

05/08/2022

We are having a “hatch off” on the farm!

We set up an incubator at our littlest farmer’s preschool and filled it with 22 eggs. Each child/sibling group picked an egg and we wrote their name on it and placed it in the incubator. We also included one for the teachers, of course.

On the same day, we had a hen go broody, which means she wanted to stay in her nesting box and sit on her eggs. We added a few more eggs under the hen so she now has a total of 20 eggs to snuggle and incubate.

The final results should be in on or after May 11, 2022. Now we wait!

05/03/2022

The hospitality of a 4 year old. When your mom REALLY needs to get you to preschool, but you find a turtle on the way to the car, and the turtle needs a snack, so you give it strawberries, but then aren’t sure if it wants strawberries, so you explain to your mom that you have to wait and see if it wants strawberries before you can go to school, because if it doesn’t want strawberries, then you will have to make it a fruit salad before you leave just to be sure. We are going to be SO late to school this morning 🤦🏼‍♀️😂🤷‍♀️

04/21/2022

A-tisket, a-tasket
Eight piglets in a basket

Congratulations to our American Guinea Hog parents, Wellie (mom) and Beck (dad), on the birth of their eight healthy piglets this morning! There are 5 girls and 3 boys, with an average weight of 2 lbs of cuteness each.

04/17/2022

Spring pasture rejuvenation has sprung!!

Here at we’ve been hard at work in our efforts to regenerate what was poor, eroded, nutrient deficient soil in our pastures. Intensive rotational grazing of our animals combined with carefully planned seeding of plants that will both feed our animals AND our soil is truly paying dividends this spring!

We have a gorgeous field of crimson clover, peas and hairy vetch (all of which take free nitrogen from the atmosphere and funnel it into the soil - have y’all seen fertilizer prices these days??)! The bees, bunnies, geese and livestock are all feasting!

All of these plants are preparing a wonderfully healthy soil environment for the next round of warm season cover/forage crops: buckwheat, Sunn h**p, sorghum-Sudan grass… all of which will continue the process of loosening and enriching the soil to provide nourishment and habitat for an amazing array of flora and fauna.

04/11/2022

Congratulations to Maggie on the birth of two happy, healthy, ewe (aka girl) lambs! This is her first time with twins and she is an amazing mama.

Sometimes with livestock, we have to make really hard decisions and right now our family is struggling and we need your help. These babies need names!!!

I (Catherine) like twins to have names that fit together like our other sets of twins, Dot & Dash, Reed & Rain. On the complete flip side, Macy would like to name them after whatever she sees at the moment, ie Trailer, Shovel, Boots, Bucket. 🤦🏼‍♀️😂 Please help! We are open to all suggestions and if we use your names, I will come up with a fabulous farm prize as a thank you for keeping our family from imploding!

03/23/2022

Everyone, even our gigantic (and still growing) livestock guardian puppy, Finn enjoyed a day at the beach. It was his first time and he did a great job riding in the boat and figuring out the waves.

We believe it’s important to socialize and train our LGDs so they will be able to function in society. At a bare minimum, he has to follow basic commands, ride in a car, walk on a leash, and be potty trained just to attend his regular vet visits. We want to make sure that he is exposed to as many different things as possible so we end up with a well trained, experienced dog whose job happens to be guarding our livestock.

01/08/2022

I believe we have just received the last pumpkin donation of the year so it’s time to send a HUGE Half Pint Hollow THANK YOU to all who donated pumpkins to our critters in the past few months. We had a large influx after Halloween, a massive amount dropped off after Thanksgiving, and a surprising few appeared in the last two weeks. Clearly, all the animals loved their treats so thank you all again!

11/16/2021

We’d like to introduce Beck, our new AGH boar. He is small, dark, and handsome and currently in a committed relationship with Wellie, our sow. Beck completed his quarantine period, got to know his new lady friend and her children through a fence, and they just began cohabitating this week.

On a related note, the gestation period for an AGH is 3 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days, so be on the lookout for adorable piglet photos around the end of March 🤞🏼

10/27/2021

Join us in welcoming the newest member of the Half Pint Hollow Farm family, Finn, the Anatolian/Great Pyrenees pup!

It can take up to two years before a livestock guardian dog is ready to be on their own and protect their crew. Our current LGD, Jasmine, does an amazing job keeping everyone safe. She is getting older and, in the interest of succession planning, we brought on a little team member for her to train prior to her eventual retirement. It was a four hour drive to pick him up, a six hour drive back home (puppy potty breaks), and, while picking him up, was lucky enough to observe a pair of Finn sheep lambs be born, hence his name. He comes from great working parents and we expect him to become a great asset to the family and the farm.

10/09/2021

Good job, little Kubota tractor! Twenty round bales of locally grown Orchard grass from are stacked for our winter feed. Feeling prepared and ready for the chilly weather to arrive. The bales are protected from the elements with upcycled billboard vinyl with added grommets so we can tie them down

10/07/2021

We now have a Tik Tok channel thanks to the younger farmers of Half Pint Hollow. Go check it out!

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZM81C4YuL/

0 Followers, 1 Following, 34 Likes - Watch awesome short videos created by HalfPintHollowFarm

09/30/2021

When we bought our farm, it had these really old grapevines that we loved. We have done a ton of research on the best way to prune grapevines and we will implement that knowledge next year. For now, our pruning method is best called, “as high as a babydoll sheep can reach” and we appear to be getting tidy results so far 😜

09/22/2021

Even the littlest farmer helps to take care of the animals, whether that’s snuggling or feeding. So, when we say that our animals are family raised and child friendly, we mean it!

09/09/2021

While it may appear that we gave HeiHei peanut butter, she’s actually grazing on our mineral buffet. We provide free choice kelp, sea salt, baking soda, and minerals to all our animals so they can take what they need when they need it.

08/30/2021

This week, on The Bachelor . . .
We have separated out all our roosters for assessment (and to give the ladies a break). In order to produce the best birds, we have to breed the best birds. We will select the best of each breed based on their specific breed standard and, equally as important to us, their temperament. Stay tuned to see which of our bachelors makes it through to the next round and which become c**k stock 😜
**kstock

08/26/2021

Thanks to Wellie, we now have four happy, healthy AGH piglets on the farm! They quickly figured out the best way to stay cool in this NC summer heat.

07/12/2021

Please join us in welcoming Wellie to the farm! Wellie is a pregnant American Guinea Hog who should be providing us with a litter of bacon bits in the near future. We celebrated her arrival with watermelon for all and for the adult humans.

06/27/2021

The 1st Annual Half Pint Hollow Farm Turtle Calling Contest! 🐢😂

06/20/2021

First cucumber harvest of the season!

06/19/2021

Chainsaw safety motto at Half Pint Hollow Farm. Good Luck. Have Fun.

06/15/2021

We are excited to welcome more lambs to Half Pint Hollow Farm! Lavender is an experienced mama and she delivered twin lambs during a torrential downpour with no assistance needed. Lavender is now the proud mama of a black ewe and a white ram. The farm names for these little ones are Rain and Reed.

06/11/2021

A loooooong row of baby sunflowers! Hopefully this will not only look beautiful, but solve a few problems as well. We have a decent amount of road frontage and map apps always tell people to turn 50 yards past our entrance. Plus, the surprising amount of litter that ends up in our front pastures isn’t good for anyone. We are hoping this will bring a smile as you pass, be a great landmark for directions (turn before/after the sunflowers), and either convince people to stop throwing trash in front of our farm or act as a block so we can just gather the garbage at the base of the flowers on the street side. Only time will tell if it works as intended. 🤞🏼

06/05/2021

Everyone at Half-Pint Hollow Farm deserves a spa day, even the cows! Today Nutmeg and Evelyn received their annual pedicures and, while I (Catherine) prefer a massage chair, glass of wine, and a gentle touch, the ladies had their toes touched up with the use of a tilt table and an angle grinder. While it might appear a bit awkward, the ladies were pretty relaxed throughout the process. It’s sometimes difficult to find people who are willing to take small family farm jobs like this because it doesn’t come with the same payoff as working on hundreds of cattle at one time. A huge thanks to Mike Stroud for being willing to come out, handle our tiny herd, share his knowledge, and do an amazing job!

06/01/2021

HAPPY DANCE!
RAIN DANCE!
Eight weeks of little to no rain… our pastures are parched and we’ve been worrying about forage for our livestock. A good, solid spring storm makes us boogie!! And Oliver’s got the moooves!

05/24/2021

We are excited to welcome our first lamb of the season! Maggie is a first time mama and she delivered a single black lamb without any assistance and got right to work taking care of her baby girl. The farm name for this cutie is Delilah.

05/17/2021

Good morning!
Bee Happy, it’s Tax Day!