At Gooseneck Farm, we believe that experiencing firsthand where our food comes from makes us more human and more humane.
We employ organic, regenerative, and permaculture-based practices in a semi-urban setting just steps from downtown Waynesville, NC.
EGGS ARE BACK! 🐓
The signs of Spring are all around, including noisy chickens singing their egg song 😂 After a winter of rest, the girls are back to laying regularly, so we are back to stocking with farm fresh eggs from our happy hens raised on forage and non-GMO feed.
Stop by the shop during open hours to pick up your own dozen!
We’re happy to share that our non-GMO chicken eggs and free range duck eggs will now be available at ! While you’re there, grab a drink and peruse their selection of gardening supplies and houseplants.
Getting egg orders ready for our regulars and !!
Their patrons get the pleasure of enjoying the gifts our happy hens provide daily. Be sure to consider Love Lane Bed and Breakfast when visiting Waynesville, and follow Sticky 8’s food truck popup schedule for incredible Asian fusion dishes 🤤
Things on the farm slowed down for winter, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy!
Introducing the next chapter in our love for growing food and growing community: Cultivate Garden Shop]
We’re excited to be partnering with our friends at to bring downtown Waynesville a hub for gardening supplies, plant starts, houseplants, and education. If you know us, you know how passionate we are about organic gardening, food ways, and empowering others to co-create with Mother Nature. To us, Cultivate is the clearest expression of that.
Give the store a follow Cultivate Garden Shop] to hear about product offerings and events leading up to our May opening!
Chickens are so low maintenance… until they’re not.
Our sweet Munchkin has her second bout of bumble foot within a year. If left unchecked the infection can spread and even become fatal for a bird, but the treatment is pretty doable at home. An epsom salt soak, foot massage, tweezers, a tough stomach and patience do the trick.
Munchkin is one of our most well behaved girls and faces the minor surgery with bravery and calm.
All this to say, the most effective way to keep your chickens healthy is to observe them. They are very emotive creatures and will clearly show behavioral changes if something is wrong.
Duck eggs, anyone? Read on 👇🏻
We love that we can free range our ducks. They could easily walk into the street or the parking lot next door, but they don’t. We’re pretty sure this is only possible with a pond 🤭 The ducks spend most of their day either on the pond or on the shoreline, and never stray too far while foraging because the pond is also their greatest protection against ground predators.
However, this also means many of their eggs are laid… in the pond. We’re grateful the relentless rain stopped here for a few days - it means the water is just clear enough for us to spot the little white blobs and fish them out. A little rinse and they’re ready for the fridge.
We’ve spent some time enjoying these eggs ourselves to make sure the QA is on lock, but are ready to share! They are incredibly rich with large yolks perfect for baking. $10 for a half dozen - reach out if you’re interested 🦆
We completed our first chicken harvest.
After opting for an ethically bred straight-run flock this year (meaning the hatchery does not attempt to s*x the chicks at birth, a practice that can injure and even kill them), we ended up with ELEVEN roosters. As beautiful as they are, so many roosters among less than 30 hens means trouble - any ratio greater than 1:10 will eventually cause the roosters to fight to the death, and cause high levels of stress to the hens, lowering everyone’s quality of life.
So we faced the inevitable: we must harvest several roosters. Our first try we only had time enough for two, and we decided to skin them instead of plucking the feathers, so we can dry and tan the pelts for display.
We were inspired by our friends at who reduce waste by preserving rooster and quail pelts to sell to artisan fly tyers.
Taking an animal’s life is no joke - there is something animal in us that feels the weight of it, arguably more with a hatchet in hand than with a firearm.
Thanks to our generous friends , we were able to get 90% of the garden flipped and prepared for spring all in ONE DAY. It’s true that many hands make light work 🙌🏻
Lessons learned since last year’s winter flip:
- Know when you need to ask for help 😅
- The annual Haywood County mulch+compost sale is absolutely the most economical way to buy quality compost. It may not have quite the biodiversity of what we’ve bought before, but getting our entire garden covered in 8 inches of compost for under $100 is a no-brainer.
- Stop waiting on ChipDrop and just call a tree company. Free wood chips will last longer than that double ground mulch you have to buy and pickup yourself.
- If choosing a no-dig method, acquire enough compost and mulch to lay it on THICK. The thicker, the better.
- A broad fork will be worth the expense. It’s way easier to roll wheelbarrows all over the garden beds once a year and broad fork it later to prevent compaction than to try and dance from walkway to walkway towing one 5-gallon bucket after another.
We harvested our candy roaster squash! We were only able to get two before the vine borers killed the vines, but two is plenty, don’t you think?!
🍅🌶🧄 Market ready 🫘🍒🥬
Come check out our booth at this Friday evening 6-9 and stock up on fresh produce for the weekend!
Downtown Waynesville will have a whole lot of fun happening, so make a whole night of it, but be sure to head down Depot Street for live music, complimentary drinks, a leather goods studio tour, and other local vendors.
See you there!
First corn harvest! This one feels really good - last year’s corn was a total fail due to under watering. This year we got on top of it early!
This morning we stepped out onto the back porch to check on the chicks, part of our regular morning routine now. We immediately noticed one chick had a very splayed leg - definitely odd how apparent it was being we hadn’t noticed it before, even picking up chicks and checking on the brooder multiple times a day. Upon picking her up, we also found that two of her toes on her “good” leg were crooked.
We immediately grabbed a box of bandaids and set her up with a leg spline and toe spline.
These types of abnormalities are normal to find here and there in a flock of chicks, sometimes caused by a slippery floor or overcrowding. It seems to be a congenital condition for this girl, possibly caused by her body developing a little crooked (see the second photo where her left wing sits almost on top of her body).
If not corrected in time for the chicks muscles to develop well, this can be fatal, so we’re doing our best to help this little one out! Right now she has her own box inside the brooder so she can practice standing up in the splines without being trampled. After two days we’ll refresh the splines and put her back in with everyone else to give her more exercise. She will probably always walk a little crooked, but hopefully those muscles strengthen up soon!
Onions have been harvested!
We had great success with overwintering our onions and garlic. So low maintenance. Huge yields. 10/10. The only thing we didn’t account for is that they would be taking up garden footprint during both spring AND summer planting. Still worth it.
Please share your onion and garlic storage tips! We already know about pantyhose. We will not be buying this much pantyhose. All other recs welcome 😉
It’s finally tomato season in the mountains, y’all! What do you like on your tomato sandwich? 👀🍅
Have we mentioned lately how much we love our chicken setup?!
The area we have fenced off for chicken pasture is on a slope that would be difficult to mow, and can’t have much else planted there due to the adjacent row of walnut trees. But these trees provide endless shade for our girls throughout the summer, and they spend all day every day foraging. Our pond’s spillway runs through the chicken pasture, so we never have to refill water, even in freezing winter temps.
A fox recently moved into the neighborhood, so we spent a full saturday replacing and reinforcing the half of the fence without electricity, but it was so worth it to see them back in the shade and exploring again.
Fingers crossed we have a Mother Goose 🤞🏻🤞🏻
Amélie has been broody here and there in the past - trying to make a nest and sitting on eggs - but it’s finally warm enough that we feel comfortable letting her embrace her maternal instincts.
Natural incubation isn’t as reliable as using an incubator, but the stakes are low for us so we decided to see what Amélie’s natural instincts can do. She’ll be sitting on these eggs for about three weeks, just stepping away occasionally to eat, before we hopefully see some baby chicks peeking out.
Yes, chicks - not goslings. She already thinks she’s a chicken, so she won’t be bothered in the least if her babies turn out to be chickens, too 😂
Finished installing our trellis archways today. Feels good to be getting so many transplants in the ground!
We’ll be growing squash, melons, and cucumbers up trellises. They can technically all be grown on the ground, but keeping them off the ground promotes air flow, reducing disease and pest pressure. You can also maximize your ground space by growing vertically, fitting three melons or squash in the space you’d grow only one on the ground!
The archway shape gives us more surface area on the trellising and just makes some pretty cool vegetable tunnels later in the season.
So on TOP of the Anarchists, we picked up four of these little boogers from another small farm last weekend. They are all full bred Khaki Campbell ladies and we expect them to be generous egg layers.
Hopefully we have more time with these girls to warm them up to us, but everything we’ve learned about ducks says they will always run in the direction that’s away from you 🥲 Challenge accepted.
We obviously don’t know how to take a break.
Meet the Anarchists. About the same time we were setting up for last weekend’s sale, we brought home four ducklings. We knew they’d be a bit older: 6-8 weeks, but hadn’t really prepared for that age.
They’ve already trashed the brooder and escaped once to the pond. It’s Day 4 and we finally feel like we’ve got them contained enough to start training. One has started the teeniest bit of quacking.
Here’s to another adventure. 🍻
We had a BLAST at the plant sale today. Huge thanks to everyone who came out - old friends and new friends, you truly made spring 2022 one for the books ❤️
🍅🍅Surprise! 🍅🍅
You now have more than one chance this weekend to stock up on rare and heirloom tomato plants. Tomorrow night 6-9 we’ll be posting up at with more than a dozen varieties of tomato plants ready for your garden. Come by and say hi!
We are overflowing with tomato plants! 😱🍅
The weather forecast this week looked so promising, we started putting our own tomato plants in the ground, only to discover that we started for ourselves DOUBLE the number of tomatoes we can fit in our garden… without, you know, making our entire garden only tomatoes 😅
So we just added about 60 tomato plants to the sale inventory for this weekend! Come on out, rain or shine, and let us help you stock your summer garden.
Pictured is one variety we’re offering - Garden Peach, one of our favorites from last year’s harvest! Here they are not quite ripe, but once ripe they turn yellow and fuzzy like a peach. Delicious flavor and texture for snacking or sandwiches - we even put them into some salsa 😋
We are T-minus 5 days until the plant sale!
This week we’ll spend hardening off all the plant babies we started indoors for you, so that your can immediately transfer them to your garden without causing any shock or stress. So far, they’re all transitioning perfectly 🙌🏻
Be sure to stop by this Saturday 9am-1pm to pick up a few specialty and heirloom vegetable plants for your home garden. We can’t wait to see what your grow!
At our May 7 Plant Starts Sale we’ll also be offering a limited number of farm fresh chicken and goose eggs.
Our hens and goose enjoy soy-free non-GMO feed, as well as ample space to forage for grasses, bugs, and the occasional tadpole. They are generous enough to lay more eggs than we can eat ourselves, so we look forward to sharing them with you!
We’re having to get a bit creative with our bathroom greenhouse organization as tomatoes get so tall they won’t fit under the shelf lights.
The next two weeks are going to feel like a squeeze when plants are more and more eager to be out of pots and blocks and into the ground. It will be worth the wait when we’re past our region’s risk of late frost and the garden is already popping with strong plants in mid May 💪🏻
Next year though, we should consider a real greenhouse…
Attention Western NC: SUMMER IS COMING. Are you ready for last frost?
We’re here to help! Come on out Saturday, May 7 (Mother’s Day weekend) to collect plant starts for your summer garden. Get answers to your gardening questions, enjoy a complimentary coffee, and say hello to Amélie the goose.
Swipe through to see some of our offerings. Can’t wait to see you there! 🌶🍅🍆🥒🥬🍳☕️🥗🫑
It’s wild onion season 🧄🧅 Why buy scallions at the supermarket when Mother Nature has a free grocer in your backyard?
Tips: the bigger, more mature ones are easier to pull out with the bulb, but you can also just use the greens for cooking or garnishing 😋
No feeling like days getting longer… and dinner getting later because we’re still in the garden till sunset!
Goal for 2022: get better at wintering. But for now, SUNSHINE.
This weekend we were delighted to finally make it over to for an oddly snowy April breakfast. We only regret we didn’t get photos of our food before it was promptly inhaled 😭
What Taylor (chef) and September (baker) are bringing to Maggie Valley and the wider Haywood community is incredibly exciting. It’s a farm to table style restaurant, but what they’ve created is so much more than just a trendy menu with arugula and avocado all over the place 😂
September is very knowledgeable and intentional about ingredients she bakes with, not only choosing ingredients for flavor and creativity, but also for how ingredients will enrich and soothe the body. Imagine eating the most delicious bread ever and not ending up in a food coma afterward 🤯
Taylor is a super fun chef with endless creativity, as you’ll see from the daily specials menu that’s longer than the regular menu! He’s always looking for some new funky combinations to try, and has a knack for making them unintimidating and delicious.
We’ll be partnering with Chef and the Baker this season to provide ingredients for their menu, and we couldn’t be more stoked!
Waynesville, NC
28786
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