The year’s first lambs are now huddled together in the Howell Farm sheep barn.  In the past week, four mother sheep have given birth to eight lambs. Three of our mothers are still expecting.

Spring at Howell Farm is also the time for plowing. Intern Jake Czaja recently helped plow up the farm’s kitchen garden. It was his first time behind a walking plow.

“Steering was a little bit of a challenge,” Jake reports. “And it was a workout. To plow an entire acre, it’s something you probably have to get used to.”

Jack, an 1,800-pound Belgian draft horse, the farm’s largest, did the pulling. As the dirt in the kitchen garden hadn’t been worked extensively for several years, the farmers used a subsoiler to break up the soil at depths below the level of a traditional walking plow.

“You could actually feel the soil when you’re plowing,” Jake discovered.  There was a marked difference between plowing one end of the garden, which is a little rocky, and the other end, where the soil is much softer. The changes in the soil come on quick – the garden is less than 100 feet long.

Jake hopes to use what he learns at Howell Farm this spring to someday start a farm of his own that incorporates draft animal power. Emese Salopek, another intern, also hopes to gain some experience with draft animals. Emese has a Hungarian grandmother in Somerset, New Jersey who has a small farm that grows Hungarian peppers.  “One day, down the line in the future, I hope to be able to plow her fields,” Emese says.

As days in March tend to be, today was an eventful one at Howell Farm. But to start, here’s one thing that didn’t happen: lambs. We’re waiting for the first lambs of spring to be born, and that could happen any day now. We’ll be sure to post photos of the newborn lambs once they arrive.

Our sheep shearing program is in full swing. Farmer Jeremy showed visiting school children the proper way to give sheep a hair cut, as well as how to trim their hooves and give them their yearly health checkup. The best question of the day was whether the sheep need a jacket if they get sheared and then there’s a cold spell, as we’re expecting in the coming days. The answer is no, as long as the sheep have a quarter of an inch of wool, they’re plenty warm even on cold spring nights.

Later in the day we received a phone call from the post office. Our mail-order chicks had arrived and were peeping in their box, waiting to be picked up. That might not sound like a historically accurate way to start a new flock of chickens, but in fact the first commercial mail-order hatchery was begun in Stockton, NJ, by Joseph Wilson, in 1892. In the first instance of long distance shipping of day-old chicks, Wilson shipped 50 Barred Plymouth Rock chicks to a farmer in Illinois. Wilson's Pine Tree Hatchery became famous throughout the country, drawing customers from as far away as South Dakota and Canada.

Our baby chicks are now getting used to their new home in a coal-fired brooder, which has to be stoked by hand every few hours.

Howell Farm also welcomed two visitors today from Colonial Pennsylvania Plantation, a living history farm in Media, PA. The Plantation is looking to expand its historical farming operations, so farm manager David Nielsen and assistant farmer Rachel Koski stopped by Howell Farm to talk to our farmers and see us in action. Currently, the Plantation has just one faithful draft horse in the barn and less than two acres under cultivation, but these young farmers have big plans. We wish them luck, and encourage you to go visit if you’re in the area. The Plantation is open to the general public on weekends from mid-April to mid-November.

March is the month that Howell Farm truly swings back into action after a winter of (relative) quiet. This March we are also starting anew on The Furrow, our newsletter, which we will use to offer visitors some extra insights on the historical farming methods we practice. Not everyone realizes that real farming happens every day at Howell Living History Farm: we grow vegetables and grain crops, and we raise chickens, sheep and pigs.

Check back on this site often to learn all about life on a 1900's farm. We plan to update this newsletter weekly. Welcome to The Furrow.