Work in the Pond Pasture

Saturday evening I mowed nearly a quarter of the pond pasture. I like working in that area because there are spearmint plants growing in the wet areas. Minty hay smells wonderful! Here the hay has been tedded once, this evening. The bare ground behind the mowed area is my garden.


I also planted paste tomatoes (San Marzano) and okra in my garden. It's a bit late to be planting tomato seeds, so there won't be a very long harvest. However, I've grown this variety of tomato before, and it stores very well at room temperature. We harvested all of the green tomatoes just before the first freeze in October that year, and had fresh tomatoes until the end of December.

At the bottom of this picture you can see the three rows of corn that have come up. I planted those seeds a few weeks ago. I had originally planned on six rows of corn, but that's all I managed to plant in the first session, so I decided to just move on with my planting.


I still have cherry tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and bush beans to plant.

Chicken Pictures

Australorps on Pasture

It's a Tough Life, Being a Duck

Compost Pile == Smorgasbord

Jack

New Rooster: Ameraucana?

Check Out Those Spurs!

Tentatively Named Jacques


New Bantam Rooster

New Garden Plot

Eventually, the pond pasture will be completely converted to a permaculture forest garden, but the first step is removing most of the grass so that it doesn't compete with the new fruit trees. I also need nursery space for the osage orange and apple trees that I intend to grow from seed, and room to experiment with open pollinated varieties away from Paul's garden. I really dislike using motorized equipment, so I am tackling this area with nothing more than shovel, rake, and hoe. I'm finding Steve Solomon's book Gardening When it Counts to be very useful with regards to tool use and maintenance. It's amazing how much easier it is to use a sharpened shovel, compared to a blunt one straight from the store.

I'm not following all of his advice for preparing a garden plot from sod. He says to dig deeply and turn the sod clumps over to expose the roots, and then dig them again in a week to further kill the grass. I'm sure that works, but since the pond pasture is immediately adjacent to the chicken pen, I have been digging shallowly, just underneath the grass roots, and tossing the sod to the birds. It's still too early to allow them out on the pasture, so they are loving the worms, grass, and other goodies in the clumps. I lose a little bit of soil this way, but I will replace it with compost (and the chicken bedding will eventually go to make more compost as well), so I think I come out ahead. Once the sod is removed, I'll go back and dig more deeply to prepare the seedbed.

Since I'm out of shape from a long winter of inactivity (and, oh yes, seven months pregnant), I've been doing my digging at a slow, steady pace and only a little bit at a time. With a sharpened shovel it's really no strain at all, and I feel great. Honestly, I think it would be more dangerous for me to operate the tiller than to dig with a shovel.

In addition to the tree seedlings, I also intend to plant some sort of bush beans, sweet potatoes (more on that in the next post), bushel gourds to make containers out of, and the first of the grafted apple trees and blackberries. I also want to transplant a young oak to one corner of the pond pasture to eventually provide shade to the chicken pen.

I have a couple more little plots I want to work on. There are several spots in the main pasture where the goats spent a lot of time this winter, so there's way too much nitrogen and compaction for the grass to come back easily. I intend to dig those areas up and experiment with "three sisters" planting: corn, vine beans, and squash all grown together. The beans grow up the corn stalks and the squash shades out weeds and helps keep raccoons away from the ripening corn, or so I've read. I look forward to trying it out in practice. After the three sisters are harvested, I'll let those spots go back to grass for the following year.

A Downside to Free Range Chickens

Finding eggs in the haystack.



I've changed the way the chickens are handled. I had been using electric netting to contain them in a section of the pasture, and then moving the pen once or twice a week to a fresh spot. This involved getting all the chickens into the movable house, locking them in, tearing down the fence, moving them to a new spot, setting up the fence, and herding the ducks into the new location. It was just getting to be too much with all the other chores I have out there.

So now I'm going with a modified free range/Balfour method. The Balfour method is basically a pen with a deep layer of straw or other dry vegetable matter. The chickens scratch it up and turn it into compost, and find lots of bugs under it. They spend the night and at least half the day in the pen, in order to confine the eggs to a small area, and then they are let out to free range over the full pasture until evening.

This has been working well, and the birds have learned the routine and are eager to come back to the pen at night. In fact, one day I had choir practice until after dark, and when I came back to the farm to put the birds away, they had all already put themselves to bed. All I had to do was shut the gate.

Now, the bantams can fly over the fence, so that's why I find clutches of eggs in weird spots around the pasture. I don't mind, though. They were free and their eggs are too small to sell, so it's just a happy bonus to find a batch of eggs from them.

Found It!

I took a closer look at the neighbor's pastures, and found the source of the pond's water. There is a little stream that runs down the hillside and into the old creek bed. It should not be too difficult to pipe that over to a trough for livestock.

There is a lot of wildlife back in there. Yesterday I got a close look at a blue heron in the pond, and tonight I conversed with a screech owl. It called to me, and I whistled the song back. I tried to get a picture, since it was sitting just above me, but it was too dark to turn out very well. After lightening the photo, you can kind of see the owl in the middle of the picture.

Auxiliary Pastures

Today I took a few minutes to go look at the neighboring pastures that I now have access to. They were a very good example of what happens when a pasture only gets cut once a year. Weeds were nearly choking out the grass for much of it, and brambles were starting to pop up at the edges. It's actually perfect forage for goats, but I don't have enough goats to go clear it, at least not without neglecting my own farm.

I'm thinking that if I get any more goats at auction this year, they can work in those pastures during their quarantine. Then, after they've cleared the weeds and grass has grown up, I'll put cattle in there.

The big issue with those pastures will be water. The creek used to run along the edge of them, but sometime in the last 50 years it was diverted and a causeway was built for the road to run along. Now the creek is on the opposite side of the road from the pastures. It was actually kind of creepy to look through the trees and see the old creek bed, dry and empty. Just before the creek bed hits the causeway, there is a small "pond." This is in quotes because I don't think it gets more than a few feet deep at any point. I could pull water from there, but it's so nasty-looking and choked with algae that I would worry about the water quality. I need to do a more detailed survey and see if there are any other water sources that I could use.

Animal Power

I started thinking last week that maybe we should get a couple of calves this year to train as oxen. It will be several years before they can really work, and I think future-me would appreciate it if I took the initiative and started the project sooner rather than later. The difficulty is that oxen are worked in pairs, and our pastures just aren't big enough to support two oxen and a beef steer, not to mention hay for them plus the goats during the winter. After much thought, I reluctantly tabled the idea of oxen for a later time.

However, just a few days later our downstream neighbor came to visit. His family owns the property, but they mostly just use it for hunting. It's a huge pain for them to keep all the grass mowed down, so he offered free grazing and mowing to me. There are a couple of pastures that are too narrow for tractors, so the local farmers won't cut them for him. All told, they have enough grass that I could raise far more than three cattle at a time, so now I'm seriously looking into starting oxen this year.

From what I've read, dairy breeds (or multi-purpose heritage breeds) are preferred for working cattle. I could easily pick up a couple of Holstein calves for less than $100 each, but I'm leery of that breed. The breeders have focused so much on milk production that I wonder how well they hold up to work. Then again, since I've never trained oxen before, it might be best to start with cheap cattle, knowing that they'll probably have a shorter working life than other breeds.

Up near Tappan Lake I saw a farm with Dutch Belted cattle, which are a little known milking breed. After reading about them, I think they bear looking into. They're probably out of our budget at this time, though.

First Mowing

This May has been very rainy, so for the last several weeks I've been watching the pasture grass getting higher, and higher, and higher. There haven't been enough dry days in a row to get it cut and dried before the next storm rolled in. It's not so bad for the big farmers, since they use tractors to cut the entire field at once, and they bale it in a day as well. I guess the downside for them is if a surprise rainstorm comes up, it can ruin an entire field's worth of hay.

Here at Foxtail Farm, it's just me and a scythe, so I can only cut a small portion each day. I really needed to get a start on cutting, regardless of the weather, so today I set up a shade gazebo type thing that we got from Paul's aunt. I figured I could pile the cut grass under it to keep it out of the rain, and then spread it out to dry when it's not raining.

I didn't cut much grass today because the necessary muscles had gotten rather weak after some eight months since the last time I did this. I had thought I was in decent shape, what with hauling water buckets all over the farm, but today I discovered that scything uses very different muscles than water hauling. Ouch. I'm taking some ibuprofen and going to bed.

Pastures and Greedy Goats

The grass on the pastures is growing just fast enough to keep the goats fed. I have to move them every day, even with the huge paddocks created by using both permanent fences and the movable fences. That size of paddock lasts the better part of a week in summer. Still, they're keeping fed.

I nearly had a jailbreak today, though. I needed to get the goats from the garden to their new paddock near the water tank. In between those two places are the compost piles and assorted equipment that I don't want the dog and goats to be messing with. The only way I could do this was to set up the movable fences as a big lane, and then after they were in move part of the section to block off the compost pile. It all went according to plan at first, with the goats following me to the far end of the paddock (I was carrying hay, so it was no surprise). I thought for sure they would stay eating the hay while I set up the other end, but I guess they thought I still had food for them. They wandered back over to me after I'd opened up the end of the paddock, but before I could get it set back up properly. It took some agility, but I managed to scare most of them away so that I could get the fence set up. Bubba and Balto were the only ones to get out (it figures that the males would wander), but I knew I could catch both of them easily. Actually, as soon as Bubba realized that he was on the wrong side of the fence from his does, he found his way back in as quickly as he could. He's going to be really upset in a few days when I separate him for good. Balto of couse was no problem to catch, because he was too busy sniffing the compost pile to get too far.