A Good Day's Work (Tuesday, Apr. 26)

Storm light over the farm warned us that we might not get much work done outside today and we'd better get going.
The first item of business was to make a new paddock and move the animals. Here they are in the new paddock (at right). You can see the difference between this fresh grass and the grazed area (at left).

Zephyr inspects the fence line!  You can see where Herb weed-whacked under the electric fence.  He has to do this to keep the long grass from shorting out the fence.  In other applications we've seen, one single wire higher up is all the farmers use, but since our little Siobhan is a pint-sized Dexter calf, she has been able to scoot under the bottom wire unless we place it quite low.

Here is the left half of the new paddock, with access to water in the creek running to the left of the horses.

Here's the right half, with access to shade.

Our paddocks are a lot bigger than those usually used with rotational grazing, but they're better than nothing.  For now, since we don't have water over most of the property and since finding shade is a problem, we are making paddocks as we can.  We are also able to graze the animals on grass that has been untouched for the last few years since it has never been fenced.

We're still pretty new at this, still getting our routine down, and it took us 2 hours to get the new paddock built and move the animals in.  They are really getting used to the new routine, though--as soon as we started, they were standing there waiting to be let onto the fresh grass!

After lunch, it was time to plant the sweet potato slips and the seedlings that Charis and I grew.

We had to do a lot of weeding first, but several hours later, we had some new pole beans planted and more space ready to sow some new seeds.  Notice Charis' nice big bean plant at left--way ahead of mine!  Go, Future Farm Girl!

Here's Charis' big bush bean, dwarfing mine again.

And here is one of her muskmelons; my poor little specimen is way in the back.

One fringe benefit of all that weeding was having a ton of green stuff to throw to the ducks when we did evening feeding.  They were delighted!

After this good day's work, before a shower and supper, I walked out with the dogs to check on the animals in the new paddock.  Hero thought it was a great chance for a run; I'm glad he had enough energy left!