High Water

I took this photo Monday evening just after we received 2.1 inches (5.3 cm) of rain. I'm standing on the culvert looking upstream to the east. This streambed had a few inches of water in it and was overgrown with wild mint before the storm. You can see the White Rocks on the high ground to the right.

My neighbor's hay field across the road had a river running through it and there was a stream running through our garden.

We've had water over the top of the culvert once in the year that we've lived here. That was a scary night. I was in the barn praying that the water wouldn't get high enough to come in. It ended up not coming close.

All of the mowing is done for now. I'll be taking the rotary mower back to my brother-in-law this week. We share half ownership in it. I think that we'll have to mow some more in August in preparation for fall & winter stockpiling of forage. My goal is to feed less hay than we fed last winter.

Pasture Biodiversity

Today I started rearranging some fencing to move the ewes and lambs up to the top of the hill on the west side of the pasture and get the rams off the pasture around their barn so I can mow it. As I walked around on the hilltop, I was amazed at the biodiversity in our pasture here.

The hilltop is almost a completely different ecosystem from the bottomland even though the two areas are separated by only a few hundred feet. The low ground is very thick grass and white clover. It's been grazed twice and mowed once and will be ready to graze again in less than two weeks. As you go up the hill, this mix of grasses and white clover continues but it thins out quite a bit and is much slower growing. The hilltop is a riot of grasses (some the same as and some different from the lower area), clovers, wildflowers, herbs and birdsoot trefoil. The number of different plants in a small area is incredible. While the grass in the lower area would be extremely ripe if it hadn't been grazed yet, this hilltop grass is just now coming on strong. The red clover is just starting to bloom.

I'm looking forward to moving the sheep up there this week. It's cool to have such a diverse pasture on a small farm. The early cool-season grasses in the lower part provide much early grazing provided that area is properly managed. Then when the weather warms up and the cool-season grasses slow down in growth, the high protein clovers and the herbs with their medicinal properties are perfect for summer grazing.

As an aside, the promised post on corn-based ethanol is going to have to wait. I don't have the patience to look up sources on my 26.4 kbps dial-up connection at home and I just don't have time to do it at work on our high speed connection.

And on a personal note, we're headed to the Childrens Hospital tomorrow with our youngest son Nick. Nick was born in 2002 with the most severe form of spina bifida, myelomeningecele, and hydrocephalus. He is truly blessed in that he runs and jumps and climbs just like a four year old should. (Actually, he's quite the daredevil so he probably jumps and climbs in ways that four year olds shouldn't.) However he does have a somewhat abnormally functioning bladder. The main purpose of our clinic appointment tomorrow is to try to discern whether his difficulties with toilet training have a physical cause or come down to his stubbornness. Your thoughts and prayers are appreciated.

Mowing and Gardening

We've been busy here lately gardening and mowing. As I mentioned in my last post, the rain delayed getting the garden planted in a timely fashion. Just when it was getting dry enough to plant the rain came back. Everything should be planted by tomorrow, though, except for some succession plantings of fall greens and root crops. I'm thinking of starting broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage for planting out in late July or early August for a fall crop.

The photo shows our pasture. Hopefully, you can see enough detail in it to see what I've been mowing. The right side was mowed about 10 days ago. The left foreground was mowed about 15 days ago and the left background just this past weekend. The center strip that the sheep are grazing was last grazed about 4 weeks ago.

This is a time for trial and error and learning about the grass on this farm and the growth curve at different times of the season. As we build the size of our sheep flock and add cattle, we will do less mowing. My goal is to have the right number and mix of grazing animals to never run out of grass while keeping mowing to a minimum. If our farm was larger, we would make hay but we can't justify the expense of the equipment. Because of this, we will probably always have to do some mowing this time of year.

Lately I've been reading less farming/homesteading blogs and more environmental/peak oil blogs. I'll probably write something soon about the insanity of corn-based ethanol and the environmental destruction that industrial grain farming causes. I've been thinking about starting a second blog to write about environmental issues from the perspective of a rural dweller and organic farmer. If you've stuck with me on this one though, you don't I don't have time enough to keep one blog up to date, let alone two. Maybe this winter when I have more free time...

We're Still Here

Wow, it's been two weeks since I've posted - the longest I've gone since beginning this blog. Of course, this is a busy time of the year for farming and on top of that we've recently went on 10 hours of production per day at our shop in the city. I leave home about 5 a.m. and get home about 5:15 p.m. After dinner, chores and working on whatever projects are going on, I'm ready for bed by the time it gets dark. This leaves little time for blogging. Anyway, here's an update.

We lost a lamb last week to sickness. We are loathe to use antibiotics but this was a case where we needed to intervene sooner and failed to do so. According to Pat Coleby, large doses of injected vitamin C is a natural substitute for antibiotics. Unfortunately, in the U.S., any idiot can walk into a farm store and buy LA-200 or Pen G with no questions asked, but injectable vitamin C requires a veterinarian's prescription. And in the area where I live, one cannot just open the yellow pages to "holistic veterinarian" and find a vet to prescribe vitamin C as an antibiotic substitute.

The chicks are growing and the hens are still laying well. The hardiness of these chicks is amazing to me. When we raised hybrids, we were lucky to get 22 out of 25 survivors. All 50 of our White Rocks are alive and healthy at 7-1/2 weeks old.

The garden is way behind due to lots and lots of rain. I haven't looked at the forecast yet for this week but hopefully things will dry out.

I'll try not to go so long between posts again.