The Loveliest Cold Front Weekend on the Farm
Yesterday was so gorgeous! And last week wasn't bad either, with a nice temperature drop on overcast and raining days.
Since last week’s storm mostly hugged close to the coast, up at the farm we only got a little over 2 inches of rain all week and the pastures have already soaked it all up.
Of course, the blissful cold front seems bittersweet with Hurricane Francine now brewing in the Gulf, but so it goes in the late summer here! We are working our hurricane plans now and still hoping that the storm will dodge us.
The goats bounced between the pasture and woods section closest to our tiny house and a section near the the entrance to the farm between the internal road and one of our barns and feed bins.
In the latter section, there were performing their grounds maintenance crew duties clearing some brush, saplings and branches in the ditch.
In between storm prep plans today and tomorrow, we will set up another area for them on the other side of our internal road to clean up.
A few older does got bred in June and should kid again in November, but there’s still many younger does in heat now, as reflected by some of the crazy faces I captured on the bucks in a few of these pictures.
Meanwhile our trio of sows completed one section of Cogon grass eradication and got shifted over to the next section.
This is in a cluster of pine trees in one of our fields that also was thick with brush and some other saplings, mainly wax myrtles. Cogon grass is an invasive species originally brought into the U.S. as a packaging material. It has a tuber root system and is hard to get rid off, but we’ve used hogs to root it up in other spots of the farm over the years and that combined with improving the soil has helped other more palatable forages that the cattle like better to begin to thrive.
We’ve put the goats and cattle through that area a few times. This last pass we left the goats a little longer to help thin out the shrubs. Then we moved the sows in and let them root to their hearts’ content. A few weeks in, Grant also cut some branches to thin the canopy and let more dappled light in.
Late fall or winter, we will aim to put the cattle back here to bale graze with some hay. This helps add more organic matter in the form of manure and hay waste and the seeds from the hay help more desirable species take hold eventually.
The cattle were working their way through a field on our original acreage this week, meaning the pastures we’ve had the longest to improve.
And it showed! Where once there was rock hard clay pan soil growing mostly goldenrod and wild asters and blackberry brambles, now there’s fairly thick grasses, including Bahia grass. There is always something to do and something to improve on the farm, but once in awhile you have to stop and see how far you’ve come and enjoy beautiful, shiny cattle grazing on lush grass.
The new Flock 2, the youngest birds that we finished moving out to pasture a few weeks ago, continue to misbehave. Or at least, there’s a contingent that know how to duck under the electric poultry net fence and frolic around the whole fields all day, lay their eggs in tufts of tall grass and hide in the ditches, where they’re hard to round up.
The majority of the birds line up at the fence at dusk, wanting to go back in with the flock mates. But I am convinced some of them roost on branches in the ditches and that’s problematic long term as some critter is bound to get to them.
We were able to do a paddock shift this week and I finally got the back fence closed on the new area with the fence that is shorter between posts and therefore harder to duck underneath. There are still some birds getting out, so the next step is to add additional posts in the middle of each piece.