No Drought This Summer!

Seems like the biggest news at the farm this week is that we most definitely aren’t struggling with a drought like last summer!

While we dodged the heaviest of the rain all at once, we have gotten about 6.5 inches of rain in total since last Saturday, the most being 2 inches at once.

While we really appreciate the moisture, we are grateful to have missed some of those deluges on the Southshore. Even with all of our improving soil and forage to soak it up, when rain comes down that fast, most of it just ends up running off into the ditches and ponds.

Even though we hadn’t been as dry as last summer even before the pattern shifted in the last week to cause all these afternoon storms, our ponds were pretty much empty. Which is interesting in and of itself because I think it speaks to how much we have improved the soil and forage on our land over the last eight years. After all, we want the water being absorbed by the soil and not running off, right?

We also have a bunch of willows around the pond that have grown immensely in the past few years, so they soak up a bunch of the pond water, as well.

But needless to say, even with all of those sponges, after 6.5 inches of rain in nine days, the ponds are full again!

Grant’s bush hogging in certain fields has paid off. Now there’s a bunch of lovely lush grasses and clover at a good height for the cattle to eat when they make their way back over to those fields in the next few weeks. Had he not cut it, it would still be 3.5 foot to 4 foot high goldenrod, loosestrife and other tall woody plants that crowd out the regrowth of other, more palatable cattle forages.

I had a very sweet experience moving the goats yesterday morning! Grant wanted to pull the cattle out of one field in the corner of the property and move the goats in after. So I rounded them up and while we were waiting, they started grazing a corner of a field they had access to the entire week but hadn’t eaten down as much as they could have.

I didn’t have a feed bucket with me because we didn’t want to confuse the cattle and get them to follow me as well.

But as soon as Grant called and gave me the all clear, all it took was a few “come ons” and the whole herd stopped grazing and followed me exactly where we needed to go with no issues.

I take for granted how well trained and trusting they are, but occasionally I think back to when we first got the herd almost eight years ago and it makes me (anxiously) laugh imagining the chaos of getting them to try to follow me on some of the walks I take them on now! That’s just years of training them to a specific call and generational trust built up, I guess. It’s definitely a very satisfying and special feeling!

Some of our midsize piggies broke out of their area this week and I couldn’t resist taking a picture of them in their incorrect location before walking them back where they belonged. To their credit, they were also very good about going back to where they needed to go and thank goodness for perimeter fence to not worry about them wandering off the property even if they weren’t exactly where we wanted them temporarily.

The hens are doing their thing, too, and just this morning Grant and Nicole got the first steps in place to move one coop to an entirely different field that we haven’t had chickens on in several years. Next, we’ll begin moving the young pullets out to that coop to start their pasture rotations!