Remember those warm days in April and it was a cruel teaser for the past few days now that we in in May. Frost warnings at night, snow coming down and sticking sometimes and cranky farmers who would really prefer to wear shorts and sneakers instead of heavy jackets, pants and boots with thick socks!
The beef herd is out grazing and have been since May 2nd. It’s been a challenge with all the rain. See cows are big and have big feet that can do a lot of mud making and pucking up the fields whent it’s wet. So we have to give them a big enough area to graze in and not cause damage then move them twice a day to a new piece. But cows often are like cranky energetic 2 year old humans. Stomping to make mud and running around just because they can. No manners !
The cows can have their babies anytime. They were bred to our new bull, Copper sometime after July 30 last year. So far all are just gestating along nicely and no birth announcements yet. That’s okay, warmer weather would be better anyways.
The pigs: Well the group we raised over the winter spent the past couple of months doing renovation work in our back meadow. Ripping up brush, grazing grass, then digging up grass. Basically they destroyed areas that we wanted them to do work on. We had cut out old diseased, damaged and often dead trees. So now there are areas we will be reseeding to pasture grasses so the pigs got to root around there and were quite content. That group went to our butcher recently.
We have 2 momma pigs- sows. They are new moms that were born here last year and bred in the winter for spring babes. Stubby (named for her stubby tail) had 7 BOYS and is an excellent momma. So calm and all the “kids” are kept in line, the babies are calm and quiet too. We introduced them to electric net fencing at 10 days old and they are doing great. Momma gets more fresh ground to graze grass and the piglets learn from her.
Her sister- Curly (the curly tailed one) had TWELVE babies a week after her sister. She’s an over achiever there. Again all are well and momma is a champ. Pigs “talk” snort to their babies and to us. Her babies have been hesitant to do much outdoors but do venture out a bit as a pack. It literally has people stopping their cars to watch and take pictures. Pigs out on grass shouldn’t be this much attention getting but few do it so we garner some attention by having the ladies out on grass especially so easily seen.
I have peas growing and carrots but haven’t been able to get anything else into the ground outdoors due to the cold and rain. The coming week looks better and it’ll be crazy planting time. 1st thing going in is potatoes then some late peas, sunflowers, gladiolus then I can get the plants in as the temps come up a bit (I HOPE!!!).
We finally found and purchased a “new to us” truck for the farm. A fellow Air Force Veteran of all people and you can tell he was an excellent mechanic on planes because that attention went into this truck. So we now have an engine with more power than our V-6 so we can keep hauling livestock to the butcher.
We will be having a large “yard/barn” sale the Friday and Saturday of Memorial Day weekend along with our neighbor. Most of our things are farm related but neighbor will have lots of household and horse stuff.
We’ve found that we have things that we have not used since we moved here 10 years ago and even though we tend to accumulate stuff we are trying to keep things moving to better homes instead of them rotting hiding in a barn here. If you know Matt’s family you would know they were packrats and accumulators that make for great TV shows. We are trying to not get that bad here. But you know it’ll happen where we kick ourselves because we sold something we needed years down the road. Ah well we can just make room for better stuff that we might actually use!