A Very Helpful Winnie

Our four-footed lawnmowers did an excellent job mowing the lawn around the garden.

Before…

After.

In only two days they ate it down to the ground, and enjoyed it immensely. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough grass there to keep them happy long term, so we moved them back to the pasture. The pasture is still not in full swing. We have past the vernal equinox, but the cloudy weather and continuous cold rain keeping soil temps low delays grass resurgence. This is just a perennial problem of farming in the PNW.

Which means we have to supplement with hay, as farmers have been doing for thousands of years.

Alfalfa pellets are not a supplement. They are a bribe. Their purpose is to make Iris like us more, and let us touch her, and by extension to help us make friends with Darla, so when she is a grown-up milk cow she is not ornery like her mom.

It worked with Matilda and Eunice. They didn’t used to like people touching them, but they are much more used to it now. They will even come up when called to see if we are offering any brassicas or small alfalfa pellets.

After feeding and petting our four-footed friends for a while, we let them out into the orchard. It was only for a few hours, because there isn’t much grass out there, and the sheep especially like to nibble on blueberry leaves. But this way they got some fresh grass and left some poop in the orchard.

And it gave Daddy and Winne a chance to get started on cleaning out their pen.

By this time they have built up a pretty solid manure/bedding pack. This muck cannot be put directly on the garden, except in the tomato/potato/cucurbit bed (even with potatoes it is pushing it, wire worms are an issue).

Thankfully, we have a brand-new compost bin set up.

We’ll just toss in a couple of loads of muck from the ruminants…

Alternated with a couple loads from under the chickens (some really high nitrogen stuff).

She cannot lift the shovel, but she can drag it. Layer the two types of bedding/manure mixes in the compost bin.

Add a few buckets of water on each layer (plus the hose is going as well, soaking it from the rain barrel). And just like that, 64 cubic feet of browns and greens, ready to heat up and compost down.

Poor Winnie was a cold, tired, hungry (and very dirty) Winnie after all this work. She had a hot bath, and some yummy chicken and raviolis, and then we sat and read “Winnie the Pooh,” but by the time we got to prayer time, she was already about asleep.

We also let the chickens out of their yard into the barnyard area. This serves a couple of purposes. One is to give them some more area to forage in, and the other is to let them scratch through the cow pies, and hopefully eat up the fly larvae, so we don’t have quite as much of an infestation this summer.

Tomorrow I need to cover the compost with a tarp. It got soaked all last night, and a bit more today. Once it has been well soaked through, covering it to trap in the heat and keep the rain from cooling it down (and possibly running all the nutrients through it, though I am skeptical about that) will be helpful in getting it to heat up enough to kill seeds and break down quickly. Then in a week or two we will toss it into the next bin to repeat the process.

Once those pigs are out of that pen on the 31st we will need to bury that whole yard in wood chips, or sow it with a cover crop, not to mention getting the hemlock, blackberry and ivy on the neighbor’s side of the fence under control.