Weeding and composting.

When you head to Texas for two weeks…

The weeds decide they own the place. Seriously, some of them were over my head.

Of course, it’s an ill wind that blows no good. The ruminants were all pleased as punch about the wheelbarrow loads of weeds they were getting out of the deal.

It’s hot out in the pasture these days. Darla has figured out a system for dealing with the sun. She just moves over and stands in her mom’s shadow.

The weeds aren’t the only things that grew, of course. Here is one of Winnie’s Tatos.

So Monday and Tuesday were spent mostly in pulling all of these weeds out of row 2.

Winnie was my big helper for that. She grabbed her little yellow wheelbarrow and asked me to load some weeds in it, and then followed behind the big wheelbarrow.

Until she got stuck in the tall grass, and had to wait for me to come back and help her. But when I got back…

Where’s the Winnie!?

There she is!

Uncle Adam borrowed some goats from the neighbor to help eat the blackberries on the rock pile near the chicken coop. So now we have goats living in our chicken coop.

Winnie thinks they are lots of fun.

We are in the chicken coop because with this many weeds, we can’t feed all of them to the cows and sheep. Instead, we are building a compost pile.

This is primarily a layer of partially broken down compost from our previous pile, alternated with layers of greens from the garden, and then layers of bedding from the chickens. Winnie did a great job making sure it got thoroughly soaked as we built it.

Can you spot it? I should weed this place more often.

(That’s the D-handled spading fork I haven’t seen in a few months, hidden under the bolted carrots.

Midway through the morning I finished my water bottle and refilled it from the water spigot in the garden. That about blew Winnie’s little mind!

After that she had to try it herself. “Mmmm! It tastes like plant water.”

Finally, 6 hours and six wheelbarrows of weeds later, and this row is clear.

The next step is to dig up the compost from the pathway and throw it up to make a raised row. This is going to be sown to buckwheat for now, mainly to help recover some of the nitrogen deplete by the wheat last year, but also because one of our friends is trying to go gluten free, and if she figures out how to use buckwheat she can have some of ours.