They will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them. They will plant vineyards and drink their wine; they will make gardens and eat their fruit.
Cow salt and sheep salt are not the same. I don't know if you know this. You may have thought that we just salted our cow and our sheep with the same generic table salt, but you would be wrong. Sheep salt has to be granular, not blocked, because sheep have smooth tongues. They cannot… Continue reading Salt Boxes
Cows like to scratch. They will scratch themselves on anything available. If the only thing available is their mobile shade/shelter, they will scratch themselves on that. It that shelter is covered with a light duty tarp that hangs over the edge of the frame, they will eventually wear through tarp and shred it. Like this.… Continue reading Re-tarping the Shade Mobile
Monday was an horrendously busy day (yes, that's right, I used the British "an" before a word starting with "h". How classy is that?!) As I said, horrendously busy, as is to be expected following a drill weekend coming right on the heels of family vacation, complicated by everyone being sick, one after another. Monday… Continue reading Paddocks
Thursday, the Feast of the Assumption, was a very busy day. We slaughtered two ganders, two roosters (for stew meat), five older hens (also for stew meat) and 27 Cornish cross meat birds. The work started the night before with setting up the kill station. We learned from last year it is good to have… Continue reading Chicken Dinner
The pigs have less than a week remaining before they go off to the butcher, and the meat birds are now four weeks old, halfway through their brief lives. It is time to get them out on grass, but we don't fancy the attrition rate we had last year with the chickshaw only. We would… Continue reading Bird-Mobile
When it does, it's usually not mine. Moving the steers and sheep on Saturday morning I was struck by the how much grass they left standing. It seemed that we should be following them with some other critter that not only ate the grass but also crushed it, rolled it, and squished it into the… Continue reading Love it when a plan comes together…
I bet you didn't know there was going to be a part deux. But there is! LAst time, when we put the thing together we didn't have a tarp to go on top, so, while it did cast some shade, it was very little, and in a grid pattern. Now we have a green/silver 12… Continue reading The Second Shade Mobile, Part II
The last shade mobile we built had a door. This is because, eventually, we plan on enclosing it in chicken wire and putting chickens in it. However, this is not ideal for cows, as they can get stuck in the doorway and break it. So we made another shade mobile last Tuesday. Incidentally, Ryan had… Continue reading The Second Shade Mobile
There are two main issues with keeping animals on pasture all year around here. One is the heat and dryness for 3 months every summer. The other is the cold and wetness for 9 months every winter. Other than that, it's a cinch. Since our pasture doesn't have any trees (yet) we are constructing mobile… Continue reading Mobile Shelters
Little Farm in the Big City 