Making Hay! and Honey! and a pig palace...

So, some farmers live in areas where their animals can graze outdoors all year long.  Must be nice!

The rest of us must feed our animals through the pasture-growing season and put up enough food for the winter.  Such a challenge!

There are two ways to put aside grasses.  There are ways to put aside grains and beets, but I'm not going to address this here.  Ruminants are meant to eat grasses, so we'll stick with this.

Hay-lage:  The cutting and storing of hay in a damp, fermenting state.  Stinky to us, but delicious to the cows.  The equipment is more expensive but it cuts and captures hay that is too wet to bale and stores it anaerobically.  Looks like this:

The side arm delivery rake

Dry hay:  The cutting and storage of grasses and legumes that involves the cutting, drying and gathering and baling.  Actually the baling is optional.  One can gather loose hay and pile it in the barn.  Baling or loose storage depends, I suppose, on how one delivers the hay to the animals.  If your animals eat in the barn in the winter, loose is a fine option because the hay isn't mangled in the baling process.  Our animals live and eat in different places around the farm, so we use the baling system.

Olivier showed us the machines that we have for the task.

Olivier discusses the baler

(I have some videos to post...)






Jen came to help us "install" our bee packages.  One can buy a package of bees with a queen to put into an empty hive.  We ordered 5 packages of bees--two of them arrived in good condition and other three arrived nearly dead.  Jen decided that the three packages in rough condition would be joined together.

Emily, Emma and Kiyoshi look at bee packages

Row for sweet potatoes

It was finally warm enough to plant the sweet potato slips in the homestead garden.  I had to weed a bit, add compost and create a nice ridge for the little plants that had come in the mail a couple of weeks ago.  I covered the row with black plastic and will update on they look soon.










We had a field walk with Stephen and Tyson up in North Orange.

Stephen admiring the kale

Tyson, cheering good root systems

Pig palace, half done

Making a roof

Several of us worked on making the "Pig Palace"  a shelter under which the pigs will eat this summer.







Other fun photos from the week:

Brian on the cubbie

Wavy board

Bittersweet woven through the orchard's deer fence

Emma clutching Clutch

Fungi flowering on the horse poop

Emma working hard to nourish the sick pig