Potato Harvest

Giovanni the Vet came at 11pm on Friday night, and again at 6:30am on Saturday morning, and did AI on Fern. It went much faster this month than last month.

I asked him about the extra teats that our three heifers had. He, a dairymen by birth, said we shouldn't worry about them; too bad that they weren't removed at calving, but not worth the surgical removal now. And certainly not a big enough problem to remove them from breed stock. I was glad to hear that!

I also asked him if we should look for a bull, in case this round of AI doesn't take. He said that, since we have the straws already, if it were his heifer, he would try once more.

I am going to trust that we won't even need that.

After Giovanni left on Saturday morning, Phil and I went up to move the sheep. I came across my long abandoned potato patch. Four months ago, I had envisioned an acre garden, interspersed with the cherry trees, that would provide us with all the vegetables we could possibly need. As such, I planted the potatoes in the upper corner. Then unexpected (to me) frosts came, and I figured the potatoes all died, so I didn't water them, cover them, or care for them in any way. They were on cardboard with a thin covering of hay, and that was it.

Incredibly, I still had a few potatoes to dig up! Pink, maroon, brown, and tan, round and oblong. The total came to just three pounds, but the three pounds were so pretty!

Next year, I will either do traditional, dirt-mounded potatoes, or put them directly on cleared soil (pig-cleared, perhaps?) and cover them with spoiled hay. Then they would have nutrients from the soil, but cleanliness and ease of digging from the hay.

And I will keep the patch much nearer our dwelling.

I decided I disliked the flattened cardboard eyesore, so I began to clean it up. I left the hay, and found a few more potatoes, so it even felt a bit exciting.

Then I turned over a bit of cardboard and upended a spider. I glanced at its belly: black spider, scarlet red belly. Black widow! Two inches from my hand! I think I obliterated it, since i saw no trace of it on the bottom of my shoe. But it certainly damped my enthusiasm for cleaning up the cardboard.

Praise God for his protection, yet again.

Phil had a triumphant day. After less than a month of very intermittent labor, he finished fencing the first part of the lower pasture.

What a tremendous amount of clearing he had to do! I am eager for the cows to clean up the massive growth down there.

Prudently, he wants to wait to bring the cows and goats down until he has a way to water them. Early this coming week, that should be done.

This was a week of good progress for Phil. Above, you can see his new shelves in our metal barn: feed stacked, almost like Costco!

Speaking of feed, I read in the magazine Mother Earth News that we could cut our chicken feed half with corn, and that, since corn is half the price of feed, we could save some money. It sounded good to me, so we've been doing that for a month.

It struck me suddenly: perhaps the reduced production (now running about 75% of what it was a month ago) was not only the result of warmer weather, but also change in ration. And Phil wondered if I was really saving that much by feeding corn. I checked the bags, and my corn was only maybe 20% cheaper than our top quality feed.

What was I thinking?!