Earlier this week, Joe discovered the comb. His hair was damp, and he stood in front of the mirror and combed his hair straight up over and over.
It made me laugh that that was the style he chose for himself, since Isaiah absolutely refuses any hairstyle other than perfectly flat. I've seen him with spiked up hair, and it looks very cute on him, but he is not interested. How different each boy is!
We walk down daily to see our cows in the lower pasture. Each day, we can see more of the terrain. I love it. Rather than thigh high weeds, we have a groomed area. Rather than dense underbrush and vines so thick we could see hardly five feet in any direction, we're beginning to see shrubs and trees and dips and rises. The cows and goats wander around, creating pathways, and we follow them and enjoy them.
Phil is talking about fencing the other 2/3 of the the lower pasture. He could potentially get it done before September, and then they'd have time to graze before frost winter kills the forages. Over the winter, then, he could cut down and mill the trees into boards, and have the pasture ready for next year.
Since the cows don't need to eat hay at the moment, the first broody hen and her babies have taken up residence at night on top of a hay bale. The chicks have a hard time flying up there: they climb onto little perches, and run around and around the bale, until they finally decide they have no choice but to flutter. Then, up they go!
As I worked in the garden today, I found two more nasty hornworms on my tomatoes. I threw one far away, and the other I donated to the chickens. It took them a while to be interested, but eventually they pecked it and, I suppose, ate it.
I fixed up one bed: weeded, mineralized, reformed, turned over. To the boys' delight, I planted radish seeds, as well as daikon radish, turnip, and rutabaga. I will hope for a good crop, and now that it is not quite so hot, I might even water on a regular basis. Last fall, without running water, I would manually water with five-gallon buckets, and still managed to get a crop. May I have better success this year.
Phil spent many hours spraying the orchard with a spray intended to improve the rootlet growth of the plants. Our manual pump backpack sprayer takes about 7 hours to spray 20 gallons on an acre. Larger farms mount a sprayer to the back of a tractor or ATV-type vehicle. That would certainly be more efficient, but until we have such a device, manual spraying it is.
If we could grow more rootlets, that would be the fastest method of increasing good soil. Plants put out roots, and the roots have little rootlets. The rootlets constantly die as the plant continues to grow, sort of in a waves of growth, out and back. We could certainly use more good soil!
While he walked and sprayed, he came across several trees that have been defoliated. Not by deer, but by caterpillars. He came across one leaf that, on the underside had five pencil-thick caterpillars lounging.
We haven't paid much attention to integrated pest management, the name for keeping trees alive from pests, but apparently we should have been more alert.
No comments:
Post a Comment