This week brought our first stretch of dry sunny weather it what feels like months and months, and it was a real treat to sit out in front of the bunkhouse to soak up some of the sun’s warmth between projects. This was also our first full week of youth programming for the spring season, and we hosted some truly wonderful kids on the farm through the week. The kids on the farm loved the dry sunny weather, and it made working outside much more enjoyable than what has been the norm around the farm for most of the winter. The extended dry weather did wonders for our cow yards, but it has also kicked off a bit of a mud season in our barn yard too. I expect that this could be just a mid-winter thaw, or ‘false spring’ as they call it up north in Vermont, but maple syrup producers around the area have started tapping their trees, so I guess they believe that the season is truly turning. There is nearly no snow around the farm now, but the sad remnants of a few large balls, rolled up by visiting youth and parked at the end of their trails, linger decaying and reminding us of some crazy free-times over the past week. February programming always seems to get going in fits and starts, and the pattern will continue this year too. The group scheduled to come out to the farm next week has had to cancel the first half of their visit, so we won’t have kids on the farm until Wednesday around lunch time. We’ll use the first half of the week to make any changes and updates to our schedules and facilities that are needed so that we are set up well for the rest of the spring. We have another break in February the week after that when schools are on vacation and we won’t be able to get a school group out to the farm.
I used our large tractor to scrape the top six inches of hay and manure off the top of our dairy loafing yard this week, taking advantage of the warm dry weather to get into the space and hopefully to improve it a bit. I was able to move off quite a bit of material, and to expose the wood-chips underneath in some portion of the yard. The chips still seem to be in pretty good shape, though the cows will bury them again in no time as they pull apart their round bales and drop manure all around. This warm wet winter has really got me fired up about our hay-feeding season dairy accommodations, and I am still working to design a new feeding and loafing setup that could keep those cows cleaner, drier and more comfortable through the winter. Scraping the yard, a stretch of dry weather, and a hearty group of kids in the barn brushing the cows every day, worked together to get the girls looking much better and to ease my panic a bit.
This is also hay moving season, and we spent most of our work sessions in the barn moving hay out of the hay loft and to various animals around the farm. The goats, down by the sawmill, have a little hay stack in one of their barns, the ‘handy-steers’ down under the HorseBarn have a pile of bales for use at chore time, we keep a supply in the back of the barn to use for refilling the dry hay feeder in the dairy yard, the livestock wagon is parked next to the beef herd’s dry hay feeder and holds bales, and we keep the hay box inside the milking parlor full too. All of this requires moving bales out of the loft and distributing them to these various locations, and this work ends up taking up a good deal of our time. We don’t have a ton of good kid’s work on the farm this time of year, other than brushing cows and moving hay, and luckily most kids really enjoy going up into the hay-loft and pushing bales out of the window. Our stack up in the loft is still looking pretty good, but this is definitely the time of year when I start counting days until grazing resumes and considering the state of our square bale collection in the loft. With about two and a half months until we can count on having enough grass to graze, I am not too worried yet. We don’t want to retain hay from last year into next year, so getting and using the right number of bales each year is always a real balancing act.
Brad brought in two large bundles of sawmill slab this week, and those will be bucked up and split for use in the sugaring arch. The smaller and drier we can get the fuel for the evaporator, the hotter we can boil and the finer we can control things, so dry soft-wood sawmill slab fits the bill nicely. We produce quite a bit of our own, but with the mill down for repair this winter, we’ve had to source some from off of the farm. Brad also started cleaning up thorn bushes from around the sugar maples along the road in front of the farm to make the work of tapping trees and collecting sap a bit easier when that work gets going here on the farm in a couple of weeks.
The veggie farmers kept working in the hoop houses, and those warm covered spaces really showed their strength here in the middle of February. Snow peas were seeded, irrigation ran, starts were planted, and crops were watered, all in the middle of winter. We’ve been eating delicious spinach all winter because the crop, started last fall, can endure the cold of winter under cover inside the hoop house. They are really remarkable additions to the farm.
The Farm School Manual 