There are a few half-gallon jars of syrup on the shelf in the sugar-shack, so despite the tough sugaring weather, we have been able to make some finished product. The ten-day forecast has some hopeful moments with cold nights and warm days, but also plenty of weather that looks too warm, so I’m not sure how the season will unfold. This was a messy and mixed up week of weather on the farm with a significant rain storm passing over us Wednesday afternoon and Thursday and dropping about two inches of rain on our already wet land. The dairy herd’s bale yard is an absolute mess, and we have been keeping the cows in the barn a bit more to give them time to rest and dry off a bit out of the mud and muck. These difficult conditions have renewed the urgency around our project to build an indoor loafing and feeding facility for the dairy herd, and I am working to pursue grant funding to help pay for a renovation of the back of our dairy barn. The heavy rain this week has soaked the farm and made mud all around, and with an inch and a half of rain forecasted for fall over the weekend, I am not looking forward to conditions on the farm next week. We might get a break in the rain next week though, so maybe we can dry out a bit then.
We bought in two bottle-baby goats this week, both wethers that the visiting students have named Chocolate and Chip. We have successfully gotten them to start drinking the rich Jersey milk coming out of our cow herd, and I expect that they will grow well with this diet. They are in a small pen in the dairy barn where we can keep a close eye on them, and where they are handy for their three-times-a-day bottle feeding. We successfully raised three bottle-lambs last year, and when I could not find any lambs this spring, I bought these little goats to fill the same position for now. We’ll keep looking for lambs, but I hope that these goats will be able to graze many of the same edge locations that the lambs did so well on last year, and that the visiting students will love these little goats as much as they enjoyed the lambs. Goats are a bit more personable than sheep, and Chocolate and Chip have been a bit hit so far.
Veggie work continued in the greenhouse and hoop-houses this week, and those were great places to work during the cold rainy weather. We had enough rain Thursday that the paths between raised beds in one hoop-houses flooded, but luckily those raised beds remained up above the flood. The greenhouse seeding work continued this week, along with some harvest, direct seeding, cultivation, trellis building, and table set up. The veggie growers are feeling the pressure mount as they see all of the work ahead of them, but our fields are not warm and dry enough for any of it to start yet. Luckily the greenhouse is warm and dry, and there is a lot of work to accomplish starting seeds and tending to starts.
Our new dairy herd dry hay feeder project advanced through the week, and other than tweaks and repairs that I’m sure will be required once we start actually using the thing, I believe that it is complete and ready to be deployed. We got a big group of farmers together Thursday to lift the salvaged green metal roof that we planned to put on top, and we were able to get that up on top of our feeder and screwed into place. We also got pressure-treated runners bolted onto the bottom of the feeder, and prepped a spot for it against the fence in the dairy herd’s feeding yard. The whole thing has come out much taller than I expected or feels necessary, but I’m sure that farmers and cows alike will appreciate there being no danger of banging heads into rafters when filling the feeder or eating out of it. I always enjoy the moment when a carefully measured and planned out drawing becomes a thing in the real world and the calculations that went into the plan become manifest. There is always some space between the vision and the reality, for better or for worse.
Taylor continued work in the calf pen in the back of the dairy barn this week, and she is working with visiting students to get that space dug out and re-bedded in preparation for the calves that we expect at the end of March. This is a big project without a straight path to completion, and Taylor has been parking the tractor just outside the back of the barn, putting old bedding into the bucket, and driving that around the cow’s yard to dump it on the compost pile. It is certainly a circuitous path to follow, but the best we could come up with in our current late winter configuration. We’ve got a couple more weeks until calves are due to Phlox and Ruby, and progress has been steady on getting that space prepared.
The Farm School Manual 