Once again I find it necessary to apologize, or at least offer my excuse for falling behind in documenting my farming adventure blog. Both I and my thirty-five horsepower Massey are getting slower in our old age so progress now resembles more that of horse drawn implement days.

However, in 2022 I was determined to get serious about cleaning up the proposed pasture, so we gathered all the logging slash and brush into fourteen rather large burn piles that had to wait for a snow cover to burn due to all the wood chips created by grinding almost two hundred tree stumps down six inches below the surface.

I hired a neighbor and his small excavator to pluck out the rocks too large for my backhoe and then began turning in the 26,000 pounds of pelletized lime recommended by the Univ. of NH. The down side to multiple passes with a bog harrow is the discovery of more and more stones with every pass. Rather than totally discourage my assisting grandson (at the advice of my neighbor who assured me that I’d run out of grandchildren before running out of stones), We decided to bed down the seed and fertilizer after five passes. With enough rain this past Fall to ‘grow grass on a rock’, we opted to Winter-over the lush pasture growth without allowing grazing on the soft soil.

While all this was going on my Angus heifer delivered a beautiful heifer calf in early July. We kept the pair on the resident field and fed out hay to them and the goats such that we could monitor them more closely. All the usual chores (firewood, hay, chickens & turkeys, mowing, vegetable gardens etc.) were uneventful even in the seemingly never ending rain.

So, as we finally settle down for the Winter, our goats have all been bred and a newly added bull calf has been adopted by our cow. Since selling off her heifer calf, she has taken over nursing this youngster and teaching him the ropes, so to speak. Come Spring, I’m sure she’ll be able to relate to him how sparse and bony this now nourishing graze area was when she was his age.