Spring is certainly in the air. The bluebonnets are blooming, the clover is coming up in the pastures and it is time to clean out the chicken house. The material coming out of the chicken house is fertilizer gold but it can only be added to pastures in cool weather. If you add chicken litter in the summer months it will cause the pasture to burn due to the richness of the fertilizer. The process of removing the chicken litter from the chicken house is quite labor intensive and I convinced my husband to tackle this project with me. We attacked with a variety of shovels and redistributed our precious poo with a manure spreader. At the end we were a few lbs lighter from sweating buckets and had a lovely aroma of "eau de poultry-poo".
The ranch is thriving and all the babies are growing like weeds. The puppies have hit their 6 week mark and received their first round of vaccines. A beautiful heifer calf was born yesterday and is wearing her tag proudly, The incubators are busily growing baby chicks, turkeys and goslings. We had a wonderful time at the Farmer's Markets this past weekend. We enjoyed seeing our regular customers and met a few new faces. It is always fun to chat about ranching, the animals and all the projects.
After a ton of research we have decided to disc a pasture and we may very well regret this decision. We chose to disc because this particular pasture has not been producing much grass and it is very rough, a few dozen years ago someone decided to plow it and it was not smoothed back out so it feels like a giant see saw when you drive across it in a tractor. Discing disturbs the ground but it also allows weeds to sprout that had not had the opportunity to grow. Most farmers spray with an herbicide to counteract this inevitable side effects of discing but we do not use these products on our land so we are hoping for the best outcome. This project will take weeks to fully complete. This week we are having compost delivered to work into the soil along with the chicken litter. We plan to plant giant bermuda in this patch of ground.
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