Summertime Sunflowers and Veggies

 Summertime Sunflowers and Veggies
Sunflowers with tomato hoophouse in background

Marie with sunflowers at Silver Creek

This week on the Farm

Bluebird Farm was a happening place this past week. 

In the vegetable field:

                The dry weather is making it difficult to germinate seedlings.  Beets, carrots, and lettuce mix are all struggling to crack through the dry crusty ground.  The good news in the fall garden is the transplants.  Weeds had started to grow in the vegetable field.  But it isn’t very hard to kill them when the sun is beating down.  Just a little disturbance with the tractor and they’re dead.  After preparing the beds we had two big work evenings to plant all the babies (one good thing about earlier evenings is that when we work to dark its only 9 pm instead of 10 pm!).  12 rows of chard, 12 kale, and 4 each of collards and broccoli are now happily growing away. 

 

Baby kale, Swiss chard, and collards before planting

 

William and baby kale plants after planting

In the pastures:

                On Sunday it was time to move the sheep.  Normally it’s a short easy move from one paddock to the next.  But this time it was a big move.  They’d been happily grazing on the hillside for the last two months or so.  But they had reached the end of the grass.  So we had to move them back down to the bottom land across from the vegetable field.  Luckily for us we had some out of town friends visiting so we put them to work (they may not have thought themselves so lucky!).  The sheep behaved pretty well on the move.  But they did miss one turn.  They didn’t want to walk into the tall unmowed grass so they ran the entire length of the field down the nicely cut road-they thought it was the best race track ever.  So I had to run all the way around them and get them turned around in the right direction.  Fortunately, after their long run they were too tire to misbehave anymore.

 Big pigs get a summer treat! The ground is very hard, so we let them gallivant around in the lush sheep and chicken grass pasture. 

                Today we opened up some piglets onto our pastures.  The ground is hard from the dry weather so they can’t turn the soil over too much.  We just want them to munch on the grass and other plants growing in the pasture, not rip the whole thing up.  It took the pigs a few minutes to cross their old electric fence (they think its still there and really don’t want to get shocked).    But once they were across into the green grass they had a blast running around and grazing. 

Enjoy the food!

William and Marie

Animals around Bluebird Farm
Cattle in the high pasture.
Hens enjoying the shade in empty veggie field with hoophouse in background

Wheee...baby pigs running!

Baby pigs and hens