If you wonder what a family of 10 does on a pretty February day or if you would like help on what is involved in having a homestead farm in zone 8, I hope this will help you. Here goes.
Sheep round up. Warm damp weather plus sheep equals parasites. Time for a good worming and again in exactly 10 day. The second treatment will take care of any hatch eggs that were not killed the first time. We rotate between three kinds of wormer, rotate fields, and don't over use the wormer. This helps to keep them healthy and worm free. Sheep are easy to care for and cheaper to raise than cows. You can have a smaller piece of land and the meat is very high quality and yummy. Just make sure you butcher before they are a year old. They also make very good compost for the garden. You will see that later.
They have set up a small portable pen at the gate of the big pen. They get a dose and out they go.
Ok, who is next.
You Miss, you are next.
Deanna checking on her herbs for her herb garden.
Yay. Mae is finally getting to her square foot garden. She made this, this fall with some of our compost from the compost pile and a sack of peat moss. Woops. Ants. She is sprinkling it with a non toxic ant poison. When they walk in it, it paralyzes them, they run to the queen to save her, and she gets it on her and now we have killed the source of the bed. The key to this poison is using it in the spring when the weather is around 70 degrees. This is when the queen is close to the surface.
She is planning to plant green beans, squash, cucumber, and lettuce.
Lot of lookers and one worker. Hmmmmm
The compost pile. Remember the sheep. When we clean the stalls it goes here. Sheep manure goes here alone with vegi scrapes, egg shells, coffee/tea grounds, the boys hair after a hair cut, and leftover worms from fishing trips. We also put some lime, and leaves here. Lots of good stuff to grow flowers and vegis.
The compost is a favorite spot for the chickens. They love to srcatch and find bugs and worms, scrapes that are still edible, and all the while they are adding more manure and breaking this into usable dirt. My chickens are 100% free range chicken. They are healthy and happy, and they lay wonderful vitamin rich eggs. The yokes are so dark, they are almost orange. They scratch around all in the yard and eat spiders, and bugs. Since they have been loose we have had very little problem with bugs and spiders in our house, and before every year at this time we would have swarms of spiders come in. Also non of those huge water bugs. We are hoping they will help with the ticks too.
This chicken decided she would roost in this tree. When she gets up, she want have to walk far for breakfast.
Woow. This flower bed needs work. This is my stand by bed. If someone gives me a plant and I am not sure were to put it. It goes here. There are lilies, irises, and some other things. I am not sure what all is here. Sally wants a bed for a butterfly garden. I think I will just let her use this bed.
Ok Sally, get busy cleaning.
This was more work than I thought.
Time to fertilize the roses. These are Mae's running roses. She planted them two years ago. Last year the sheep mowed them down. They grew ten time there size after that. This year Mike cut them back like crazy. Figured if the sheep were that successful, well then. The girls are dreaming of someone having a beautiful wedding under these roses one day. Wonder who will be first?
You can see the new leaves just sprouting.
Time to fertilize the pecan trees. We have three huge tree that have only had a few pecans since we have been here. The lady said they haven't had pecans in years, so I went to work trying to make them productive. I read that they need zinc and fertilizer. We put that the first year and they had a few pecans. Last they did nothing. Maybe this year we can have a pecan harvest. This is triple 13. We are putting a half cup about every foot out at the drip line of the leaves. That is where the feeder roots are.
This is our little fruit orchard we planted the first year we were here. There is two apple, two plum, two pear, on one pecan. Alean is helping put triple 13 around them. You can see Mike helping Deanna with her herb garden in the back ground.
Worry about yourself Alena, and leave Sally alone.
If you look close you will see tape at the bottom. The sheep and goats got out and broke this tree off. It put a lot of little branches out at the break. Mike clipped all but one off when he pruned all the trees last month. This will become the trunk. It is important to only have one trunk. At least it is still alive. Alena is glad she is finished. She wants to see what Sally is doing.
Alena. Do you really think that is going to grow. She just couldn't stand Sally planting flowers and her not getting to.
This is that corn we planted Tuesday. We have such a crow problem we decided to just cover them completely. We hope for several benefits of this row cover. They are; the crows want get them, the frost want hurt them, the ground will heat, we will get earlier corn, and we will have less bugs because of how early it will produce. This is about a hundred food row, two foot wide with three rows of corn. About a hundred plants. We put lime and fertilizer under it.
It is getting dark so time to pick up all the tools and go inside for supper. We will have peas, corn, fried okra, rice and gravy all left over from lunch. The vegis are the product of last years garden. A bath then Mike and I will go visit a man in our church.
Keep watching for up dates of the Mike Senn Farm.
