The Last Week of May

Oats and field peas, the idea is to combine them both at the same time so they'll already be mixed for feed.

The field corn has germinated, warm days and plenty of soil moisture make good corn growing weather.

The wheat is also growing really well. We got an inch of rain earlier this week and that helped things along.

Rain and warm weather have given our pastures a boost.

Some of our larger pigs enjoying pasture.

May 17-23

Getting ready to check the bees, smoke helps to calm them down.

Planting field corn, this corn will be be pig food.

We had a visitor earlier this week, a yearling black bear wandered through. He didn't do an damage and went back into the woods.

May 10-16

Our batch of 30 meat birds arrived this week. They'll be cute for a few more days.

On Friday I planted sweet potato slips in the green house. Last year they did pretty well despite the fact we had crummy transplants.

I've been setting the onions outside during the day, hopefully they'll be ready to transplant this week.

I'm working on building another pig feeder. I can build them for a lot cheaper than what they cost to buy.

The last week of April

The lettuce and arugula are ready in the greenhouse. We've started selling some and have been making lots of salads.

We finally got rain, and some hail last night. The hail wasn't big enough to do any damage though.

After quite a bit of work, the $75 grain drill is functional again!

I'm planting spring wheat for fall harvest.

The next project is to get our 16 ft drill working.

April 19-15

The grain drill needed a hitch to pull a cultipacker behind it.

Instead of welding the hitch directly to the frame I welded the hitch to separate pieces of angle iron and bolted it to the drill. The idea is that if something happens the part I built will bend (or the bolts will shear) so the frame of the drill isn't damaged.

After adding the covering chains, its starting to look like a functional grain drill again.

April 12-19 th

Quackgrass (Elytrigia repens) was introduced as a forage crop. Unfortunately it is invasive and very hard to get rid of since it propagates by underground stems called rhizomes (pictured above), rhizomes can be several feet long! The rhizomes are capable of sprouting a new plant at each node. If the rhizome is cut into pieces (such as by disking) then each piece develops more plants.

One way to manage quackgrass is to harrow at the three leaf stage. If the soil moisture is right the harrow will pull out the rhizomes and they will dry out and die.

A view from the tractor seat, I'm disking up a field I just plowed.

Disking breaks up soil clods to help prepare the seedbed for planting.

Lynn and my dad getting suited up to transfer honeybees to their hives.

The bees are given a dose of smoke to calm them down.

Maple Hill Musings is One Year Old!

This was meant to be last weeks post. For some reason it didn't get published.
On Saturday the sheep got their annual haircut. And Maple Hill Musings turns 1 year old in May!

Bagging the fleece.

We needed to transfer feed from one of the big bins to the smaller one.

It worked best to put it in the gravity box, then auger it into the small bin.