Well, summer is here with a bang. Spring was long, cool and wet, but there was a window of opportunity in April for most of the vegetables to get planted, cover crops put in, and lambing to occur. Lambing went well for the most part. There were a few deaths due to me not being there at the right time — we had a couple of triplets that didn’t make it. Other than that, I was pretty pleased with the outcome.

This is our first year on our home pastures, and I’ve been working overtime putting in our perimter fence along with the electrical part. We use electric fencing to control our grazing, and believe it or not there is a lot of preparation and installation that goes into installing a charged fence properly. Compounding the issue has been simultaneous wet weather, lambing, planting and a host of pressing spring jobs. However, we are rotating our sheep and horses every 2 days, and it’s great to see the response of the grass to grazing pressue.

Our goal is to eventually minimize and possibly eliminate hay feeding in the winter. Right now, I would settle for extending the season in fall to late December, and starting back up in late February. I still can’t see how our sheep would bust through the ice to eat stockpiled grasses, but I could be wrong.

Lots of wet weather lately, and hay making has been an extremely difficult excercise in futility. But, all is not lost and we have much to be thankful for.

Filed under: Grazing/Pasture on June 22nd, 2009