Fall 2021

 Hello, 

I decided I would take this quieter Sunday afternoon to stop by the blog and share just a few pictures from the past couple weeks that I snapped on my phone while out and about on the farm.  

It's been a long, mild fall. We had our first frost just this past week- it's unusual for us to have made it this late into the fall before having a killing frost. Having the mild weather last and the growing season extended was a blessing. The beef cows and a few critters are still on grass, but most of the livestock has been transitioned to hay or baleage over the past couple weeks, as our grass supply is pretty much exhausted. Our goal would be to figure out how to stockpile enough grass to be able to graze later into the fall, but haven't quite figured out how to make that work well for our all our farm just yet. Nate does this some with his beef cows though. The garden has pretty much been harvested, and just the carrots and beets remain to be dug and stored in the root cellar. 

We played for a Gold Star Mother's Day event at the local cemetery a few weeks back. Set up and played under this big tree... 

Sunrise from the hill. Getting up in the dark to move fence isn't so bad when you get to see this kind of sunrise from the hilltop.

This one was taken just a few days after the one above. We've had some intensely foggy mornings.

This was about two weeks ago, when Grace picked up some of the polywire that had been used for creating lanes and strips on the field for fall grazing. Moving fence is one thing that Grace does a LOT of in the summer time. That season is pretty much over now as we transition into the hay feeding season. 

Since the weather has been nice, the sheep and goats have remained in my land. We rotated them through this land for most of the summer as the goal is to convert this land from having so many brambles and brush to better pasture- a slow process. Now we are feeding them hay up there, so that the hay they don't eat breaks down into more fertilizer for the soil. 

Last Saturday, the squash crop was picked. 

This was about a week ago as well- sorry for the not so great pictures, but it's hard to hold the leaders in place and take pictures into the sun... ;)  The huskies got to do their first training run of the fall. They were so excited to go, and it was so. very. noisy. during hook-up. At the command of "hike" the barking stopped and 48 feet were in action. Matt used the Gator to take them for the run. 

Last Sunday was warm and sunny and the forecast showed it was to be one of the last nice days this fall, so we had to take advantage of it. Laura had the day off work, so 4 of us, Grace, Silas, Laura and I, loaded up the canoes and went for a paddle at a local lake. It was a lot of fun, even if the person in the back of my canoe was still learning how to steer the canoe, and we didn't go anywhere in a straight line....  

Hope you are all doing well, and have enjoyed your fall so far. Enjoy this final week of October.  Thanks for reading our blog!