Garden Gone to Bed

Breaking dawn, about 7:45 this morning. Chores are finished.  Notice the oak tree on the right. It doesn't shed its leaves until spring.

Heavy frosts this last week have taken their toll on the garden. It is almost December after all, but I hate to see the end of the season.  The Swiss chard and the kale are looking very droopy and the cabbage and broccoli haven't grown in a month.  I did manage to find three smallish beets out of the entire beet patch.  Something is not right with my garden and beets.  Perhaps my cow and chicken manure rich compost is not good for them. Time to do some research!

Green Oak Leaf lettuce

I cut the last of the fall lettuce - which was the green Oak Leaf variety. That was the only one of the fall lettuces that grew well. I still have the patch covered with floating row cover but I doubt the plants will put on any new leaves this late in the season.

Round bales of hay, each weighing about 700 pounds. Twenty six of them arrived last Sunday morning. Forty three more to come. We are feeding 25 head of cattle who eat an average of 25 to 30 pounds of hay a day. You do the math!

The calves who live in the field next to the garden stand at the fence and beg for chard, kale, broccoli and cabbage plants.  Everyday I pull three or four plants and toss them over the fence. They are getting a good diet of grass hay and crimped corn (not cracked, which has had the good parts removed) which will help them grow to their full potential, but a little extra vitamin rich greens go down well.

The calves in for their morning feed.

 

 Ghoulish morning picture eyes!  Left to right, ZZ Tom, the Angus heifer and the little Angus bull.  ZZ Tom is twice the size of the Angus bull and he's only three weeks older. If I every questioned my decision to raise Limousin cattle over Angus, this set of three calves shows why people buy my bulls to breed to their Angus and crossbred cows. The Limousin bull calf, ZZ Tom is twice the size of the Angus bull calf and he's only three weeks older! If you are raising feeder calves to sell at six to nin months and you are paid by the pound, which calf do you think you'd want to be selling?  In a year or two the Angus  may be the same size, but that's a lot of time and feed in between.