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.

Drought and Poison Pasture Plants

Poison Hemlock- kill this weed whenever you see it - even use harsh herbicides if you must, it is that bad for you, your children and your pets.

We moved to our farm in 1955 when I was just four years old.  My Dad took his day off from his medical practice on Thursdays and he devoted the day to chores on our farm. He and my mother kept a small herd of Hereford cattle, some chickens and a small herd of sheep.  We kids went with him while he mended fences and walked the fields checking on the cattle. Those trips around the farm are what developed our love of nature. 


Ground cherries, one of the poisonous nightshade family of plants. We love some of the non-poisonous ones such as white potatoes and tomatoes.

While we walked the fields my Dad would pull up weeds, cursing under his breath and naming them as we walked.  Canadian thistles were always a problem and he worked diligently to root them out. But his most hated were things like milkweed, jimson weed and horse nettle, another of the deadly nightshade family.  We learned to pull those weeds whenever we saw them and to never ever put anything we found in the pastures in our mouths.  Dad wanted to keep those weeds out of the pastures just in case a cow or sheep got a hold of one by mistake. They were all poisonous to our livestock. We worked diligently at eradicating those weeds and to my knowledge Dad never lost an animal to poisoneous plants.





We all love to blow these fluffy seeds in the wind, but don't do it!! Yes butterflies like the flowers but the plant is poisonous to livestock and those seeds scatter and grow everywhere.

 



Drought causes most of us some distress because our flowers, lawns and vegetable gardens all suffer from lack of rain.  It causes crop farmers stress because their crops don't grow well or not at all. Livestock farmers worry about our animals having enough pastures grasses to eat, but we also have to worry about  poisonous weeds that may have been crowded out by lush grasses and clovers in good rain times, but thrive when those same grasses and clovers go dormant in drought times. 

This fall my sister lost one of her  sheep to poisonous plants.  Her sheep are very old and don't like to travel far to graze.  When their pastures began to dry out and go dormant in late August, they traveled a little farther afield then usual and found some still green ground cherries and poison hemlock that had snuck into a small, seldom used corner of their pasture.   A trip with one of the sheep to Ohio State Veterinary hospital confirmed the problem.  Blackie died of a lack of thiamine (one of the B vitamins) , a critical nutrient in sheep. The thiamine was blocked from her system by the poison in the hemlock and the ground cherries.  The poison made her brain swell, blocking her optic nerve and causing sudden blindness. Then it went to work on her central nervous system and caused her to loose the use of her legs. A younger sheep might have survived with emergency treatment, but Blackie was over 20 years old and her system couldn't recover.

Needless to say, my sister went after those plants and destroyed them. More drought is predicated for 2013 and you can be sure we will all be walking out fence rows and pastures this coming spring, summer and fall rooting out any of these poisonous plants.

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance.."

"There's rosemary, that's for remembrance, pray love remember", says Ophelia in Shakespear's Hamlet.