We camped at the farm this past weekend and had the opportunity to do lots of things. We also, finally, got to bring our 2 goats home to the farm! On Saturday afternoon, our neighbor brought the goats over and put them in the enclosure we had built for them out of cattle panels. They immediately started eating all the weedy bits which made us very happy. The plan is to have 2 enclosures set up at all times – the one they’re in and the one they’ll go to next. When they move out of one, we’ll move it to a new place so that they always have their next spot set up. This way they can help us clear out the weeds from a large area (hopefully) of the farm. Based on this first few days, it takes them about 2 days to eat down the weeds in a 16x16 square.
Over the course of Saturday evening and Sunday, we started to get to know the boys. Hercules (the white one) is very people friendly. He was a bottle baby and loves to be scratched around the ears and shoulders. He’s the buck and is a cross between a La Mancha and a Nigerian Dwarf which means he has the very little cute ears of a La Mancha but is the much more manageable size of a Nigerian Dwarf. He also has the gentle disposition of a Nigerian. Rollins (the black one) is much more reserved and is a full blood Nigerian dwarf. He will come up to investigate you if you’re still enough, but he doesn’t really seem to like lots of attention. He may warm up over time or he may not. For now, he’s eating weeds and that’s what we need! Hercules is also the dominant goat – he pushes Rollins around a bit. They’re very entertaining to watch. We put a dog house and a large dog carrier in the pen for them to use as shelter and shade. It only took about 5 minutes before one of them was on top of the dog carrier! They jumped up and down and all around playing king of the hill. Rollins is nimble enough to jump onto either structure, but Hercules can really only get on the dog carrier with the flat roof. When we came out Sunday morning, they were each in a little house so apparently it worked out.
The other thing we did lots of this weekend (other than watching the goats play) was work with our scythes. I have a favorite tool now! On Saturday, we staked out where the first greenhouse is going to go and then mowed that area with the scythes. It didn’t take very long and gave us a very good visual picture of how big the greenhouse really is. I also mowed a path through our top field over to our neighbor’s so that we could stop walking through the tall grass to get there. On Sunday, we staked out the second greenhouse and used the scythes again to clear out that area and the fence line on the south side. It took about 2 hours to mow that quarter acre of dense weeds and small saplings. I’m pretty positive that it would be much faster to mow just grass or even just grass and smaller weeds. Even so, they say that the original acre was the area that one man could mow in a day and it looks like we could keep that pace up. Not bad for nearly complete newbies.
Jeremy using the brush blade on the fenceline
Jeremy honing his blade while I mow
Mowing with the scythe is very meditative. There is a rhythm to the work that you just don’t get with a string trimmer or a power mower. The blade cuts through the grass/weeds in a swath about 3 inches deep and 4 feet wide and lays most of the cut material in a pile on your left. The rhythm goes swing, step, return, swing, step, return. The steps are tiny but steady. The physical effort required for each swing is minute and spread over the whole body so that no one body part is overly worked. At the end of using the blade for 2 hours straight, I felt completely….fine. I wasn’t really tired and no parts of me were more tired than any others. It was great!
First greenhouse site mown Saturday afternoon
The area we cut Sunday morning as I finish the last swath
There is a definite difference between the ditch blade and the brush blade though. The extra weight and depth of the brush blade make it very difficult to use for open field mowing. It really doesn’t cut grass well at all. It excelled at clearing the fence line of years of accumulated saplings though. The ditch blade, by comparison, cut the grass quite well and would go through very small saplings and woody weeds easily. It won’t do year old saplings though. The difference in the 2 tells me that if we’re going to use scythes to do our own hay or to keep larger areas weed free, we’ll be investing in either a longer ditch blade or a grass blade. That will enable both of us to cut a larger area efficiently.
After mowing the area, we raked up all the cut weeds and grass and created our first compost pile on the farm – it was a surprising amount of material! One day all the weeds will become awesome garden soil. I have to admit that raking up all the cut material and building the compost pile was a job. Luckily, Jacob was there and was a huge help. Aside from taking most of pictures in this post, he also manned the wheel barrow ferrying weeds from the field to the compost pile. He’s really getting to be quite strong and is a very hard worker.
Note the compost pile in the center of the picture - about a 4 foot cube
We started mowing at 8:00AM and we finished raking at about 12:30 (2 hours mowing and 2 hours-ish raking). We were all hot and tired at that point so we headed for the RV to have lunch and rest. Our plan was to have nap time/family time after we ate and then go on a short hike to a large (4 acre) pond in the woods just north of our farm. A quiet afternoon spent enjoying the quiet and exploring the woods sounded fabulous after the morning’s work. Then we’d pick Catherine up from her sleep over next door and go home in time for everyone to have dinner, shower and be in bed on time. Since I used the word “plan” in this paragraph, you can guess that this isn’t how the afternoon/evening played out. That will be a topic for our next post!
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