Green acres

One footnote to the "slinging the manure at the silo" episode:

The muck involved is only a fraction of the manure that has to be moved/composted.  I was in bed last night, thinking of the mental image you might have after reading that little story:  ALL of the manure from the WHOLE year of cow-poo, piled 40 feet high against the silo until there was a huge sledding hill from the silo and extending in all directions.  Well, if it became a sledding hill, the boys would like it, at least!  :)

If you had a mental image of it at all, it probably wasn't THAT drastic.  

Yesterday's pile consisted of only the mucky stuff that the cows were wading through, the wet stuff that keeps getting churned up into deeper mire, the partially composted stuff that has needed cleaning up since the weather got warmer.

It's maybe a pile that is 4' high/3' out from the side of the silo now, but will condense and compost to a nice 2'x2' berm of black gold around the bottom of the silo.

And yes, there are other methods of dealing with the fresher manure, no worries there. 

 

Here's one success-story about enriching the soil here, from last years' experimenting:

We have two beautiful stands of white pines in our pasture.  White pines in a tightly-spaced stand like these typically drop enough needles to ensure that nothing else can grow underneath, including the grasses that we need for the cows' summer grazing.  Between both stands of trees, the soil was having a difficult time sustaining anything besides a thriving band of thistles.  

With precious little grazing area for our Bessie and her calf Caspian, every blade of grass counts for something.

With manure coming fast-and-furious on a daily basis, I was looking around the property for soil that needed enriching.

For most of that winter and spring (2013), I deposited wheelbarrow load after load of freshly soiled cow-bedding (straw or wasted hay dirtied with cow ploppers) in between those stands of trees.  By early summer, it looked like a field of tiny burial mounds, with straw sticking out the top of each one.  By mid-summer 2013, those mounds were partially composted.  By late summer, I let the chickens and ducks out to scratch up those mounds and to even out the surface of the pasture in that area.  By early fall, the manure was close enough to being well-distributed dirt that I over-seeded with some pasture-grass seeds.  This spring 2014, the clover seeds in that composted manure burst into life, along with more grass seed that I had broadcast in early spring.  Now, the beginnings of a richer, more lush carpet of grass and clover are growing in the beautiful, black, crumbly topsoil that just over a year ago was fresh cow poo.

I didn't really know if my little idea would work, or if it would just kill the small amount of grass that was already growing there.  But hooray!  The experiment paid off, there is precious grass and clover growing for our cows (and sheep, and pigs) to munch down, the soil has some life in it again, and what could have been a bad decision turned out to be the beginning of a plan to enrich much more soil around the tiny 2-acre farm that we try to keep up with.

I have my eye on a few bare patches in the pasture, and on an area where too many chickens in a small enclosed area scratched any green thing into oblivion (and the topsoil is now washing away), and areas where we want to extend the pastures along the side of the property with new fencing.....  All areas that will grow grass if I seed it, but will grow much better grass with just a little enrichment. 

Green Acres, courtesy of the mounds and mounds (and mounds!) of cow-stuff that has to be deposited....somewhere.

 

Laura