The weather is getting warmer and much more humid. Some days it will break through the 80s. While this makes it muggy and uncomfortable, it does mean prime growth of the grass. I am now seeing grass almost up to my waste, 3′ tall.
I noticed berry bushes are growing strong too. A few days ago, they had flowers, and now they are showing berries. I’ll try to grab as many as I can to munch on when they are ripe.
This is the time of year when the animals need to be gorging on fresh grass and forage. They need to fill their bellies, chew their cud, and turn that grass into muscle, bone and especially fat. The fat is important because through the rest of the year, the forage won’t be so abundant, especially during the autumn and winter months.
In addition to that, the animals need to put on that weight so that they can feed their young copious amounts of nutritious milk. Even in the best grazing conditions, those first few months of new life are stressful on the mothers.
I’ve experimented some with leader-follower, but I gave up on it. Now the two herds are mixed, for better or worse. My biggest challenge is back-grazing. The animals will go back to previous areas in the row and graze some of the grass twice, or worse, forget to deposit their manure at the ends of the row.
I think I have a solution for that: Grazing backwards, towards the water source. The animals are lazy and would prefer walking shorter distances, and since the fresh grass is always closer to the water, there’s little reason to go back to previous areas. I tried it on the latest row with some success.
In further news, I harvested one of the castrated rams and we had a leg of lamb roast for Easter dinner. It was pretty good. We’re not familiar with the flavor of lamb, and we like mom’s curry better, so it may be a while before we try that again.
I have one more ram lamb ready for harvest right now, and probably 6 that will be ready for June. I am going to keep some of the best rams back for breeding and trading for more breeding rams, so I can’t get rid of all of them.
If all goes well, we should be seeing calves soon. But nothing yet. Some of the cows are starting to fill in their udders, but most are not.