Belted Galloways for the Small Homestead

After reading, and reading, and reading about what breed of cattle would work best for our little farm we honed in on the Belted Galloway. They're highly adaptable from their original Scottish wet and cold to Texas heat. They're very efficient (just behind the Longhorn) in converting marginal pasture into weight gain. The final thing they had going for them was that their meat, even when fully finished on grass is highly marbled.                                                          
From the Joel Salatin school of farming we'll be paddock shifting the ladies and doing our best to repair the pasture and ultimately improve the soil itself. Full grown they'll tip the scales around 1000 pounds, roughly half of most modern beef cattle. As time progresses we should have about 1.5 beeves to sell, hopefully by early 2018.

Onion sets

I dug in a shallow trench for asparagus, put them in, and then covered them in 3 bags of soil and 2 bags of Miracle-Gro. 40 sweet onion sets and 40 red onion sets went in around the asparagus along with 6 strawberry plants. The strawberries didn't survive first contact with the free range chicken, but as of 21 February a good number of the onions are starting to peek through. Hopefully the harvest wil be bountiful.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

Getting ready for another cow to be added to the herd, and if things go well she'll be calving shortly after she gets here and we want to keep her and the calf safe. I'm planning to set up a paddock shift system after the calf is born to help manage the pasture (preven over grazing) and repair the damage that was done to the pasture in the past.

The Mighty Turnip

In the fall of 2014, after planting all the trees, shrubs, vines, and bushes there was quite a bit of bare soil to cover. I went to the Co-Op over in Mertens and noticed a big bag of turnip seed on the shelf, and if memory serves, it was about $8. Brought it home and handbroadcast the seeds onto the open dirt, no muss, no fuss, no raking, no watering, a couple of weeks later turnips popping up everywhere. Great ground cover, great soil penetration, and lots of bio-mass to pile up in the swales in the spring, or so I assumed. Fast foward a few months (and a mild winter) and the biennial nature of the turnip had other plans. 

When I think Turnips, I think Russian peasants, and finally growing Turnips made me better understand why the Turnip was so important to so many. The greens can be plucked and eaten early, though they do taste like turnips... :-) The root crop is winter hardy, the mild Texas winter never even touched the greens, they grew taller and fuller until beginning to bloom in early February. I had no idea what was to follow, bee heaven. Today was the 21st of February, and walking through the Turnip flowers today I was surrounded by 1000's of bees happily working and hopefully they'll remember where we're at when the fruit trees start blooming.