monday's mountain musings

My hands are rather sore from pulling wires through woven bags and metal lath for the last few days so just a quick update from the weekend. It did not go as planned but do they ever? We did, however, get a fair bit accomplished and with another couple days we can get the goat shed completed. I will do a much bigger write up on it all but not tonight since I am absolutely starved and pretty tired. I love kids but dang they wear this ol gal out and I am always glad to see them go home n have my quiet, dramatic free life back. Be warned, every structure we have ever built looks incredibly crooked in pictures. I don't know if its illusion or perhaps I always have the camera at a slight angle and though things may be a tad out of square, they are not nearly as bad as the pictures look.

around the homestead-tobacco planting

Finally got the first round of tobacco in the ground this morning. Second round has a bit more to grow before planting and the third round is still tiny and wont go in until July or so. Since tobacco needs tons of fertilizer anyway I decided to throw another round of corn in between them all. We typically use store bought fertilizer for the tobacco rather than organic but this year we are trying to go all natural and use wood ash and pee. The plants in the pictures look a bit funny as they were dusted in ash as I plant them. We have also gone to only tilling the rows where we are planting rather than the entire garden. Soon as the new weedeating machine comes in the paths will be mowed down. On the ends of each row I put in winter squash and some melons. I am hoping they will all grow outward toward the fence rather than through the tobacco beds. I really need a ski lift put in on the hill to the lower garden, my legs are tuckered out from hiking up and down the hill somewhere near 15 times.
Found a couple rogue potato plants from taters we had down there going on 2 years ago and decided to pull them up . Check these bad boys out !

splitting the pasture

This week we split the pasture for the goats in half. This will allow us to rotate pasture and/or split the goats up into three groups if needed. The gate is also going to have new fencing put on it but the rains came in before we could get it done today.

This weekend we will begin the earth bag goat shed in the lower half of the pasture and get the tobacco in the ground, finally. We could have done it this morning as well but with the threat of violent weather, yet again, we decided to wait until after the rains passed. Though we only had some small hail and rains, some areas of the county had baseball sized hail. Praise be we did not have that here.