Teresa & Mike CHS - Our journal

[Mike CHS]

Our rainfall is 56" a year but like many places, it is mostly in winter and early spring.

I know you love that kind of country GB but I will take a pass.

Teresa is canning chicken broth this morning and that has to be way up at the top of the list for return on investment. We get chicken thighs at the IGA for $.99 a pound and use a $4 package of thighs with 10 quarts of water. We use a lot of chicken broth in our cooking.

We are getting ready to go out and move the rams and wether and give Ringo his CDT. We will put them and the dogs in one of the side pens for a day while we work on the main herd doing hooves, worming if needed and CDT for the few left that still need it. We still need to separate our last set of twins but they aren't old enough to wean yet. I'm not sure how many will breed in the next month or so since it turned so hot so fast.

 

[Latestarter]

Having just looked at the radar, it appears you have more rain coming Mike. Slow moving line from the NW. Nothing in my area at all.

 

[High Desert Cowboy]

We would gladly take some rain over here. It’s so dry my neighbor just had his first cut in 3 years that didn’t get rained on. Here’s hoping for July

 

[Mike CHS]

We have been getting some rain but there have been several rain showers that we can see from the house but they just skirted our place. I was planning on cutting the pasture down to about a foot but I don't want to put the cutter on the tractor only to have it start raining. Kubota did some master engineering (NOT) with their PTO cable that if it gets wet it won't work right after a bit so I try to keep part of the tractor under shelter and out of the weather.

 

[greybeard]

We have been getting some rain but there have been several rain showers that we can see from the house but they just skirted our place.

I call that "livin under a hole in the sky". Happens frequently here, but sometimes too, the whole sky compresses itself right over my place....

 

[Mike CHS]

This one is a nice steady but light rain. It is light enough that the sheep aren't going to shelter but heavy enoughto do us some good.

 

[Mike CHS]

We wound up with a little over 1" of steady rain that had very little run-off. Other than do Ringo's hooves and his CDT there wasn't a whole lot going on around here today.

Way back when we first started our journal I posted a picture of the original layout. Where the pan rack is now was the vinyl door that opened into the bathroom. I closed that off and added a door that opened into the pantry so we could keep more personal goings on personal.

We wound up with 8 quarts of nice broth and the chicken that we used will all be used for soups so that is a pretty good return for very little effort.

 

[frustratedearthmother]

Looks good!

 

[Bruce]

Much better door location Mike.

It's not how much we get...it's when. We get most of our rain in winter and early spring, which doesn't do any good in summer...July-Oct

So basically you can't grow anything in the summer like we can't in the winter! Unless you have a well that can handle irrigation.

 

[Mike CHS]

Much better door location Mike.
So basically you can't grow anything in the summer like we can't in the winter! Unless you have a well that can handle irrigation.

Our pasture does well most of the time but it's all native grass that I don't try to change. We wouldn't be able to garden if we didn't have the well that we use for that.

A little trivia about how we found our little farm. I was getting the Atlas out of the car for Teresa's upcoming trip and when I opened it I found one of the maps that we used when looking for property (yes we use GPS but still like having a map around). We basically drew a circle approximately 8 hours out from our home in Charleston. The other map is missing but it went up into upstate SC, a bit of North Carolina and more of Tennessee and Georgia. We would pick a couple of towns and then start searching outward from them. We made it a point to make at least one trip a month just to identify areas that we liked and quickly eliminated the majority of our initial search area. It only took a few trips to narrow our search area down to parts of Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee but the first trip we took to where we eventually found our place eliminated everything else.

We didn't keep track of how many trips we made but we were looking for over 2 years when we found our home.