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This photo is the third of my Kiowa blackberries to ripen…..I put it in the same place that I put the two the day before……in my mouth……yummy……hoping to get enough ripe at one time to make a cobbler…plants were only planted last year. The Chesters and the Ebonys have lots of berries but they are insignificant compared to these….

These are fescue and orchardgrass from one of my lots and have been in these buckets for two years….
Fescue left…OG right.

Orchardgrass and bermudagrass mix also from one of my lots…..look like this will be a year for prodigious Bermudagrass growth…..hot and wet is what it loves….

This berry is compared to my thumb to show the size of these berries….I love them….

This photo is of the first field I sowed with the summer cover crop mix….this is the one I sowed in two stages using the lawn spike tooth aerator…..now noticeable is the lack of sunflowers…..where I have put sunflowers in the soil they have done well…..these summer cover crops need to be drilled….

These are the two summer cover crop buckets….that growthier one is about 10 days older and it is the one where the seed were scattered in the bucket and then mulched and watered. The other is the younger where the seeds were just scattered and watered in. Both are doing well and are very crowded….fortunately we have had plenty of rain….

Here is my cover crop row planted into my garden….naturally, my lawn mower has died so I have not mown between the rows….

Finally got the mower fixed and did some trimming.

Here is a shot of Yellow Sweet Clover….this plant is more difficult to grow than most clovers….I have some in the lot where I had an unsuccessful broadcasting of summer cover….The Yellow Sweet Clover is a carry over from the fall cover as there was no yellow sweet clover in the summer mix planted there….Yellow sweet clover is a biannual and its value is in its deep rooted nature to open the soil and bring nutrients to the surface….not a particularly desirable forage plant….my guess is it is another plant that will do much better drilled than broadcast.

It will have to compete hard where it is as there is Crimson, Red and Ladino clover in a good stand where it is….also a good smattering of buckwheat and the rape seems to have reseeded as well as a few stems of wheat….photo of this lot….hard to see the sweet yellow clover in the photo

I brought my cows and weanling calves home this weekend. Two cows who are half sisters by the 6D bull
this one is Utah looking for a handout….

and a heifer and two weanling bulls…also have a red heifer that belongs To my neighbor. He has sold all his other weaned calves and we did not want to put her in a lot by herself. The three calves weaned off at eight months age at 800 and 724 for the bulls and the heifer was 692.

All on grass and hay and mamas milk…not the prettiest calves I have ever raised but they have done a good job of growing….my theory is that they are from stock that is adapted to the environment they are raised in….We have run a closed herd since Jack bought the draft of ten heifers from Walnut Hill in the early nineties. These two cows go back to my first cows bought from Lynn Brae in 1986. I am thinking of breeding back up to five or six cows…. These girls are like the horses in that they like to spend the day lying in the barn to get away from the bugs….then they go out and graze in the evening…

We took one of last years bulls to slaughter for the freezer a few weeks ago….hung up an 880 lb hot carcass and yielded some pretty good beef….started this years bulls on light feed Friday and one of them will have a similar purpose. The other will probably make a saleable bull about a year from now…

Dee Dee and Apache eating peaches that have fallen off the peach tree….They are not ripe and hard as rocks but they love them….

Bale beans are growing well now….may do more of this in the future…….they are doing better than the row planted in the garden.