Barley Pasture Update

Post date: Feb 23, 2016 9:37:11 PM

As of middle February... the Atlas barley is doing just fine - we haven't had a lot of rain, but at least in January, enough to keep this growing. The photo below is of the western pasture with Butch and his five ewes in the foreground.

The photo below this is of the middle pasture. Interestingly, even though it was planted on the same day, and in fact within a couple hours, of the west pasture, the barley in the middle field is several inches taller than in the west field. Same kind of soil and same amount of rain - so what's the difference - we think, since the ewes and lambs spent much of their time in the middle pasture last spring and summer and fall (before planting), this pasture had received quite a lot of sheep poop. Good fertilizer, apparently. For next season, we will have to spread the "joy" around.

And the photo below this was taken from the middle pasture area toward the east pasture, which you can see behind the ram lambs (two of them standing close together). Is one of them Peabody? too far away to tell them apart.

By photo-documenting the progress of the pastures, as well as the "unimproved" parts of the ranch, and keeping track of high and low temperatures and rainfall, which we also do, we can eventually correlate growth with weather conditions - and have records of it all.