Back to work

It is starting to look like spring is coming. The snow is almost gone and the sun has been warm. I am sure we will still get a snow storm or two before it is all over but in my head winter is over and I need to get back to work.
On Friday I had a few hours to go up on the hill and do some burning. There is so much debris from the cutting and the more of it I get cleared up the better the grass will take. As the snow leaves the ground exposed I am reminded of what a disaster area it looks like. I know it will eventually be a beautiful pasture I just need to keep my vision and move ahead. Sometimes the forward progress is slower than I would like but I guess as long as it is always forward I will achieve my goal. I actually won’t be planting the seed until May so I have some time but I know that, with all the other things I have to do, I will be still seem like not enough time. I told myself I will broadcast the seed and fertilized by early May even if all the branches and debris is picked up. The longer I wait to get grass growing the longer it will be until I can get animals up on the hill.

Foster Farm finds a home.

For the last 5 or 6 years I have been raising market lambs. I discovered very quickly that a pasture based system was what I wanted to use to raise them. The problem was that I didn't really own any pasture. I had a little grass but not nearly enough to raise the 8 to 10 lambs that I consumed every year so I was left having to borrow pasture. For the past few years my sheep have been transient. I can not say that this experience has been a waste. I have learned a lot about sheep management in a grass based system. Some pastures have been better than others – all have been greatly appreciated. Last year I even switched to pasture lambing where the lambs were born outside on pasture in late spring. It was a great success and this winter the sheep will be kept on pasture thought the winter. I have learned enough though all this that I have decide to have a go at raising lambs on a bigger scale than just for my own freezer.
Last August I finally bought the farm, well kind of. I bought the land that will be the farm. It is a 43 acre woodlot on the top of a big hill in Poland, Maine. This is a beautiful piece of land that used to be part of a farm back in the 1800s. It is lined with bold stone walls, has a view of the surrounding mountain tops and it even has a spring, did I mention this land is in Poland Maine i.e. Poland Spring? The one problem was that it is a woodlot, not a pasture.
11 acres of the land has since been clear-cut and it is sitting frozen solid waiting for spring when it will be scratched up, fertilized and seeded. I have decided to not stump the area but to let the stumps rot instead. This is an idea that my friend and successful dairy farmer thinks is not the correct way to move ahead. This guy definitely knows his stuff, he is still in business so he is doing something right, but the bottom line is I just do not have the money. I would love to have a nice tillable field that I could plant a nice clover timothy mix and not have to spend years battling the native species of brush but I have to build a barn, drill a well and put up fences and my dollar is only going to go so far.
I know that a woodlot can be turned into a pasture without being stumped because the settlers did not have excavators. I will have to use the same tools that shaped the plains of the Midwest, the grazers. I have done a lot of research (a phrase that congers a queer look from my dairy farmer friend) and in short if I fertilize and lime the soil to what grasses like, plant varieties of grasses and legumes that grow quickly in the climate I am in, and use the sheep to “mow” the area, the pasture will develop. The big negative to this is it will take a few years before it is a productive pasture, 20 before all the stumps are gone if they are left alone. Last month I bought the lime, fertilizer and seed that I will use in the spring to start this process.
The time to plant grass is months away, I am having a hard time being patient. Lambs aren’t due until May, It seems like I have been planning forever and spring is still so far away.

First blog.

I have wanted to have a place where friends and family could go and see what I/we are up to. It seems like something is always going on and very often it is something that I think friends would be interested in. The posts will most likely be about the Foster farm but we are always busy so don't be surprised to read about something else.
Note: You will discover very quickly that I was not an English major.