Spring teaser

The big news is that ERJ Enterprises liquidated our cattle-herd.

One was turned into meat. The other two were sold, at a discount, to a neighbor who helped us get the steer to the butcher-shop.

The entire evolution involved too much drama and rending of garments. I was stressed.

Slaughter "slots" are scheduled months in advance. Our day was proceeded by a week of heavy precipitation, turning the ground around the shipping-shed into a quagmire.

The heavy demand for slaughter services is due to so many small-town butcher-shops being driven out of business, mostly by regulations. Ironically, Retch Whitmer recently signed legislation that eliminated one of the checks-and-balances on regulatory over-reach.

Another bit of drama is that while there are a dozen livestock trailers within three miles of Casa ERJ, nobody is economically stressed to the point of having them up-for-sale. They sit quietly behind barns and backed into fence-lines, rusting and getting overgrown with brush. It isn't an issue of "not enough trailers", it is an issue of "they are not changing hands". The people who own them are NOT raising animals any more. Most of them sold off "splits" to developers and don't have enough land to support a couple of cows or horses.

The line "rusting and getting overgrown with brush" applies to a lot of agricultural infrastructure. One reason I like to have grazing animals is because the way to maintain a pasture is to have it grazed. It keeps the brush down and it forces the owner to maintain his fences.

But for now, we don't have any grazing animals on the property. I pulled up interior paddock fencing and have fence-posts piled along the perimeter fence.

Potato patch

I got a jump on the gardening season. I tilled up the 2024 potato patch. It was a rough, surface tilling. I stomped the weed stalks down, then mowed over them with the push mower. Then I did a quick till to chop-up the stalks (they are brittle) and loosely mix them with the top layer of soil.

Weed stalks need to be in intimate contact with soil to rot. Fungi, bacteria and worms are God's plows. As a gardener, I schedule when the weed stalks and the soil get together.

My target date for getting the potatoes into the ground is the last week of April.

We are scaling back and I only plan to put in 180 feet of potato row.

Other news

The violets on the south side of our house are blooming. We had a three day warm-spell that advanced the season.

The seed for the red onions were planted three days ago. I have them on a heat-mat and some of the seeds are pushing roots. Onions are a good crop if you have heavy deer and rabbit pressure.

Grass was mowed. Woven-wire fence was yanked out of over-grown fence rows. Posts were hauled to the orchard/vineyard. Cow-flops were hauled to the orchard and the spots where new trees will be planted this year were mulched with them.

One of my gold-star must-does was to dig up a small pecan seedling that had been grafted to a Shellbark Hickory. The complication is that it was within a couple of feet of the road and I wanted to get a lot of root. Mission accomplished. I did not snap off the year-old graft while moving it. It is in its new home. The Shellbark is a seedling of Fayette.

Handsome Hombre has a new job. He will have an earlier start-time so we need to sort that out.

HH and Southern Belle have a new, for them, vehicle.

My cold is in the final stages of leaving my body. Mrs ERJ is still hale-and-hearty.

I really like spring-time even if this warm spell felt like a "teaser" for a coming attraction.