Groan......

I'm sore this morning. No, not mad at anyone or thing, but sore from a long weekend of labor. It was good labor to be sure as most labor is on the little farm. But when the labor is unaccustomed, well it hurts. This weekend saw a lot of things done. Curiously BOTH mornings we slept in until after 8am! We haven't done that for years and years. Once we got up we hit top gear quickly. First thing we went to what has become one of our favorite stores, Tractor Supply Company. There we took back 2 of the 3 bags of "beef cattle supplement" that we had errantly purchased the last time we were there. One drawback of our particular TSC is that they like to move things around frequently. The did this with the feed bags last week. Where the goat feed usually is, they had stacked bags of beef supplement. The bags and labels are identical except for the 8 point type on the label. The consistancy of this product reminded me of fish food flakes. It was 5 o'clock in the morning when I discovered the error, too late (early?) to do anything about it, so I fed it to the goats anyway. Our older female took a mouthful and the poor thing kept trying to swallow the dry powder. Not much of it got eaten. We still have the opened bag which will get traded to someone at Kristi's work that runs cattle. Anyway, we swapped the unopened bags at TSC for the goat chow that our babies love so much. 5 bags of goat feed and a bag of chicken scratch, a hose end sprayer for plant watering with built in on/off switch completed our purchase. We did a quicky shopping at the grocery store too since the store is a block away from the tractor store. We had 39 chickens left out of the birds we slaughtered and we have to eat our way through them. I had the crazy idea to make Carne Guisada but instead of beef, I substituted chicken. It came out pretty good and we're having it for lunch today (Monday).
Back at the farm, I borrowed Kristi's golf cart - boy, that thing comes in handy - and hauled the bags of feed to the tack room. When I opened the door I took in the sad state of the room after months of work. It needed cleaning up. So the hay was restacked, the empty feed bags were flattened and stacked, unused feeders and waterers were put away and everything was moved, swept under and replaced. Now it looks good for a few more weeks.
The next task for me was to rototill a 50ft x 50ft area for Kristi's goards. With our tiny little tiller this took a while. The dirt was very easy to work here. Very sandy and with very few rocks. This would be great for herbs. Once the tilling was done I raked the weed remnants out and smoothed it in preparation for planting. Then I began building the watering system. This was all made from 1" PVC with several valves for different circuits. I am taking the easy way out this time around and I'm running a hose from the nearest spigot to the PVC part of the system. I'll make it permanent later, digging a trench, altering the plumbing underground and putting in a run of pipe to the gourd field. For now it's quick and, believe me, dirty. Kristi got busy planting before I was finished. A few dozen gourd plants of 2 different kinds were planted. Since there was a lot of room left over, potatoes went in. That was it for yesterday. Today, who knows, peas, beans or more herbs may be planted. Barbecue has to go back into the vet today to have her stitches removed.