Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Busy down on the farm

Spring is well and truly upon us now and so we starting to look down the barrel towards harvest now, and there's plenty of jobs that go along with getting organised for that.
I'm happy to say that all the spraying is out the way now. All the herbicides, fungicides, fertilizers and insecticides have all been sprayed out, including spraytopping all the pastures so that no weeds are able to set viable seed that will germinate next year.
Shearing is all done and dusted, with the shearing shed all cleaned up and the wool bales sent off to be sold.
While I'm on the topic of sheep, today is a very special day for the sheep on the farm, and particularly the rams. Over the past few days I have been sorting out all the ewes into their breeding mobs (we have 4 different mobs of ewes), and culling out the ewes I want to sell. They've been moved into the paddocks that they will stay on over the summer harvest, and the water troughs have been checked to make sure they will have plenty of water to drink. And today was the day that we sorted the rams, which form a little mob of their own for most of the year, and divided them up to go do what they do best. Yep, today they were put in the paddocks with the ewes for mating... see I told you... spring has really sprung!
For the next few weeks harvest preparation will be the main job on the agenda, and I have already organised a few things including some modifications to the TR88 harvester and pea plucker, and also some new equipment including shiny new field bins (bins to store grain in before we can deliver it to our local port).
2 x 360bag Sharman multi-bins (they have a high cone so they can hold grain or fertilizer)