Hottest Day of the Year So Far

Monday, June 24, 2024
Hello friends,
              The hottest day of the year so far!  Whew!  We tried to prepare yesterday by watering the garden and flower beds as much as we dared.  I pulled all the lettuce that I could because I figured it wouldn’t survive the searing sunshine.  I was right.  The tomato plants are loving this weather.  They are a tropical plant after all.  The cows were in pastures that have plenty of shade.  It is summer, but this is pretty hot for June.
              Bill has located a source of alfalfa in BIG square bales and this week his project is to bring it home and strategically stack it in the barn.  When you see the big round bales of regular hay out in the field waiting to be moved, they are designed to shed rainwater so they can be stored outside.  Alfalfa is generally put up in square bales so it can be stacked under a roof of some sort to protect the precious nutrient dense hay.  It’s very expensive and we carefully portion it out to the dairy cows a little at a time.  They love it and produce lots of milk because of it.  Asking a dairy cow to produce way more milk than it naturally would need to feed a calf means it needs more nutrition, and alfalfa is an important part of that.  It will be good to secure enough alfalfa for probably the whole year!…