Even in the rain, you got to do your chores

Okay, so it wasn’t raining while we were doing our chores but it did start raining right after.
I haven’t done the chores with Ed for a week. And man, five minutes into it I was getting sore. Farming is hard work. And I kept forgetting the cleaning routine. But it was good. We are starting to think that we like the goats the best. The little pygmy’s are really cute. We’ve started using the goats and sheep as lawn mowers by moving them to different areas of the pasture everyday. We are going to tie them up by the blackberry bushes soon, let them eat their way through that. Back in the barn, Ed and I cleaned up the stalls, throwing all the manure and used hay into the wheel barrel.
We decided that it was time to turn the compost again. We have been throwing daily barn waste on top of the two piles for three weeks, but the piles never seemed to get any larger. Both piles had heated up to about 130° over the past couple weeks, but were beginning to decrease in temperature, so we figured we’d turn them.
It’s hard work! A square yard of finished compost weighs about a thousand pounds. We have probably 2 or 2 1/2 square yards, but it’s not finished breaking down. It took us about three hours to move all the compost out of the bins and rearrange them. But within a few hours of turning the compost the second pile was up to 140°! Ed is very excited about this. The compost is his baby, he goes over to look at it a few times everyday, just wondering what microbial bacteria activity is going on in there.
Second and third minor farming activities that we accomplished this weekend: We transplanted the starter tomatoes from egg cartons to Dixie cups. It was fun and dirty, and Ed and I kept claiming that we each had the better way of transplanting the tomato seedlings. And we built deer nets around our apple trees, so they don’t eat the little buds, that are growing bigger and bigger everyday.
By the end of all this, we were both brain dead and body tired. It was really good to be doing the chores with Ed.