Unseen portions of the farm

Today we worked on the outside perimeter of the hay field--horses don't live there but hunters love to cut parts down to hunt on our property (without permission of course). There are always things to repair there, in order to turn horses out on the hay field for the winter. There are a lot of trees and really thick brush covering most of the fence line, so it is like going through the Amazon to drive the Gator as close as possible to the fence line. It is old old old field fence, with barbed wire on the top, which I hate, so we take it down as we go, and replace it with hotwire (that is never hot due to the brush, etc). I bet Barry pulled limbs from 15 trees off the fence today. Many of the T-posts are flat rotted off at the bottom, so they have to be replaced as we go as well. No wonder, of course, as the fence is at least 50 years old, and probably more.

This year, I am only putting some hard keepers out there, as it has not grown but a couple inches since our first cutting on Jun 8 or so. The lack of rain kept it from growing, and the heat burned up what did. Surely though, twenty acres can support four or five of them for a couple of weeks, and there is some hay out there that never made it off the field at all. I will keep a close eye on them, but I cannot pass up the chance for them to have green grass, as nothing works better on their weight than good ol Dr Green.

Since it has been so dry, out first smaller pond DISAPPEARED. It has been known to dry up , but this is ridiculous. It is so completely empty that there is more grass growing in it than anywhere! The lower, brighter green is one side of the pond, but even the taller brush at the bottom of the photo should be covered by water. This second water photo shows about 1/4 of the other larger pond. It is really low as well, so low that we could finally get into the previously underwater parts so that we could get the barbwire off of the T-posts there. Maybe sometime we will be able to let the horses have access to it after all.

The wierdest part of the ponds is that there are FROGS everywhere! Hundreds of little chirping frogs, they even sounded like birds. It was the craziest thing...this dude is one of the biggest ones. They blend in so well with the green stuff floating on the water, their eyeballs are the same green.