Summer is on its way, at last.

It's been an odd Spring. It has been a lot dryer than normal, and all of the rainfall figures for Douglas County from January to April are at about 2/3 of the average. What that translates to is a leaner hay season, which started a couple of weeks ago for most people on Memorial Day weekend. Ours started last week, earlier than last year but a sudden thunderstorm stopped everything in its tracks. The ground has dried at last and we're back in the swing of things.

The lambs are all doing very well, most are over the 50lb threshold now and the earliest ones are looking almost as big as last years yearlings. they're all on pasture now and have been for over a month, which has enabled us to determine our hay usage over the winter and so we know from the cut happening now how much we will need for the winter ahead. The rest can be sold, and if we can get a second cutting from at least 2 of the fields we should make a decent profit, at least enough to get the hay equipment we own working 100% so we can do our own hay next year and take all the profits.

With the lagoon in place we have an extra 40,000 gallons of 'water' that we can use for irrigation, with the added bonus that it has manure in it which is great for fertilizing the grass. Once the haying is done we will begin irrigating, and hopefully will get a second cut in late September.

The ewes were all shorn last week and we are about to turn them all into the neighbours fields for a couple of months once he has removed his hay. That will take the pressure off our pastures and allow us to do some serious fencing work, making some of the larger pastures smaller to aid in flock rotation.

Late last month we had some Arizona friends stay with us for just over a week. We had been feeling jaded because of the work we still have ahead of us but they picked us up and have given us a new perspective. The rebuild plans for the milk barn have halted, the quotes we received were a little higher than we had anticipated, even in the economic climate we're in, so we are moving ahead slower than we originally anticipated, but that is good in some degree because we are not feeling out of our depth, as we had felt now and then before. The milk barn has been gutted and over the summer months Jen and I will try and renovate as much as we can ourselves.

We have some new ideas we are looking into, thanks to our Arizona friends, including selling raw mutton from our culls as dog food. Looking at the prices around it should be more profitable than just sending them to slaughter.

At the moment we are handicapped by the fact our Bobcat isn't working. Once its back in one piece and the haying is done and the irrigation is running, I have to use the manure spreader to spread about 3-4 tons of solid manure across our 50 acres. That should be fun! Actually its not that hard a job, it just takes time, like everything.

We are also about to turn our young unproven ram in with about a dozen yearlings so we have some lambs in Autumn. these ewes will hopefully be the first small group that we milk on a regular basis. as I mentioned, moving slower is a lot more comfortable.