I read recently in a Dublin-based newspaper that, "Winter is now almost at an end."
While winter is defined as the time between December 1 and the last day of February, I suspect the writer may need to curtail their enthusiasm after much of Europe shivered in a Siberian deep freeze for the last week.
In defence of that writer, I did find myself listening to early morning bird song two Sundays ago. And the evidence of our temperate winter of 2011/12 is to be seen in every green, growing field of grass.
The mildness of our winter so far was brought home to me as I made my way down the fields on my tractor with a load of dung last week, and by the grass cover on a seven-acre paddock that I had to cross to get to my destination. All my fields and paddocks are in good order, but this one was royal green in colour. Granted, the field has relatively new grass, and was covered in slurry last autumn, but I was still amazed at the colour and depth of cover for these, the early days of February.
As on many cattle farms, farm manure on my farm comes in two types, the liquid slurry type and its cousin, the solids we push into a corner, be they bad bits of silage or spent bedding. For my collection, I use a portion of a small yard where the floor is six inches of reinforced concrete, important given that the essences of dung can eat just about anything over time, and four-wheel-drive machinery will always find that one weak spot and dig it out.
The back wall is five feet high, which makes loading easier and tidier, and the fall in the yard leads to the outside tank. It’s four years since I last cleared away my collection of bits of bad silage and straw bedding. Over time, I would add an occasional bucket of slobbery slurry, and once a year I’d give the whole lot a twist with the loader, to help it cook a bit better.
Following last autumn’s grain harvest I decided that a specific area of one of the barley fields might benefit from a good coat of dung. It’s a field that even when in grass had two very distinct divisions, the top four acres always appeared richer than the bottom four. That division wasn’t maybe as evident when we cut the barley, but it was there nonetheless — evidenced by the fact it only produced three quarters of the bale average.
I don’t own a dung spreader, and to curtail costs I have devised my own system for spreading. I loaded my steel bottomed trailer with eight buckets of dung. Each time, four of well-mulched older stuff, and then four of the more recent variety. Tipping the load in the field, I then push it about the place with the loader, so that it soon diminishes into smaller, more manageable portions. I did this for each of the 16 loads. I left maybe two loads of the oldest stuff that has the consistency of moss peat in the yard — this I intend to use for the kitchen vegetable plot later. With all the dung I needed in the field, I returned with an eight-foot chain harrow and began driving over the now broken loads. I spent two hours at it. The result was very satisfactory. All that remains is to plough it in — weather permitting, of course!
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
This appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Thursday, February 09, 2012
