Gift That Keeps Giving
It is the simple things that make me happy. A rainbow during a fitful stormy day, a beautiful sunrise, a newborn calf standing for the first time, Butler the dog digging and catching a gopher, Jackson the other dog stopping his frantic ways long enough to lift his paw for a handshake, and even Mike mucking out the barn.
The barn mucking is a necessity as well as making me in a better mood. Walking into the mid-section of the barn where the hay and equipment is stored while, on either side of me, have each been been cleaned out, refilled with a scattering of lime and a layer of fresh wood chips gives me a much better outlook on the whole day. The tidy barn makes the cows look better to me and it makes me happy.
As for the piles of muck that is removed from the barn, that can make me happy also. Usually the muck (I had learned long ago that this term stands for mud + yuck) is loaded into the honey wagon ( another long known moniker for manure spreader) and hauled to the fields that are not in use by the cows this time of year. The muck is spread over the field and the natural slow decomposition of this natural fertilizer gives the field a boost of nitrogen needed for the grass in the spring. Pretty simple to get the muck out of the barn and into the field that needs the nutrients.
During this current mucking, the river is running very high, there is water across many of our paths to get to the fields and we are getting nearly 2 inches of rainfall each day from the current storm, not ideal weather to be mucking out a barn but things were getting desperate in there. Mike made the call to do the next best thing to a proper mucking and did something that made me just as happy. He switched from front end loader tongs to the bucket on the tractor to remove big amounts of the muck. He put large scoopfuls of the soupy-poopy right onto the area of the poorest soil in my garden. He apologized for not being able to spread it out or to place the piles further inside the garden boundary, but the tractor would have sunk if he pulled off of the driveway rock since the ground is saturated already.
To me, the piles look perfect where they are. The rain is already starting to break the bulk down and once the weather dries a bit I will be able to get a pitchfork to scatter and trim the piles into smaller wads. Since there are wood chips mixed in with the muck, I should be able to do the task easily without the pile congealing into a solid brick.
Once spring gets here, my rototiller will get the rest of the piles worked right into the soil. But don’t think that this takes Mike off the hook for a proper barn cleaning, it only bides him time so that he can do the job properly when the weather allows the task to completed in comfort. But for me, this is a very happy day.
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