Glad we have horses!
Nana cant ride anymore guess I am just gonna have to trade a cow for a horse drawn wagon!
With the price of beef maybe i can get more than just a wagon!

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZTdm...

I've been trying to find a donkey or burro or mule for about a year now... Used to be, you'd find folks giving them away, but not now...

Donkeys are selling for $1k - $4k now, Pffft! Folks must be thinking of them as "alternative transportation."

I really need a little "manure factory" for my Victory Garden, LOL.

Meanwhile, until that happens, I'll be visiting my neighbor down the road to shovel out their barn for composting & pick meadow muffins out of their pastures for immediate use.

Goat berries tend to scatter out; chicken takes a while to build up; pig manure has to be composted for over a year...

A llama as a livestock guardian may be the best choice; llamas always put their poop in the same place each day, usually next to a gate. It doesn't burn plants, so that may be an option...

Horses and Donkeys do the same, not all the time but generally they have certain places in the field they go to poop cause they dont want to eat the grass there.

All the horses I've ever raised were of the club that preferred to spread it far & wide, without regard... But I guess the bigger space they have, the less worried they get about contaminating it.

Most folks I know with horses have a set of old bedsprings that they hitch to the pickup & drive the pasture with to scatter it. Once scattered, the horses aren't bothered by it...

I'm eaten up with shit covet now every time I pass a place with visible horse piles, LOL.

WAY too focused on excrement these days.

https://www.youtube.com/wa...

Bingo!

This is why a lot of homesteaders don't make it... They buy a place with green everywhere & then discover it was all fertilizer... and don't know how to restore the soil.

If you don't have an active & thriving variety of microbial buddies in there, your soil is in trouble.

I don't fertilize; I feed my "microherd."

Yep! And the reason nature always fills any place up with the local species to maximum capacity that species can be supported. Delete the buffalo in the US and the west turned to desert dramatically. I know the Indians groomed the herds...but the same happened here.

Bingo!

And some areas were never intended for cultivation, like the Texas Panhandle & parts of the Oklahoma Panhandle...

Six inches of topsoil, then caliche in so many areas...

It can grow the most beautiful & nutritious prairie grasses imaginable, but it sucks as farmland...

Hence, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. So much of Texas & Oklahoma ended up in New York City.

I live 18 miles from Utah in Mesa County Colorado. The grass everyone wants here in their yards hates the same salty tan caliche totally absent of organic material soil here. But the hard ass, tough as nails, when cut the "straw" left stabs your feet bloody grass loves it! Man doesn't farm where farming makes sense...always trying to make purses out of sow's ears! never seen so much irrigation dedicated to freakin "lawns" in my life as here!

You have just illustrated one of my pet peeves - lawns!

In fact, because fence timbers are ridiculously priced, we're not fencing our selected "garden spot."

Instead, I'm busily tearing out the grass of our lawn - cutting up that turf - and putting veggies & fruit bushes in the spaces North & South of the house...

Rhubarb, asparagus, cardoon, artichokes, gogi berries, red raspberries, gooseberries, Jerusalem artichokes will give us food for years... Permaculture.

Then there's squash, peppers, garlic, salsify, lettuces & Swiss Chard, mint, lemon balm & other herbs...

We're picking up a couple of cattle panels this weekend for the scarlet runner beans, asparagus beans, Armenian cucumber & picklers.

Once those are in, I can focus on tearing up more turf for the watermelon (Black Diamond & Rattlesnake heirlooms) and winter squashes.

We'll feed ourselves & the pigs on these, then sell the surplus at the Farmer's Market alongside my soap, LOL.

Funny side note...I cut local lawns part time for a living! I HATE LAWNS! No one asks when they build a house if you want an expensive, ridiculous to maintain, impossible to just let grow free headache like a lawn they just include it in the build cause "everyone else has one"! Blah! In the desert, your yard should look like the desert!