Fenicia Medrano and company arrived at our farm yesterday.  Six people, eleven horses, a mule and a dog.
They spent the night here and departed midday today.

Our neighbor, Brett Beverage, came by this morning to let us know there were two horses in our alfalfa field. He tried to get a rope on one, but it was skittish and would have none of it.

Susan called the neighbors who own the horses, the Fritz family, and we decided they would be safe in our yard.  So, I walked out across the field to them.  They would go near the gate into the yard, but not through it.  Susan came out to help and we both encouraged them.  After another call to Jon Fritz, we decided they could be left in the field until his work day ended.  At that point, I was pretty far north in the field.  I had to walk back anyway, so I figured I would walk to the horses and encourage them a little further south.  They walked with me and into the yard!!!!  I quickly closed the gate and announced my success.

One of my favorite sayings is, "It's good to be smart, but it's better to be lucky."

Here are a few pictures of them in our yard.

One of the risers was bent during the fall or winter.  I called Precision Rain and was told that it needed to be dug up and replaced.  I started digging.

The man came to finish the digging and replace the riser and he decided that it just needed a new top welded on.  Another person came and did that.

Before the repair:

After the repair:

The ducks are enjoying spring-like weather in the yard.

The cows really enjoyed the compost piles.  I am digging out the flattened compost and re-piling it.

It has been warm here.  There's still some snow in the mountains, but I'll bet it will be gone and irrigation water will be scarce.

Gophers nested in my soil moisture sensors.  One seems open-circuited.  Of course, it's the deepest one.  I've dug about half-way and I will finish it tomorrow.

Susan has documented the work I've done to clear weeds and tree limbs from the field.

The western branch of the Swackhammer irrigation ditch runs down the east edge of our field.  Trees have grown up along the ditch and sometimes encroach on the field.  With the tree limbs there, it is hard to control the weeds.  The ground there is not productive.

Another spot on the Swackhammer ditch.  Note the pile of brush I've made from tree limbs I've cut off.

There was a knot of dead branches that I cut out and piled into a big pile.  Now I am cutting and breaking it to make smaller piles closer to the ditch and out of the way of farm operations.

There's the stump of the dead tree that gave me all those branches in the pile.

This is an area in the far northeast corner of the field.  The damson plum trees are doing well there.  Solomon's Seal is the ground cover between the trees.  It is a native, riparian wild flower.

 Ugh!  This is next year's project.  Note the tree limbs sticking out over the field and the teasel, burdock and thistles.

The foreground is full of weeds, but you can see the progress that has been made beyond it.

Finally, you can see the ten yards of new field we've gotten now that it has been weeded.

I just put an ad on Craigslist for our hay.

The "harvest moon" was pretty nice out there over our "outhouse" (actually, our composting toilet shed).