Rolling Dog Farm Blog

This is another field we've been working on this summer. As I mentioned in a previous post about the other field we cleared, this was also part of the same, once-productive farm. This used to be exceptional hayground about 40 years ago. We know that because the fellow who picks up our trash said his grandfather once owned this land, and he worked with his grandfather to hay it when he was a teenager. He said they would get 10,000 bales from these various fields we've been restoring.

That hay production included a 10-acre pasture adjacent to this cleared one; we grazed it this year and hope to try haying it next year, though at the moment it's pretty weedy. We're counting on grazing pressure to help bring down the weed burden.

This next shot is looking inside another 4-acre "field" next to the cleared land; we took this photo at the tree line at the top of the photo above. This is what the cleared field looked like a couple of months ago:

That was once high-quality, highly productive hay ground. <Sigh.> We might tackle that next year, or just turn the goats out into it. It may not be hay land, but it sure is perfect goat habitat!

This is what happens in this climate when people let cultivated land go … it naturally reverts to forest. The only way to prevent it is to mow it or graze it. It's really a shame to see this happen, because it took such back-breaking effort and labor to create those wonderful hayfields originally, back in colonial days, and after two hundred plus years of farming, people just abandoned them in the last half of the 1900s. Now we're expending a lot of effort and labor to restore them to their original purpose, though thanks to machinery it's not the back-breaking burden it was back then.

Here's another view of the same cleared field, looking up towards where we took the first photo:

The only benefit to this project was getting a year or two's worth of firewood from it. If you click on the photo for a larger image, you should be able to see two large piles of logs up next to the treeline at the top of the photo.

I seeded this field with grass seed a week ago. Two days later, a torrential downpour washed most of the seeds away. I seeded it again on Saturday, and yesterday "rolled" the seeds into the ground with our land roller. We have several dry days ahead. Now what we need is a nice, soft, gentle rain. 

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I took these photos on Friday evening of Wilbur checking out the long row of dog dishes drying on the back deck. The barely one-year old dishwasher quit working on Thursday — about a week after the warranty expired, of course! — and so we're back to washing them all by hand. This is the second dishwasher we've had in two years — both new, both died just after warranty expiration. We've had similar issues with a variety of appliances in recent years — stoves, washing machines, dryers, you name it. I don't mean to sound like a crank, but it sure seems they don't make them like they used to. Generally the failures are related to their electronic controls — as was the case with both dishwashers. Our appliance store, Top Furniture in Gorham, New Hampshire, promptly sent their repair tech out on Friday. He hopes to have the parts as early as Monday. 

In the meantime, that's a lot of dishes to wash … and the ones you see in the photo don't include all the small dishes for the little dogs like Wilbur. Alayne had already done those and taken them down to the dog room to dry on a table.

Meanwhile, Wilbur kept looking:

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I thought you'd enjoy seeing some photos of the farm taken by someone else — in this case, Judy H., who was here for our visitor day earlier this month. Judy took a lot of very interesting shots during her visit, posted them on her Flickr page, and kindly gave us permission to share them with you. She has two sets of photos — one of the dogs, and another of the horses. The photo above is of me with Bugsy, who was being a total lovebug. 

Here is the link to the dog photos … Judy posted some text from our website at the top, but scroll down the page to get to the photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/38203292@N05/7735763022/in/photostream

And here is the link to the horse photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/38203292@N05/7732143372/in/photostream/

It's always fun to see how our animals look from another person's perspective!

Thanks, Judy!

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Dexter hasn't really been himself since we lost our beloved Goldie a couple of months ago. He loved Goldie — she was really his best pal, and the dog he snuggled with most of the time (though sometimes not to his liking!). He seemed to spend the first few weeks looking for her, and was just out of sorts.

But then Alayne noticed the other evening that Dexter had cozied up to blind Madison, and was propping his head up on her as he napped:

Madison's not really a "best pal" in the way Goldie was, but it was still heartening to see him finding some comfort in resting with — and on — another of our old girls.

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You may not want to read this if you're living in a part of the country that is suffering from drought and intense heat, because this post is about rain. And plenty of it. 

I took the photo a few days ago, after the dog dish had collected the previous night's rainfall — two inches. We feed blind Jake his dinner outside in his yard because he often needs to, um, "use the facilities" right after eating. After bringing him in for the night, I forgot to pick up his dish until the following morning. I was no longer surprised to see how much rain we got all at once — these heavy downpours seem to be more and more common. You can see in the photo that the raindrops hit the ground so hard they splattered dirt off the ground and into the dish.

Of course, it's not just us, or our imagination. Extreme precipitation events have become much more common in the past 50 years. And a new study just released today, When It Rains, It Pours: Global Warming and The Increase in Extreme Precipitation from 1948-2011, shows that New England is well ahead of the rest of the country in the frequency of extreme precipitation events, up 85% between 1948 and 2011. The next highest region is the Middle Atlantic states at 55%. And in New England, it's New Hampshire that has seen the most frequent extreme events — up a whopping 115%. Next highest is Rhode Island at 90%. (The summary is here and the full study, including state and regional tables, is here.)

Another study, Trends in Extreme Precipitation Events for the Northeastern United States 1948-2007, was published by the University of New Hampshire in 2010 and also showed a significant increase in these events. That study, available here, said that historically, a two-inch rainfall could be expected to occur about two times each year in the Northeast. (Bear in mind that there are different ways to define "extreme precipitation" and degrees of "extreme," such as two-inch, four-inch and six-inch precipitation events.) I haven't counted how many two-inch events we've had already this year, but we are way over two!

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here's a related graphic from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):

(Click on the graphic for a larger version.)

The methodology and timeframe behind that chart may be different from the other studies, but the results are still pretty dramatic.

The challenge for us is learning how to grow crops on naturally damp soil — the farm is dotted with springs, and both of our wells are spring-fed — when rain is increasingly coming down in torrents. Indeed, the morning after the storm that left 2 inches of rain in Jake's dish, we had another torrential downpour. I wish I had left a dish out to capture that rainfall, but it was so heavy I'd be surprised if it hadn't been close to 2 inches itself.

It's not just extreme precipitation that we will be learning to cope with as a result of climate change, of course, but more extreme weather events in general, as a recent study in the Journal of the American Meteorological Society explained.

The best "visual" on extreme weather is this next chart from Munich Re, the giant insurance company that is a global re-insurer (i.e., they insure other insurance companies, like State Farm, for major losses). Because much of their business is based on assessing risk from major weather events, Munich Re has collected this kind of data for years:

(Click on the graphic for a larger version.)

You can see the trend line is going only one way — up. This matters to Munich Re, and by extension to their insurance company customers, because their rates for reinsurance are driven by the likelihood of these risks occurring.

Now, I'd rather have to deal with extreme precipitation events than extreme drought and heat. Alayne's father is in Wichita, Kansas, where it is forecast to hit 110° today and tomorrow, cooling off to 109° on Thursday, and back up to 111° on Friday. I can't imagine. What's a two-inch rainfall compared to that?

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