The Cattle on a Thousand Hills

 For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills.  Psalm 50:10 KJV

The LORD owns it all.  We don't have hills where we live.  We are in the flat, Cajun prairie.  There is not much slope to the land.  We do, however, have a manmade hill on our property.  A while back we had a load of topsoil delivered to the house.  It's always good to have topsoil to fill holes in the yard, to add to the garden and to build up low spots.

The load of topsoil came with a little something extra (lagniappe, you might say).  It came seeded with rye grass.  Tricia has been getting the momma goats out to come eat on the rye grass that's growing on the hill and today, she got Clarabelle out to feast on the rye grass.  Clarabelle was a happy old girl.  She has a mouthful of rye.

Clarabelle rushed to the hill and grabbed a big plug of grass with her tongue.  You'll notice something about Jersey cows below.  They have blackish-gray tongues!  Their tongues are coarse as sandpaper.  I guess that assists them in latching onto the grass and pulling into their mouth.

I happened by as Tricia was grazing Clarabelle on the hill and she asked me to photograph Clarabelle.  

Many trade magazines show the cows standing on a hill, and Tricia wanted to imitate that pose.

Clarabelle wasn't too terribly interested in posing.  She was more interested in skillfully mowing down the remainder of the rye grass.

The Hills Are Alive...

Once I got all the tomatoes, peppers, corn and beans planted, I started phase II.  That consisted of straightneck and crookneck yellow squash and zucchini.  Those seedlings were started in hills in the garden as soon as they put their first true leaves on.  Then I planted some other items that we transplanted.  I'll show you those today.  In the seed trays on the back patio, I started two varieties of cucumbers - Suyo Long Cucumbers and Boston pickling cucumbers.

What we'll focus on today are some of the vegetables in the photo below that we'll be transplanting:

• Butternut Squash
• Spaghetti Squash
• Green-striped Cushaw Squash
• Tahitian Melon Squash
• Georgia Candied Roaster Squash
• Moon and Stars Watermelon  

These plants were all started from seeds and the germination was fantastic - even the Moon & Stars Watermelon seeds which were saved from back in 2012 all popped up.

Spaghetti Squash

To give these seedlings a good head start, I dug holes and lined them with some biochar we made.  The photo below shows a big tub that we made last year.  It consists of homemade charcoal mixed with cow manure, hay and shredded paper.  This was put into a tumbler and tumbled over a year.  The bacteria in the cow manure inoculated all the microscopic holes in the charcoal.  Now all this will go into the soil and will give the soil fertility to assist in growing healthy vegetables.   

Here is a hill of spaghetti squash.  It was time that they get put in the ground.  The leaves were just starting to turn a bit yellow.  It will green up in no time now that the roots are in the soil.

In the very back of the garden I have a huge pile of wood chips that we use in our Back to Eden Gardening method.  We had 24 truck loads in all delivered to the house - for free!  I kept hauling it to the garden by wagon-load and stacking it high.  We compost directly into the wood chips.  There is one downside.  The hill has taken away some space that was formerly planted.

But then again, as I thought about it, I can still grow veggies on the hill.  I planted all of the squash and melons around the perimeter of the hill.  As all of the squash and melons listed in the bullet points in the second paragraph above begin to grow, they'll vine over the hill.  The brown hill of wood chips will be transformed into a productive green hill of squash and melons. That's a good use of square footage in the garden that might otherwise been fallow.