This is a little rose bush that my friend Becky gave me. They were re-landscaping around their house and didn't want it, so she dug it up and gave it to me. Pretty impressive that it has survived the move.

Wooly Bully

You never know what you're going to get when you step out the door in the morning. I suppose that's true of most professions, farming being no exception. Today it was Bully, who's been sequestered in his own space since about 4 weeks after the first calf arrived. I guess he just couldn't take the isolation any longer. When Matt went out to feed him this morning, Bully was looking at him - quite smugly - from the cow side of the fence. From the looks of that fence - 4 feet of woven wire and 2 strands of barbed wire now crumpled - he went over the top of it.

So I got the call..."Kel, can you come out and help me for a minute?". I have to tell you, I've lately come to dread that call. You see, I was raised on a hog farm. Dad did have a small cow/calf herd, but that wasn't something I was ever involved in. (Except for the time a cow got struck by lightning and my brother and I got to bottle-feed her calf.) I know about working pigs. But cattle don't work the same as pigs. It's a whole 'nuther psychology.

For example, after our big flood this spring Matt was trying to fence the cattle off the damaged part of the pasture. I was weeding in the garden that day and watched him for awhile, trying to herd those cows across the creek and away from the giant mudhole. After running them in circles a couple of times I finally (begrudgingly) asked, "Do you need some help?".

So I grabbed a stick, put on my mud shoes, and headed out. His objective was to drive them across the creek and up into the corral. He could shut them in there, giving him time to fence off the worst parts of the main pasture.

So we pushed them towards the creek. Turns out we could get them up next to the creek, but getting them to actually dip a hoof in the water was not happening. Cows get scared of strange things (but aren't nearly as bad as horses!). But finally the wild cow, who has somehow taken over Queen-of-the-Herd position from Mrs. Hamilton, trotted across and the others followed. Now to get them into the corral.

Cows may be easily frightened, but they're not stupid. They went across the creek all right...and then circled around us and crossed back again downstream. Repeat that scene a couple of times. I wonder what the neighbors were saying? Here's the two of us waving arms and sticks, being encircled by our own bovine.

The whole operation broke down when I suggested to Matt that he get a couple pails of corn and put them in the feedbunk inside the corral. I won't repeat verbatim his reply to me, but what it boiled down to is that I know nothing about cattle and I'm quite useless to him and this part of his operation. I simply kept my mouth shut and walked off the job. A couple of hours later what do you know? The cows were in...with the help of a couple pails of corn, Matt admitted.

So today there's Bully, ensconced in his harem. Unfortunately he can't stay, and fortunately there are no cows in heat right now. Matt managed to get Bully back to his side of the fence by allowing a couple of cows to go with him, and we're going to "gate-cut" the two cows back over to their own side. A-ha! Here's where my pig farm experience finally comes in handy. Gate-cutting pigs is something I helped Dad with when sorting them for market, though I'm thinking now how pigs are much smaller than cows.

So I'm stationed at the gate that divides Bully's space from the cows' and my instructions go something like this - open the gate so that the cows see the opening and run out, then shut the gate real fast right behind them. Don't let Bully follow them through. Uh-huh. Suddenly this metal gate seems like it's made of Lincoln Logs. So cow #1 runs out...no problem, Bully is hanging with the other honey. Matt chases cow #2 towards the gate, I open it so she can get out. But Bully follows and gets ahead of her just before they get to the gate. I quickly shut it and we start over. This time she stays about two feet ahead of him. She gets about 3/4 of the way through and I shove the gate closed - hitting her in the rump and causing Bully to stop short right on the other side of the gate from me.

Mission accomplished. But it's only 8:30...still plenty of time left in the day for adventure!

Chicken Butchering Day

Our first chicken-butchering day. I was so excited you'd think we were doing it ourselves. Instead a local Mennonite woman is doing them for us. Originally we were supposed to have them to the Hurst's farm at 8:00 a.m. But Esther called Friday and asked if we could be there at 6:00 a.m. The other farm they were going to do them at wasn't ready, so they were doing them at their place. She can't get the heads off herself so her husband was going to have to help her, and he has to leave for work at 8:00.

So we were up at 5:00 on Monday morning. It was still pretty dark, but by the time we were dressed and out to the pasture at 5:15 it had already given way to that light gray early morning light. It was cool, but damp and humid. I could tell it was going to develop into a hot, humid, sultry day.

As we drove the truck down to the red pasture gate we saw headlights coming down the road and wondered if it was Dad coming already. I got out to open the gate for Matt to drive through, and sure enough Dad pulled up just then.

Dad had come up with the idea the day before to put up a cattle panel from the chickenhouse to the fence. Then we could drive them around the house to the trailer and they'd be trapped against the panel. So that's what we did - it worked great, we had them loaded in less than 20 minutes. But I don't think that would have been the case had it been only Matt and I. I held the other gate behind the chickens, and also held up the poultry netting to keep them from going over it. Dad and Matt caught them 2 at a time and put them into the trailer.

Dad went back to the house to stay with the kids, who were still in bed. Matt and I took off, stopped at Kwik Star for coffee, and headed for New Haven. We pulled into the Hurst's at 6:00 on the dot. Jim showed us where to drop the trailer, and we stood around and chatted a bit. He told us a little about their process, we talked about the recent flooding, admired their new puppies. They have a chicken picker that will pluck 10 chickens at once in about 2 minutes. Amazing! Even more amazing is that they're doing 3,000 chickens just in the month of June. Jim didn't act too excited about butchering chickens, but said that Esther really likes it so they do. That was kind of sweet.

I would have liked to stay and watch, but we had to get back and get the kids up and let Dad get to work. So we went home, the girls fed their bottle calves and got cleaned up. I typed and printed up the sales slips and recipes for our chicken customers. We were back out to the Hursts at 8:30.

Esther wasn't quite done bagging, so I stood and chatted with her. She's a very likeable person and I found we had a lot in common. We both enjoy math (and calculators). We both would have liked to live 150 years ago when farms weren't so big as they are today, just a few animals and enough land to keep it self-sufficient. We both like gardening.

2 of her 6 children were helping her now. The 10-year-old daughter was pulling the birds out of the tank and setting them on the table. Then the 8-year-old son was putting the giblets into them. There was also a 3-year-old son playing around there, and later the 13-year-old daughter came out. It kind of tickled me when Esther asked her if she had the towels hung out yet, and she said no. Esther asked her if she was going to get them hung out, and she said no again. You imagine that their children are more old-fashioned and obedient. Glad to see that, in some ways, they're just like mine.

We loaded the chickens into a stock tank we had lined with a tarp in the back of the pickup. Dropped the girls off at Bible school on our way back through town, then took the birds home and got them into the freezer right away. Then we bagged up the ones that were going to the Utilities and Matt took them in. On his way in Al saw him and said, "Hey, those look pretty good, I'll take 5." So our own share is now down to 8. I wanted to keep 15 to 20, but if it helps us sell more chickens out of the next batch I'll sacrifice.

Our neighbor wanted his chickens live, so we left 5 in the pen when we loaded in the morning. He was out there catching them when we got back, so Matt went out to help him. Oops! I shorted him a chicken - they wanted 6. So later in the morning I took one of the bagged ones down to them. I walked in the door and he said, "Are these chickens or turkeys?" His wife said she saw how big they were and thought they'd be fatty, but they weren't. So that was a relief - when we originally told them we were butchering at 8 1/2 weeks they didn't think they'd be big enough. Glad to have proved them wrong :)

Haven't sat down and crunched any numbers yet, though I'm certain we lost money on them. But if we sell enough (eventually) to pay for the building and equipment that will be good enough. I'm thinking that if we're going to keep doing this we may be best off getting a certified scale so we can sell them (and charge for them) by the pound. I'll have to crunch those numbers, too.

Having the day off to do farm stuff just renewed my drive to work towards that kind of life for ourselves full time.

Geese

About 10:00 this morning I happened to glance out the kitchen window. Wow! There was a flock of over 40 Canadian geese hanging out along our creek. I quick grabbed the camera, went out and started snapping pictures. All of the geese, combined with the picture-perfect weather we've got today...what a beautiful sight.

R.I.P., Sassy

Today started off a little rough - Matt ran over Sassy, one of our 2 housecats. She had spent the night outside and was apparently under his truck when he drove out this morning. She wasn't killed immediately, but I knew it was bad when she wasn't using her back end at all and she was panting and drooling. Still I had Matt put her in the cat carrier so I could take her to the vet and see if the injuries were something she could recover from, or if she should be put to sleep and out of misery. But the vet office doesn't open until 8:00 and, fortunately I think, she died before that - within a half hour of getting hurt.

Madeline was upset, but not for too long. She wants to bury her by their clubhouse and put up a marker that says, "Here lays Sassy, dead.". Yes, I stifled my laughter.

So that just leaves Ed as our only housecat again, and I told the girls right away that it's going to stay that way. I'm tired of having a catpan to clean, and they have a nice bunch of new kittens in the barn. Ed will be 12 this summer and we're always wondering how long he'll go on. When we had him declawed he was about 5 years old, and we got a call from the vet telling us that Ed has a heart murmur. This put him at a higher risk of complications from the declawing surgery, and did we want to go ahead with it? I asked how long they usually live with a heart murmur and the vet said 10 years. Well I couldn't live with him tearing up our upholstery for 5 more years so we went ahead with it. Here he is, 7 years later, fat and lazy and loveable as ever.

The bottle calves are looking much better. They're venturing out of the shed and spending more and more time laying in the grass outside. That's exactly what they need - fresh air and sunshine, I think, are big contributors to animal health (including people).

Our broilers go to be butchered on Monday. Esther just called and asked if we could have them there at 6 a.m. instead of 8 a.m. I didn't quite follow the whole story, but something about the farm they were going to do them at isn't ready so they're doing them at their own farm. Her husband has to leave for work at 8, and she can't get the heads off, so they have to do them before he leaves for work. I really wanted to go and watch, but maybe Matt's going to have to take them by himself. I don't want to drag all 3 kids out of bed at 5:30 a.m.

I'm getting a little nervous, this being our first batch, that they're going to be big enough. They certainly look fat, and they feel heavy, but I'd like to actually weigh one and see. Unfortunately we don't have a scale. I want them to dress out on average at 4 pounds and range from 3.5 - 4.5 pounds. We're charging $8 per bird, which includes the butchering and bagging, but Matt says if they're light we'll just charge less for them. I just can't wait to have chicken for supper Monday night!

Seems I have a couple of snobs amongst my pullets. When I went out to put the flock to bed a couple of nights ago I noticed I was missing 1 white pullet and 1 black one. I figured "something" had got them - a hawk, maybe - but Matt said maybe they just found somewhere else to sleep. So I went yesterday after lunch and they all happened to be hanging around the cattle shed. Sure enough, I counted all 5 white ones. (I didn't bother to count the black ones, there's too many of them to count when they're spread all over the place.) And I noticed a black and a white one hanging out by themselves around the horse pen. Last night when I put them to bed, only 4 white ones. So I've got 1 white and 1 black that are apparently too good to sleep with the rest of them - or another possibility may be that they're at the bottom of the pecking order and not being allowed to sleep with the others. Haven't figured out where they do sleep yet.

The garden-planting is going so slow this year because of all the rain. And of course we got a late start because of having to plow up a new garden bed out of our lawn. We got peas (sugar snap, snow, and garden) in on Mother's Day weekend, as well as rhubarb and asparagus. The peas look great, the rhubarb and asparagus haven't come up. We received them quite a long time before we could actually plant them, and I'm thinking it was too long and they're not going to make it. Same with the berry bushes - none of them are green at all yet.

The following weekend Matt planted onions (yellow and red) and garlic (2 kinds). Over the next week he got in beans (bush and pole), potatoes (red, blue, gold, and kennebec) and peanuts.

Last Monday (May 31st, Memorial Day) I transplanted 150 tomato plants. I know, thats-a-lotta plants. And I have probably 100 more to get in.

So yesterday after work we decided we must get the rest of the seed in, because it was only going to be practical to till it with Dick's tiller one more time. Unfortunately Matt forgot where he had planted the peanuts and tilled them up. So we'll have to try those again next year. We got in carrots (Danvers half-longs), radishes (a mix), spinach (tyree), pak choi, mesclun mix, cucumbers (Ms. Pickler and Straight 8), butternut squash, acorn squash, pumpkins, and sunflowers (2 kinds). I brought the rest of my seed trays out of the basement and watered them good. Need to harden them off and get them in this weekend. Problem is we're running out of room! I've got to find a place for the other transplants - peppers, muskmelon, watermelon, basil and oregano, and cabbage.

Now they're calling for rain - again - starting after midnight tonight and continuing through the night Saturday. Which means it will probably be too wet to plant on Sunday. Wish I had more vacation time built up - I should take the afternoon off and try to get the rest of the transplants in.

As I'm planning for my market garden for next year I'm overwhelmed by how much planning there really is and, after all that planning, how much luck it really takes.

Weather for today is 78 and sunny...beautiful. And I'm stuck at my dayjob. *SIGH* Better get to it.