Pictures from our foggy morning walk

Smoky Canyon

grazing

'Tude, on the watch for something

cobwebs on the leaves

cow parade

I checked on the kittens after our walk.  They try to nibble cat food from my hand now.

Dumb animals?

My Uncle Leo (is it OK to have a favorite uncle?) used to say, "There are dumb people, but there are NO dumb animals."  
Well, I've always considered cows to be not-so-bright.  That's in spite of the fact that every mother cow I've owned who had a baby in trouble came to the house to get me, bawling her head off.  
It's true.  They know that when the chips are down, I will help them.  
But you can't teach a cow tricks.  You can't ride most cows like you would a horse.  You can't get her to fetch a stick or roll over.  The most you can do with a cow is try to tame her down enough so that you can milk her without getting kicked.  And if you're lucky, maybe she'll let you pet her.
So Bonnie and her calf were gone for over a month, and both of them were happy to see their best friends again.  I have to tell you, the reunion was heartwarming.  I really did get a lump in my throat watching them.  
I decided to put Bonnie's calf, Max, in the stall tonight so I could get some milk out of Bonnie in the morning.  I opened the stall door and drove him in.  He remembered the routine after being away for about five weeks.  No problem.  
Later on I looked out and saw this:

Max is in prison, and his BFF is not going to leave.  The two grown cows (one of whom is Max's mom) went out to graze, but Jody is going to wait right there until her buddy is released.
Uncle Leo was right.  There are dumb people, but there are no dumb animals.  

Bonnie and Babe

This picture shows the contrast in cattle breed sizes.  Babe weighs at least twice as much as Bonnie.  She also eats twice as much.  
I have my eye on a Craigslist ad that has some Jersey cows, of various ages and stages of pregnancy, for sale.  I surely wouldn't mind having another beef-dairy cross calf to sell every year; it seems lots of people are interested in buying grass-fed (and milk-fed) young beef.  
We'll see what develops.  
I may simply lose interest and forget about it.  That's what happened with the foreclosed-upon property next door that has the desirable pole barn:  The more I thought about it, the more it sounded like a lot of work for a couple of retired people who would rather play than work.  The only way we'd end up with it now is if somebody dropped it right in our laps, and I don't think that's going to happen.  


I'm hooking this up with Nancy and Lisa for Rural Thursday Blog Hop. 
   

The Herd

As you can see, the cows are now a herd.  Babe is indeed the boss.  She is also eating me out of house and home... or I suppose I should say barn and pasture.  The larger the animal, the more calories they need to consume.  Hopefully we have plenty of hay to get these beggars through the winter.  
There is a problem we often have with new animals on the place:  They have to learn how to drink from our in-ground waterers.  This was no problem with Babe, though, because Cliff's brother has the same type of waterers; it's what she was already used to.

Her first day here she knew exactly what was behind that black rubber curtain.

She had no trouble at all pushing it back with her nose to get a drink.  


Babe only has one other thing to learn, and it really isn't essential:  The pasture behind the house has a lot of alfalfa in it, so we don't want the horses going in there due to the risk of founder.  It's surrounded by electric fence, which Babe is familiar with.  We want the cows to be able to graze there, so Cliff has fashioned a walk-through entry that's big enough for the cows but not tall enough for horses.  Clyde, Bonnie's calf last year, never entered that pasture; he was always afraid to go through the opening, so he'd graze with the horses while his mom grazed the good stuff; it certainly didn't hurt him, because he is delicious.  We'll wait and see whether Babe ever goes in with the other cows.

So why another cow?

I had originally intended to watch for another Jersey, since they're my favorite breed.  And who knows how long Bonnie will last?  We aren't positive, but we think she was in heat last weekend.  Before it's time for her to cycle again, we'll take her to visit Cliff's brother's bull and hope for the best.  Poor thing, one of her quarters no longer gives milk and another is compromised; she seems to have a displaced hip, so she walks with a peculiar gait.  Not that this destroys her quality of life... shake a feed can at her and she can run at the speed of light to get to it.  That cow lives to eat!  
We went to the livestock auction a few days ago and were astounded at the prices beef cattle are bringing.  High-grade 600-pound calves are bringing as much as $900 each, so I thought to myself, "We have grass and hay to spare, and it's just going to waste.  We could have another cow on the place making us money."  
I finally realized that since I already have one Jersey cow and a Jersey heifer that will probably be having a calf in eighteen months, I'd be wiser to consider a beef cow that wouldn't have to be milked at all.    
We no longer have a pickup or trailer with which to transport cattle, so when Phil said he'd let me buy one of his cows (and he'd deliver it), we jumped right on that deal.  Lindie asked in a comment if the cow we're buying had been pregnancy checked; no, she isn't far enough along to check.  But Cliff's brother would make it good with us one way or another.  After all, he's the one who lets us use his bull for Bonnie, free of charge.  He's a good brother.
So we'll get Babe, the new cow, accustomed to the place, turn her loose, and wait until she has a calf and raises it  up to weaning size, then sell the calf.  Free money, right?  
Not quite.  I don't count the cost of mowing and baling hay, because Cliff mows this place like a park anyhow.  Just remember, though, that the calf Babe has in September won't be ready to sell until June or July of the next year, so it'll be eighteen months before we see a return on our investment.  And if she has a heifer calf, we might keep it.  On the other hand, we could probably take her to the sale barn when she's about ready to calve next September and make money on her.  Not that we plan to do that, because then we'd be looking for another cow to buy, wouldn't we?  
There's always the risk of a cow dying.  We once had a pretty weaned Holstein heifer that drowned in a shallow pond, in less than two feet of water:  The pond was iced over, the heifer walked out on the ice a short distance, the ice broke, and she couldn't make her way out of the ice-covered pond; she thrashed and struggled until she dropped from exhaustion, and was already dead when we discovered her there.  Years ago a lovely registered Jersey heifer was frolicking through the pasture, we assume, and ran right into a barbed wire fence, which wrapped around her neck in a hideous way.  She was alive when we found her, but her neck was broken.  Any time you are dealing with livestock, there's a risk.   

Even though it will likely be a year-and-a-half before Jody will have a calf and start giving milk, I'm getting her used to the feel of the stanchion now.  Bonnie hates it when I let another cow in the barn because she knows they are likely getting fed there; she bellows her displeasure until Jody is back with the herd.

We bought a cow today

Having seen how much calves are bringing, and because we have plenty of pasture and hay, and because it's raining money around here lately... I made the decision that we should buy a cow.  Not a milk cow this time, though.  I suggested to Cliff that we should perhaps go to a few auctions and look for a bargain.  
Of course, that's a little "iffy".  You don't know where the animals come from or what problems they might have.  
So Cliff told his brother we might be looking for a cow, and he asked what sort of cow.  Cliff relayed the question, and I said, "Something that's already bred."  
Phil called back later and said he had a couple we could pick from.  

The one in front kept looking at me as though saying, "Take me home, please."  She's a heifer (in other words, has never had a calf), and was bred in December, so she would calve in September.  

This one has had a calf, and would have had a second one by now, but Phil got rid of the bull too soon.  She also was bred in December.  She spent a few months on our property when she was being weaned, so she'd be familiar with our place if she has a good memory.  Notice the young one in the background still looking at me as if saying, "Take me home with you!"  

This one... still staring at me....

Or the older one.  


Well, we chose the older one.  She's bigger, she's proved herself as a mother, and she's visited here before.   Meet Babe.  She'll be coming home next Monday.  

That's her on the left, back when she visited our place.

Perfect days

We are indeed having a run of perfect days.  After having highs of over 100 for so long, and an almost-month-long drought, we now have snuggling weather at night and daytime highs in the seventies.  
The hard cheese I'm making is in the cheese-press.  Who knows what it will turn out to be?  Last time I followed the instructions for hard cheese, I ended up with feta cheese.  Later I looked at the feta cheese recipe and it was nothing like what I had done, so I guess the cheese fairy switched it somewhere along the line.  I really wish I could repeat that episode, because we have been loving the crumbly feta-type cheese in salads.  

How do you like my cheese press?  I'm using a wine bottle (from a local winery) full of water for the weight.  Tonight the cheese comes out of the press, gets wrapped in cloth, and will be stowed away in the refrigerator.  Cliff made the press for me out of a piece of PVC pipe.  
I'm pretty sure my experiment with making cottage cheese in the crock pot is a failure.  Oh, I have some curds to work with, but they are funny-colored and rather chewy.  Back to the drawing board.  
I went out in the pasture a while ago to see what the cows are doing with their time.

On the way back there, I noticed that some coyote, fox, or other varmint had feasted on bird recently.  
Bonnie was off grazing by herself.

The kids were in a nice, brushy place where it was cool.  Jody has a thing in her nose to discourage her from trying to nurse Bonnie.  

It might look uncomfortable, but it doesn't slow down her grazing at all.  
Also, while I was in the pasture I took a couple of shots of Adam's horses for possible future header photos.  Bonnie has been featured there so long, she is liable to think she's a movie star or something.

critters

I turned Jody out with Bonnie and Max yesterday for the whole day.  My only concern was that she might nurse Bonnie, although at this point that wouldn't hurt my feelings much!  Oh yes, it would worry me, because she's old enough that she might take it all and Max wouldn't get his share.  This morning I actually saw her reach for a teat, and Bonnie kicked her hard.  Some calves learn a trick that fools the cow, though: They learn to wait until the cow's own baby is nursing, then sneak up and nurse from the back.  We used to live next door to a fully-grown bull who did this all the time, nursing cows that were two-thirds his size.  





Max is deliriously happy to have another youngster around; this is how he greets Jody when they first get together, and it happens several more times during the day.  

Here's the whole herd this morning.  Even Sassy is in the background.  Adam took Tude away for the weekend, so Sassy is the only horse on the place.  She doesn't even act like she misses Tude at all.  
"That's just like a woman," says Cliff.

Max is losing something very valuable to himself, but he doesn't know it, so it's OK.  His scrotum is about to drop off.  We use specially-made rubber bands to castrate bull calves.  Before they're even able to get up and walk around, Cliff uses an elastrator to stretch the rubber band and put it above the testicles; eventually the whole package dries up and falls off harmlessly. 

Oh, guess who's back?

The calico runt!  Notice she is less than half the size of her sister.  At least I assume they are sisters, they both nursed the mother cat.  And I've seen no other cats around.  

She has an appetite, I'll say that for her.   
I probably should put another disclaimer here about the milk:  I know veteranarians don't like cats to have milk.  But I have lots of milk and these cats were starving until I started feeding them.  They are barn cats, and when I have milk, they are getting it.  I have cat food in case a day ever comes when I don't have to milk the cow.  (Dear God, let that day come!)

Like my new header picture?

I got tired of looking at the picture of a very pregnant Bonnie.  After all, she has that big old baby who is two weeks old today.  Max has learned a lot in his short life.  He and his mother seem to avoid the side of the ditch where he fell in over a week ago, so they've both learned something on that score.  Max already knows what happens when he touches an electric fence, so he stays on the proper side of them.  He does hang out with Jody a lot, as closely as he dares with an electric fence between them.  

Max is taking more milk all the time.  Originally I was bringing in two gallons of milk every morning; it's now down to one gallon, and I figure within another week I won't have to milk at all unless we need some milk.  That means we won't be so tied down at home and can go places and do things.  
Our friends did not make it here yesterday evening.  I talked to Celeste on the phone before bedtime, and she said between the breakdown with her bike and the extreme heat (99 degrees), she couldn't go on any further, so they camped.  I expect to see them some time today.  

I'm a cattle baroness.

Jody, on the left, is almost four months old.  She's been weaned awhile and is eating lots of grain.  The halter is on her because I am teaching her to lead.  Actually, she seems to have been born knowing how to lead.  Most calves, when you start trying to get them to follow you, will balk and refuse to move; some will even "sull up" as Cliff calls it, and fall on the ground with their eyes rolled back in their heads looking dead as a doornail.  (Strange expression, that.)
But Jody only put up a struggle the first time I had a rope on her; since then, she has followed me anywhere I lead her.  She does think it's fun to butt me, but I smack her with the end of the rope when she does that; she'll learn.  Once the fly season is over, we'll have the vet out to remove her horns, vaccinate her for whatever he thinks is wise, and remove an extra teat.  Yes, she has five.  It likely wouldn't produce anything, but I want it gone.  
I bought Jody because Bonnie, the cow in the background, refuses to give me a heifer calf.  
Bonnie was perfect when we bought her, but at this point she is battle-scarred:  Last year she got mastitis in two quarters, and one of those quarters quit producing entirely.  This year the other quarter with mastitis is, for now, giving good milk.  But once a cow has had mastitis in a quarter, you can bet it will show up again at some point.  Bonnie also has a displaced hip, which causes her to limp somewhat.  This problem was caused either by giving birth to those gigantic calves she always has, or else by one of those huge bulls she has to support when she's being bred.  Anyhow, she's had this slight limp for at least two years.  Cliff hadn't noticed it until I called his attention to it this year.   
Because so many things can go wrong with a milk cow, I wanted a backup, so I bought Jody.  She isn't pure Jersey, but she'll do in a pinch.  
Right now Bonnie is keeping us tied down at home because her calf still isn't able to take all her milk.  So I'm milking every morning.  Hope is in sight, though; today I got less milk than I have been bringing in (or pouring out).  Max's appetite must be increasing.

Spring things

I'm going to milk the cow this morning; at least, I'm going to try.  Since Clyde has been running at his mother's side for about three months, taking all her milk, she may not "give it down" for me.  We'll see what happens.  The weather turned so severe this winter, and Bonnie cut back on production (she only has two working quarters now, remember), that I decided it wasn't worth my time going out in the cold for the small amount of milk I was getting.  

Clyde doesn't seem to have lacked for food this winter.  
I happened to find some lovely alfalfa-brome hay on Craigslist yesterday for four dollars per bale, about fifteen miles from home.  We went and picked up twenty-five bales just for Bonnie.  Spring is on its way and people are clearing last year's hay out of their barns.  

I spied this crocus blooming all alone in the flower bed in front of the house.  I was looking for signs of life from daffodils, but this is all I found.  

The garlic I planted last fall is up and growing, in spite of freezing nights.  


Cliff and I are past the worst part of whatever we had that laid us low.  I've decided it's sleeping sickness, because every time either of us sat down in a chair, we'd fall asleep.  Even though other symptoms are gone (except the cough, of course), I'm still sleeping a LOT, and doing it very soundly, too.  At one point in the night I started waking up, very irritated that somebody wouldn't stop disturbing my sleep with their coughing.  Once I was completely awake, I realized I was the one coughing.    
I need to find some seed potatoes someplace; St. Patrick's Day approaches.  

Stuff about cows

A reader asked me to explain what a bobby calf is; I will, but I will lead up to it.  
Dairies exist to produce all the milk they can.  In order for a cow to give milk, she has to have a baby.  Ideally, when she calves, the calf will be left with her for three days, or at least fed colostrum from her or other cows that have just had calves.  After three days, the cow joins the milking string, never to see her baby again.  Two or three months following, she will be bred.  Six to eight weeks before the next calf is born, she will be "turned dry", or "dried up", as my parents would say.  When the dairyman stops milking, she stops producing and puts her energy toward growing the fetus.   
If the cow has a heifer (female) calf, the dairy will probably keep her and raise her as a replacement.  At the age of two or thereabouts, she will have her first calf and go to work producing milk, and the cycle goes on.  
Half of calves born are bull calves, although with artificial insemination, is it possible to buy sexed semen, which produces 80% heifer calves.  
Dairies have no use for the bull calves, so they are usually kept for three days and then sold.  In my part of the country, these little bulls are called "bobby" calves.  I've read that in other areas they are referred to as "bummer" calves.  
What good are they to anyone else, you ask?  Well, they make fine beef if you raise them past a year old.  I'm sure many of them end up as veal, too.  For a few years I had several milk cows and no use for all that milk (I do love to milk cows, it's a fact), so a nearby dairyman sold me all his Holstein and Brown Swiss bull calves.  I'd milk the cows, put the milk in calf nursing bottles, and feed all my babies.  It's possible to wean calves at six weeks, but I found they do better if they can have milk for three months.  Once weaned, I'd feed them a mix of grains for a month or so and then turn them out to pasture.  We usually hauled them to the sale barn around the age of six months, and I made a pretty good profit with this enterprise. 
  

I raised the calves in individual hutches, shown behind me here; the kids are my two oldest grandchildren, Arick and Amber.

On to another cow subject, butter.  I posted a picture of my pretty butter on Facebook yesterday evening, and a friend asked if that was the natural color of the butter.  Indeed it is.  When cows are on pasture, as opposed to eating hay, their butter is more yellow.  Also, Jerseys and Guernseys don't convert carotene to vitamin A very efficiently; so their butter is especially yellow.   

Around the place

I have some tomatoes, fairly large ones.  They aren't pretty, but at least I have some for now  The splits are caused by all the excess rain we've had.  I expect to have no tomatoes at all, a week from now, because the blight is spreading fast.  Several plants are already dead, having given me no tomatoes larger than walnuts.  There are two local places where, hopefully, I can buy decent tomatoes after mine are gone:  Frye Farms at Buckner (no website) and Fahrmeier Farms (a lousy website); they also have a winery.  

The late zucchini I planted is doing well so far, with no sign of a squash bug.  Look closely and you'll see two tiny zucchinis, the largest about an inch-and-a-half long.  I'm that close to the ratatouille I am longing to make.    
I used the last eggplant off my counter last night to make Meesha's eggplant salsa/caviar.  This time I added 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper; one of my better ideas.  

That pathetic little plant is an acorn squash I probably planted too late; we'll see.  

Not only are the cows spending all their free time at my cabin, pooping everywhere; they are now getting ON my porch and knocking the dwarfs over and shoving my camping chair off into the woods.  

But how can I be angry at someone who provides me with meat and milk, and is due to have a baby in three weeks?  Just look at that face.

Morning activities

We've been using a huge borrowed pet taxi for Iris to sleep in at night; it's been beside our bed, taking up an incredible amount of room.  Iris had no complaints about it; if I told her to go to bed and the door of the taxi was almost closed, she'd stick her nose in and open the door, squeezing through.  
We also have a too-small pet taxi that we used to transport Sadie in the car; Iris is the same size Sadie was, so that one is too small for her to use as a bed, although it works fine for taking her someplace in the car.  
I've been watching garage sales for a just-right-sized pet taxi Iris can comfortably sleep in; I certainly didn't intend to pay the price for a new one.  
Cliff was putting some stuff in a storage shed in the pasture and noticed a pet carrier back in the shadows.  "Did you know there's a dog crate down there that's the size you want?"
Neither of us have any memory of acquiring that thing, but sure enough, there it was.  
The metal door is rusty, and I had to clean out lots of wasp nests.  It isn't the prettiest thing I ever brought into the house; but after some cleanup, I figure it will serve Iris just fine until we find a better one at a garage sale.  

This picture shows the difference between the sizes of the two pet carriers.  


On another note, this morning I plugged the electric fencer in and it was dead as a doornail.  Where it usually reads "14.4" or something in that range, it read "0.0".  We had not been using it for a couple of weeks because the removal of the old trailer house also entailed the removal of the source of electricity to our barn.  Yesterday the barn was re-wired to our box.  
Although I was fairly confident that "0.0" meant there was a worse problem than a few weeds on the wire, I decided to eliminate that possibility while Cliff was asleep.  That way he can go on to other possible problems.  

There definitely were plenty of weeds on the electric fence.  However, after I had removed the weeks, the fencer still reads "0.0".  
This electric fence runs along our side of the barbed wire fence between us and the neighbor to the west; his horses, lacking decent pasture, eat over the fence and lean on it so hard that they'd eventually push it down.  We string the electric fence along it in such a way that whether they eat between the barbed wire strands or over the top, they'll get a shock. 

 Our cows have a selection of any variety of grass or legumes they might want; so where did I find them eating this morning?  In the idle field Cliff intends to plant to grass this fall, where nothing but weeds can be found at the present time.  In this picture, Bonnie has a mouthful of the vine my daddy always called "Creeping Jenny".  Weeds!  My cows like weeds!

Speaking of weeds and vines, here is the trumpet vine I've been trying to get established for two years; it suffered a serious setback in the spring of 2009 when a nephew mowed it; I then marked it with an electric fencepost to keep such a tragedy from happening again.  This is a plant many people have warned me about, saying it's invasive.  So I put it in a place where it should remain harmless, and yet I can sit on my porch and watch when the hummingbirds are feasting on its blossoms.  I have yet to see a bloom, but I'm sure I will eventually.  
I recently put a "butterfly bush" in my flowerbed; I understand that's another plant that can sometimes be invasive.  I'm not worried; my husband loves to kill plants, and if it becomes a problem, I'll turn him loose on it.

When I call my cows, they come running

Bovine family ties

I love you, Son.

I love you too, Mom.

We're changing the way things are done around here, regarding feeding the cows and horses.  

Adam's two horses have put on weight, far too much weight.  This could lead to health issues.  In the past we've gotten by just fine letting the horses eat at will from a big round bale of hay.  For some reason, perhaps their ages, it isn't working any more.  They're getting too much to eat.  

For the past month or so, I've been turning them out twice a day for two hours at a time to eat from their big bale of hay.  I don't think they've either one lost an ounce, and it's getting harder to get them to come back to the lot when the two hours are up.  I give them a tiny taste of sweet feed (about one cup each) to lure them back, but I think they're waking up to the fact that they're going to get locked away from the hay; they're more reluctant to come to me all the time.  

Cows' needs are different.  Ideally, they need all the hay they can get.  Cows don't founder on hay.  

So yesterday Cliff did some re-arranging.  

He put a big bale in the little cow-lot; the cows can enter and leave that pen, but the horses can't.  

He then placed a big bale in front of the barn across the fence from the horses, and we're going to try peeling hay off that a couple of times a day to feed them.  I haven't tried it yet, so I don't know how well it will work; it sounds like a messy situation.  

We're trying to decide how to deal with this situation next winter.  Normally Adam's pasture rent goes up when we start feeding hay, and back down when the grass can be grazed.  

We may stop raising the pasture rent in winter and let him buy his own hay and store it in our barn.  He can tell me how much he wants the horses to have, and I'll feed them accordingly.  He'd have control that way.  He's never complained, by the way, about his horses getting fat or the way we've handled them; I just want to prevent problems.  

It's always something when you have animals, isn't it?  Rather like children.  

If you noticed that my weight ticker on the sidebar hasn't changed, it's because my weight hasn't changed.  At least I'm not gaining.
  

It's still no heat wave, but Sadie's been soaking up sunshine for over two hours this morning; I guess she's waiting on me and Cliff to go for our walk.

morning ramblings

Cliff and I went to pick up a motorcycle for his brother yesterday, and I noticed these dogs in a pen. There are two dogs and three doghouses, but that one fellow would rather spend time on TOP of the occupied doghouse. It just struck me as amusing.

I milked Bonnie this morning for the first time since the freezing rain before Christmas. I've bought milk twice. It's good to be back to normal, and I do believe Bonnie was happy to have her can full of sweet feed. In dry weather I take a kitchen towel that's wet and soapy on one end and dry on the other; I wash the udder and then dry it with that towel. Today, knowing how messy cows can get in thawing weather, I took a bucket of soapy water with a rag in it, plus a towel for drying. That way I had what I needed to make sure my milk would be clean, and indeed, it was.

Anyone who has ever milked a cow knows that no matter how clean the cow and how clean the milk, you are going to smell like a cow after you've milked one. In sloppy weather, you REALLY smell like a cow after getting up close and personal with her. I'll be hopping in the shower soon.

This reminds me of a man Cliff and I encounter when we patronize Pizza Hut in Higginsville. He's an older gentleman, and he obviously has a hog farm (a very rare thing these days, what with mega-farms producing most of the country's pork). When he walks in the door at Pizza Hut, he could almost clear the place with his odor; there are few smells on earth as bad as a hog farm. It certainly takes away some of the pleasure of eating pizza.

When I did that entry about "Missing Persons", I had a specific person in mind. She isn't one of the old J-land group, by the way. As far as I know, she doesn't post on Facebook. She had a much larger following than I do, and had giveaways sometimes. I doubt if she reads my blog.

It's just troubling when you follow somebody's life online and then they totally disappear. In the case of this lady, she has even closed comments and did away with the email address given on her blog. She has a relative who still is blogging regularly, but I'm not going to ask her if everything is OK, because she shouldn't be held accountable for her family members.

Under these circumstances, I know there's something wrong; I don't necessarily want to know what is wrong, I'd simply like to know that the lady is all right.

Snowy morning update

Cliff's awake; he asked, "How much snow did we get?"

I told him there's no way of knowing, since the wind has blown some places totally bare and piled up drifts in others. I don't imagine we got more than two inches.

Before he woke up, I put my coveralls and boots on again and went outside. I took water to thaw the gate-latch. Then I pondered the situation for a while.

Bonnie will usually follow a can of feed anywhere: Did I dare let her out the front door of the barn, which would mean letting her free into the whole wide world, and try coaxing her into the front door of the horse stall so she'd at least be inside with her calf?

That meant getting her out the door on the right, through a snowdrift, and into the sliding door on the left. Without letting her moose of a calf out.

I had success with this project. When Cliff is fully awake, dressed, and caffeined up (another hour, probably), he'll figure out how to free them from their confinement.

This picture, by the way, illustrates why Bonnie can't use the open-face shed. Although the horses tolerate her and her calf pretty well, they're not about to share this small space with cattle. Once we get the sliding barn door open, we'll leave it ajar so Bonnie and Sir Loin can go inside out of this awful wind.

odds and ends

We have a wintery wind whipping about the place. There's no turning back now: Winter has arrived, no matter what the calendar says. Cliff and I did some shopping today for the big turkey dinner. I told him beforehand, "I'm not going to get a huge turkey, even though we always freeze the leftovers and use them; a small one will do just fine."
I went into Walmart north of the river and found no turkeys. OK, there were two small Butterball turkeys no bigger than large hens, $1.49 a pound. I didn't want that small a turkey! Except for those, the cooler was bare.
So we stopped by a local Apple Market in that town and found out they had plenty of turkeys at 39 cents per pound! So much for my plan to buy a smaller turkey; I never could pass up a bargain. They had good buys on other items I needed, too. I wish that store was closer to home; I do believe I could learn to like it.
After getting home and putting up groceries, I looked out the north window that faces the pasture and saw Sir Loin coming toward the house at a dead run, without his mother. First I thought she might have preceded him up here, and perhaps he was coming to join her. But soon I saw him laying down, chewing his cud... all alone. Then I cast my eyes far away and saw Bonnie grazing, way out on the point.
This is not normal cattle behavior, people. Cows are herd animals; they tend to panic when they're away from their friends. It puzzled me, but I decided maybe it was the weather change. Animals often act peculiar on days like this.
Half-an-hour later I saw Sir had joined his mother on the point, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Whatever his problem, it seemed to be solved.
A while ago, I heard him bellowing loudly, and looked out to see him coming toward the barn again, running as fast as he could! Bonnie was nowhere in sight. He went to the salt block and licked it, bawling every little while.
I decided it was time to go take a close look at Bonnie; maybe there was something I hadn't been able to see from a distance. Sadie and I headed out, soon to be passed up by Sir Loin, trotting and bawling as he went.
By the time we caught up with him he had joined his mother, who was grazing happily in tall grass the horses turn their noses up at. She was obviously in good health.
So, I still don't know what possessed that silly calf to throw two running fits in succession.
Things that make you go "hmmm".
I notice most of my commenters like green bean casserole, and that's fine. There's just something about the fact that the sauce tastes like cream soup right out of the can, and I don't care for that kind of onions, either. Believe me, there are very few foods at which I turn up my nose! Oh, I can eat the stuff; I'd just rather not.
The turnips are still in the garden, and at least once a week I'll bring some in and cook a few creamed turnips for myself. I was delighted this week to finally make them taste like my mom's: The secret ingredient turned out to be just a little sugar!

When you’re the only kid on the block…

I can’t help but pity the little steer, Sir Loin. His cow companions consist of his mom and two adolescent heifers. There’s really nobody to play with, although sometimes the youngest heifer will hang out with him.

As I was finishing up my horseback ride yesterday, I found little Sir playing with the bucket I climb on to get aboard my tall horse. Blue patiently waited while I took some pictures to make into a slide show and a video.

Here’s a very brief video of some of the action.