cows

Babying the horses again

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Every once in a while we have to count the cows. I fed them a new bale on Friday. There are 13 cows in the picture. One is hiding behind the feeder and one is a baby hiding behind the bull. The cows think me starting the tractor up means meal time every time they hear it. This leads to a lot of disappointment. We will have two cows for sale in the spring if anyone wants to finish them off. We should have another 4 babies this winter, maybe 5.

The director from PAWS called us today. They had some reject cats for us. The only reason they are rejects are they don’t like people. This makes them very hard to adopt out to homes. We use two dog kennels and we feed and water the cats for a couple of weeks. Once they recognize us and that food and water come from us then we will let them out. We feed the cats every day when we feed the other animals so they can just live in the barn. There are lots of places to hide and to stay warm. The cats are all neutered so we don’t get kittens and the cats get to live life on their own terms. An added bonus is the cats control the mice in the barn so the hay does not get destroyed. Everyone comes out a winner, the cats, us and PAWS. We got three adult cats today. If you look closer at the picture you will see our other PAWS kitten on the steps, three cats in the kennels and look up at the barn door opening and you will see Mouse standing on the hay looking out!

The side barn area was muddy again. We have put gutters on the end of the barn, I have put in a drain line from the down spout to the front spring. I dug a small drain line over by the horse enclosure to catch the rain coming off the barn that was forming a mud puddle. That seems to be helping. What we really need is a long 80 foot trench running down the center of the back alleyway. This idea did not excite me but Annmarie had a hard time getting to the cats in her not mud boots. I started digging the trench today with a Polanski and a shovel. I was about 10 feet into it, down to my long sleeve shirt only, even had to remove my hat, it was too hot when I realized this decision was going to take me two days of back breaking labor. This concept tore at my soul and lower back. Suddenly, it dawned on me that this summer I had purchased a trenching device for my tractor! I had not had a chance to use it. I promptly gave up the shovel and jumped onto the tractor. Once I got the box blade off the back of the tractor I realized I needed three pins. I had to dig around the machine shop and came up with two and reused one from the box blade. I got the trencher on without too much difficulty. I just lined up over the area I wanted and drug that thing up and down the path. It doesn’t like to go through solid rock. There is a rock bluff just under the surface of the dirt about 6 inches down near the back of the barn for about four feet. I am sure this is why they built the barn here, a nice rock base. I still had to shovel the dirt clear but I had the whole thing done and filled with gravel in under three hours! Now to see if it works.

Gizmo has this perverse habit of watching anyone who is in the shower. I think he is afraid you might drown and he needs to save you. Who knows? He got a bath last weekend and the water was brown, he is a dirty dog. He has been sneaking out to the barn to play with the kitten, Soot (Annmarie named it this week).

The bull is not with the plan

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I have not been able to get back up on the hillside and finish the fence this week. I keep wanting to but other things keep coming up.

These other things should sound important, but they really are not. I really was ready for our living room to start turning back into a usable space and less like a storage room. I managed to get the craft room finished with some effort last week and buffaloed the child into coming over and helping move furniture. Annmarie has been an invalid all week and has managed to sleep the better part of 48 hours straight so she will be no help moving furniture. We got the loom, the cedar chest and the trunk all moved out of the living room. Now we just need to get a book shelf down from the office and the sewing machine from our bedroom installed and the room will be complete. The new paint, new floor and lack of curtains makes the room echo something fierce. I will be installing the curtains tomorrow.

We used colors from a turn of the century palette. So we really do have color in the house now. I used this awesome brown under the stairs and since it was a small area I put it all on with a brush. I usually use a roller or pad. I now know why I use a roller or pad, I have these weird shadows in the paint from changing brush stroke angles. They will not just come out by themselves. I have tried that correction method already, now I need to roll them out. When I attempted to install the door on the closet under the stairs it would not fit. It kept rubbing on the top and hitting on the bottom. I had to use a hand planer to remove about1/8” off the top on the distal half from the hinges. Then I smashed on the lower door casing a few times and ended up taking the door off the wall three times until I had chiseled the hinge joint down enough to allow the door to close unhindered.

This small little endeavor took me three hours to get the door right.

The bull is being a typical male with lots of testosterone and too much spare time. He found a way to get from the bottom pasture into the barn lot last week by going through the creek in the ram pasture. There was an old fence creek crossing that was installed prior to us moving here. He pushed through it and made his way in. Well this week he decided he wanted to go back down with the other cows. This time he tore up the crossing pretty severely getting out. Luckily, the sheep and other cows are just not as motivated as him, none of them have used the crossing. I think even the sheep could pass through the hole now.

Fencing cause I love it

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The cows are at it again! Earlier this week a neighbor called Annmarie at work to tell her our cows were out. This happens a few times a year. I cannot believe that it only happens to us. I had a more flexible schedule that day so I went home during the day and spent three hours herding cows back to our pasture. The first thing that must happen before the cows can be retrieved is to figure out their escape hole and fix it. It does you no good to get them if you don’t plug the hole first. The bull tried to get under the panel crossing the front runoff ditch but it is wired in place on top and bottom. He couldn’t get it to move, favorite technique denied!

This prompted him to try out his second favorite technique, which is opening the gate. He will try and lift it off its hinges or push/pull it open. He managed to tear the gate latch out of the post. I had merely stapled the chain into the post with three 2.5 inch long staples. He just pulled them out of the wood and off the cows went. The crazy part is they went into the section I am building a new fence around. If I can get more fence up they will just break into the next fenced in area and will be stuck. No more calls at work from neighbors. I wrapped the chain around the entire post and tied it together. He will now have to rip the post out of the ground to get through the gate.

I drove the mistress up to the end of the property and brought both border collies with me. We were told the cows were in the neighbors green alfalfa field, which is a common destination. I tooled up there but didn’t see the cows so I went up the creek, on the road, with the dogs hoping to spot the cows. They were hiding at the far end of the suspected field by some out buildings. So the dogs and I drove back to the entry point of the field. I had to wait for Zeke to catch up so Mouse and I took a breather. We all calmly and slowing made our way to the creekside of the field. It is no longer an alfalfa field. It’s a grass field now. I kept a tight verbal reign on the dogs. They did very well. Annmarie had some issues with a Mouse and had to do the dominance choke. He listened better. We have learned that working with pack behavior and using the tools the dogs use on each other allows us to maintain our alpha leader status and the dogs understand us. Mouse does not like to stay in one place while I drive off a few hundred yards. Zeke will stay and guard a gate opening if told. This caused a little problem but I got the cows back into the correct lot. I was told that night this is a direct cause of us not feeding every day. Unfortunately, she is right. We have very little grass left and what little there is is dead. So now every evening we are feeding about 1/3 of what they would get in the winter and it is keeping them happy. I really need to put both cow herds together but I want to tag and band the new baby first. So hopefully next weekend. I had to go back to work and finish making up for lost time. Annmarie had to do all the evening chores.

The upper hillside is an issue now. It was one of the earlier stretches of fence I built. All these early attempts have some “learning curve issues”. I tried to use T-posts but the hillside is just too rocky in places so I built rock cribs instead. They are too small and very ugly. The cows are pulling them over just by pushing on the fence. This is happening to the T-posts also. In the picture above the fence looks fairly upright. I broke a T-post and several other posts are fragile and about half the wires are disconnected and loose. It needs to be repaired. I am going to have to go with the tried and true method. I bend a 16 foot cow panel into a circle, nail a large post to one side and then fill the crib with rocks. This takes about 25 loads of rocks with the tractor. All those rocks have to be knocked out of the ground then placed in the bucket and then dumped into the crib. Before I put these cribs on a hillside I like to attempt to create a flat spot for them so they don’t slide down the hillside.

Thursday I managed to get 1.75 cribs installed alongside the fence. Collecting the rocks is the most labor intensive side of the process. This also helps me in the long run as I pull the rocks out of the pasture to use in the fence line. I have some help lined up to help me on Saturday. I would like to be done with that hillside fence this weekend.

This is the gate area near the top of the fence. You can see the cows are just pulling the rock cribs over. I need to level this gate crossing, level a rock crib pad and install a real metal gate. This has to all be done in one day so the animals don’t escape. Once the upper rock crib is complete I can restretch the fence going up the hillside.