Mother Nature - Make Up Your Mind!

This has been some strange year. I think that every year actually. This year it warmed up and then got cold and then repeated several times. It went from eighty degrees at the end of April to nine inches of snow May second, which melted and replaced itself with two more inches by the fourth and then of course melted. Mud is everywhere.

It finally warmed up so I could plant all those plants I ordered for my garden. My brother talked me into planting my potatoes in old hay bales. I looked it up to see if it was an actual way of planting them before I did it and it was. However, it takes massive amounts of water to keep the hay bales hydrated and now that it seems to be raining every day and going from below freezing to eighty in a day, the bales are molding instead of producing potatoes. I don't think I'll do it again next year. I am thinking of replanting potatoes in dirt already for this year. Naturally, as soon as I got that garden all ready and planted asparagus it rained and filled the trenches with so much water I think it drowned the roots. I had also planted strawberries and they too are suffering the effects of the weather. I think I have maybe four out of thirty plants left. The only thins 'happy' are the onions. I planted four rows each of various beans and peas and the seeds are not doing well. Finally, some of the beans are coming up, and for some reason the lettuce survived the deluge of rain. The spinach and cucumbers washed away. Luckily, I had started some cucumber plants indoors, so as long as the rain and too cool weather doesn't kill those off too, I might actually get some cucumbers.

                                         Obviously we couldn't cover the entire tree.

It seems when we need it warm; it's cold. When we need it dry; it's wet. When we need it wet; it's dry. We wrapped a couple of our smaller apple trees to protect them from the freeze, and then it turned out the ones that didn't get wrapped came out okay, then it rained and the wind blew like crazy and blew a lot of the blooms off. Last year's drought killed my blueberries, possibly the cherries, and one of my plumb trees. So, to anyone who thinks farming is easy- think again. It's a hard job keeping our family fed and possibly yours too for those who sell excess veggies at the farmer's market. I used to do that too, but that's another post!

                                 An older apple tree in full bloom- That's what they should all look like!

The Long Winter's Affect on Raising Bottle Calves

Last year we decided to go from raising beef cows (the big cows had the babies and raised them), to raising Holstein bottle calves. Bottle calves, for those who don't know, are day-old calves diaries separate from the milking cows within hours of being born. Some feed the colostrums to the calves and some do not. This can make the difference in a healthy calf and one that needs extra attention or one that just doesn't survive. We ran into a lot of that last year. We had many that because of their treatment at birth (sent immediately to a sale barn for whatever they could get) died within weeks if not days of our buying them. I hate when that happens. I get attached very quickly to my calves and I feel it deeply when they don't make it. As a result of the pneumonia most of them acquired within days of leaving the sale barn, we had to keep them inside all winter, which turned out to be very long.

Our barn cleaner chain had not been used in years, so we were constantly repairing it and putting it back in the gutter. It usually slipped off its wheels when it was full, so getting it back on required a winch and a lot of time. Also, because we had not used the system in years, the pipe to the retaining slab from the intake pit was plugged with years-old dry matter. Once it got wet, it swelled and would not let the waste through. We had to call someone from 80 miles away with special equipment to use high pressure water jets to 'drill' the pipe out. Most farms that have been running constantly don't have that issue often. Hopefully, we won't either for a while.

In the fall, we did obtain some really healthy weaned calves that were not bought from a sale barn, but from a local farmer. That makes a huge difference, as they had given the colostrums to the calves for several days before putting the moms back on the production line. Now, those are the kind of calves you want. Since we had to take down our pasture fence to allow a combine into a soybean field, and the deer had done a lot of damage as well, we had no secure pasture for them, so they too had to be tied into the barn. Our barn used to be a dairy barn so we were using the tie stalls from the dairy cows and they all had to stay in for the winter.

Calves don't stay calves for long, in fact, healthy ones grow rather fast and they eat enormous amounts of hay. Farmer's control the amount of grain and hay cattle get, but while grain is fed in a few pounds a day, hay is fed in bales. The winter ran so long we ran out of the small manageable bales and had to put large round bales in the barn and roll them out, using a pitchfork and wheel barrow to feed the animals. They could go through a bale a day easily. These are four to five feet across and have to be moved by tractor, but since the tractor won't fit into the barn, they have to be rolled manually. It usually takes two people until it gets down quite a few layers.

Calves are also quite clever. They could teach magicians a few tricks in the escape arts. We used a variety of types of clips and they somehow figured out how to unscrew, unclip, or outright break the chains that held them in regularly. When you're all alone doing the chores that can be a lot of fun –not- getting them back to their stalls. First, you have to catch them, and they run really fast when they want to. Then, you have to get a rope on their heads and make a harness out of it. Next, since they were usually in the feed aisle, they had to be coaxed to go all the way down the aisle and around to middle walkway and back to their stalls, and stand still to be re-attached to the chain. Often I had to fix the chain before I even went for the cow.  This might sound easy, getting them back to their stalls, but let me tell you, when they are loose, they decide if they are going to move or not and you are not going to drag them. They will spread out their legs and hold their ground. Unless a calf is trained as a show animal, they cannot be lead. You have to get off to the side and tap them in just the right place while leading the rope as one would a horse. Usually when they decide to take off, it's at a dead run and you could get dragged rather than running alongside of them. It can be very dangerous, and they can in their sudden taking off dislocate your shoulder, which is also true if you try to drag them. A lot of people use a cattle prod, which is a long fiberglass stick with a plastic handle on one end and a taser-like device on the other end. These are very effective at persuading the cattle to move, but again, if they don't have a rope, you can't control easily where they will go, and once they are moving, it's hard to stop them, even if someone else is in front of them. Sometimes they stop with a skid, and others, they trample the person standing in front if they don't get out of the way in time. We roped them, got to the side and got them moving, and then jumped into their stalls and wrapped the rope around the pipe they had been chained to and sort of winched them in, or tied it off in a way that it could be loosed and pulled tight again easily and then got with them in the walk aisle and got them moving again until they jumped into their stall. This was usually if only one person was in the barn trying to move them. I have been known to tie the stubborn animal to a post and call for help from my brother-in-law or nephews. Then of course, once the animal is back in the stall, everyone is mad because they haven't been fed, but the feed aisle has to be cleaned of the manure and limed down to dry it up, and then they can be fed.

As they were not full grown and the barn was not stocked full to the brim with animals, the cold could be too much for the water system and then we had to torch the lines and each bowl to thaw them so the animals could get water. This had to be done several times a day when it was extremely frigid. At one point, it got so bad we opted to just shut the water down to them and go give them buckets several times a day until it 'warmed' up enough that it wasn't freezing the lines faster than they could be thawed. At one point, the cows were so anxious about the promise of spring, they started butting heads under the stanchions dividing them and they ended up banging the shared water bowl to a point they broke the line. That was fun! At least I had learned how to rebuild the water lines and was able to fix it myself.

One would think as anxious as the cows were to get outside; they would gladly leave the barn when we tried to put them out to pasture at last. Nope. It was hours to just get thirty cows out of the barn. They ran all over the place and into other stalls and knocked each other all over the place, and my husband ended up with several broken bones in his hands and feet and we both had bruises and cuts and scrapes, but we got them out. The next morning they had knocked the cattle panel gate over (the ground was too soft from the mud and the post didn't stay put) and several of them were back in the barn. It took another hour to get them back out where they belonged and we put up a sturdier gate and more posts to hold it.

Some lessons learned:

1.  Get a cattle prod!

2.  If you get calves at a sale barn (which is a really bad idea unless you have no other means) get them early in the week; if it's a Saturday, they are left over from the other days of sales and sale barns do not feed the calves. Day-old calves don't eat grain or hay yet and most of the barns will not go to the trouble of bottle feeding the calves. They're half-starved and sick by the time you get them.

3. Turn them out immediately upon weaning so that they don't get too big to handle in the barn. The bigger they get, the smarter they get and will figure out how to get loose from their stalls and are harder to put back!

4.  Get a cow dog that knows what it's doing. We have never been fortunate enough to get a herd dog that went for the heel as it's supposed to. For some reason they always went for the nose and turned the cows around the wrong way. I should quit getting puppies and get them already trained, but I suck at dog training. I'm great at dog spoiling!

Spring on the Farm: Sweet and Smelly

Usually the farm is pretty benign with chores, but sometimes it gets quite lively. The last two weeks of April before it finally warmed up, my husband decided we (meaning me) needed to learn to make maple syrup. I ordered three spiels (the tap that goes into the tree) and three collection bags and hangers. I got a turkey cooker and new buckets and every insulated cooler on the farm (clean of course) to hold the sap until time to cook. We didn't get a ton of sap before the season ended, but it took me three days to cook it down. The nights were freezing still so I could just turn off the cooker and start back bright and early after cow chores were done. The days were warm enough that I got to wear a tee shirt and shorts so I took the opportunity to get some sun and read a book while I waited, and waited, and waited, adding more sap as it cooked down. I must have done something wrong. The syrup came out great, but I don't think it should take three days to get 3 ½ quarts of syrup; should it? Next year we're planning on more and starting earlier, so if anyone knows how to have it not take so long, I'd appreciate the tips.

We went from those glorious eighty degree days to nine inches of snow on May second. I couldn't believe it. (They had more than I did further north!) The next day it melted into a muddy mess- again.

We waded through the mud and re-set fence posts so we could rebuild the fence around a small pen we used for small calves to learn what a fence was for. If they get out of that, there's always the bigger pen to catch them. I had used the pen for long-horn sheep for about a year and a half, so it was divided up to wean the babies from the ewes and keep the rams from breeding the young ewes. They ended up more like pets (although in my case, most animals do), but they were not big on the profit margin, so they had to go. When we put up new the fence, we took down the wooden panels that divided the fence and I pulled up posts. I had a roll of woven wire also, and I rolled it back up and deposited it in the small building we had built for a sheep shelter. We had put it on skids so it could be moved if need be and my husband hooked the chain to the tractor and tried to pull it out of the pen so it could be used for hens instead. It wouldn't budge. There was a lot of mud and wet hay from the sheep piled around it, so he turned the tractor around and gave it a lift with the hay spear and then dropped it back down so he could turn around and try to drag it again.

Now at this point, experience should have warned me there was a reason our yellow Labrador was going crazy around the bottom of the building, but I just told her to move out of the way. Big mistake! When my husband gave that thing a yank and it started moving and within two feet I saw the error of not locking the dog in the house. Pew! She has a thing about skunks- I don't know why. She attacks and shakes them as if they were stuffed toys. Of course she ends up getting sprayed. I yelled for my husband to run but he didn't understand what I said and looked at me to see what I wanted. I just motioned for him to go as I covered my nose and ran like heck. He turned the other way and saw what was happening and floored that accelerator. I'm not sure the building was actually on the ground at that point, as it was sort of floating over the ground. He went back in the pen to try to get that silly dog to drop the skunk. She did. I ran to get my de-skunking supplies to wash the dog. (That always ends up my job for some reason.) When I came out the house the skunk was waddling across the pasture. I asked how my husband got it to go away. "I threw rocks at it," was the reply. "What is wrong with you!" was mine. 

I washed that dog four times and there wasn't much in the way of results. I had to lock her in the barn (poor cows) as there was no way she was coming in the house. The first night, she did okay, but the second night she got out in spite of having the door blocked by a heavy object. I put her back and locked her in the feed room, and she got out again. I finally figured out she was getting into the gutter where it runs underneath the wall between the main part of the barn and the blocked off part where the feed is stored and the barn cleaner chain goes to a pump-out pit. She somehow scrunched her 85-pound body into that tiny gutter and under the wall- twice. I left her out at that point and of course she barked all night wanting inside. I got the smell down to a dull roar and let her in, but I bathed her every day (twice) with whatever I could find to get the smell off. I could not figure out why it wasn't letting up, and in fact, was getting worse.

                                         Chaos the Trouble Maker!

In the mean time, we finally got those calves out of the barn, which in itself was a rodeo. They had been out of necessity locked in the barn since late July of last year and now they didn't want to go. We got really beat up out the deal, as there were thirty of them, and then they broke down the panel gate and opened the sliding door and helped themselves back in the barn the next morning. We had to wrangle them out all over again, but we reinforced the panel to keep them in the pen. There's nothing like a herd of cows getting out to show you the weakness in your system.

I cleaned out the former sheep shed and deposited the litter around our fruit trees which are on one side of the machine shed. That dog kept digging at the wall and running around in her usual crazy way. I yelled for her to knock it off since she hadn't bothered to run the wild rabbits off all winter that had taken up residence there. They hopped right up the stairs to the house and she would just walk past and keep going, so I didn't know why she was so interested in them now. Anybody see a warning sign yet? I had fed the cows a couple of bales of hay, getting one off the floor of the shed where they were stored and parked the tractor back in there by the hay. After getting the shed cleaned out I went to get the tractor to pull the shed into place for hens I was getting the next day. I climbed on-board and was about to turn the key when I saw something under an old unused cabinet that was right about where the dog had been digging from the other side. I muttered something unladylike, and yelled to keep her out of the shed and then started that tractor and hauled it as fast as I could out of the shed making sure those beady black eyes stayed under the cabinet. The dog was watched closely as we finished the job at hand. That critter wasn't coming out for a while. I got the shed put into place and pounded posts in to tie that roll of wire I had put in the shed earlier. Wouldn't you know, I hit the last post so hard, I knocked the end right out of the pounder. It must have been cracked from years of use because I didn't think I was that strong, but I was nervous about that skunk in the machine shed. Obviously, I chose to park the tractor outside. 

After the pen was finished, my husband took off with the dog to the house and I went to back the vehicles out of the shed (didn't want Stinker Bell smelling them all up.) We noticed the dog smelled a little worse; couldn't figure out why. And then, I took a different path to the house than they did. After some more unladylike language, I went and told the dog she was in big trouble. My husband asked why. There were three baby skunks, dead, or nearly dead, on the path and that was why she smelled so bad. She had dug them out from the wall side of the shed and had been playing with them. I had to go finish them off with a shovel to the head and then put them in the burn barrel to keep her from getting them again. We had just discussed that if the skunk had babies under that cabinet, she probably wasn't going to go until she was ready to move them. Well, I guess Chaos took care of that little problem. (Isn't that an appropriate name for the dog?)

Skunk Spray Remover
1 qt Peroxide
1/4 cup baking soda
2 tsp. dish washing soap (I use Dawn)

Pour baking soda and soap into a bucket. Add peroxide. This will foam! Immediately coat the dog over affected area,( if you can figure out where that is) while it's still foaming. Leave on the dog until the foam stops. Then wash the dog thoroughly. This may have to be repeated.

 

Down on the Farm: It's Spring - I Think

Originally posted on Eliza Lynn Taylor's You Never Know! March 30, 2013...

It's almost Easter and we still have snow- make that a LOT of snow. It is raining though so that is helping it melt. Unfortunately we had so much that when it got pushed up out the way for egress from the driveway, it blocked the natural drainage from the yard, so with the cold, I have a really big skating rink, and when it's above freezing. it's also covered in water. That is really fun; especially if you can't skate. At any rate, rain rather than snow and above freezing at least some of the day more than none of the day, means spring is on it's way - it's just taking its time getting here.

Spring means all sorts of things down on the farm including lots of work, but hey, we sort of live for that. (I don't know why.) I have already purchased some of the seeds for the planting, although I have more to get, and we have plotted out which fields will be planted in what and how much seed we need for each field. See, there really is a use for that algebra beyond high school. Also, we have to figure out if we can sell any left over hay and how much to someone who ran out, or whether to keep it until the grazing pasture is one, dry enough to turn cattle out on without their ruining it with their hooves, and two, if it is tall enough to give them yet. If it's too short, they'll just pull it up ruining the filed, and they will run out faster, and if it is too tall, they won't touch it because they think it is too tough. It's a balancing act! If there is a drought we might have to feed the old hay in order to have enough of the new hay to last the next winter. Ever wonder why farmers relied on the Old Farmer's Almanac? This is why. It might have been wrong, but it was somewhere to start. And it has lots of helpful charts to save time and help planning. There is a saying up here that the corn needs to be at least knee high by the Fourth of July. That's because if it isn't, it probably won't grow the rest of the way in time to harvest because our growing season is so short, so it's a good idea to know the weather charts and hope the fields are dry enough to plant, but not so much that the plants die from lack of moisture. (The balancing act thing again.)

We also are waiting for the snow to melt to stabilize the fence posts that heaved over the winter and put up new fence. We really need to get those calves out of the barn but they will go right through a weak fence. They would have been turned out last fall, but we got a late start and they weren't big enough to withstand the winter cold, although it was pretty harsh this year and we have lost full grown cows to it before, so these wouldn't have stood a chance. Once they are turned out, we plan on getting more. Spring calves can be turned out once they are weaned or if we're real lucky we can find some that are already weaned and save some time. I'm all for that.

I am still planning my garden. I'd really like to grow sweet potatoes, but every time I order them the seed company sends them almost dead, and way too late to grow. They say they send them at the optimal time for planting in my area. July is not the optimal time for planting any potatoes here. It gets cold before they have a chance to even grow a good bush on them, much less a tuber, and when they are pretty much dried up and dead when they arrive, there isn't much to be done to save them. Okra would also be on my wish list, but until I get that greenhouse I've always dreamed of to start plants early, the season is just too short. Still, I can hardly wait to get in there and plant something, because I know that even though it means more work later, I get to put up my own veggies and avoid the stuff in the store.

I might even get a couple of pigs this year.

Are you looking forward to spring too?

Winter on the Farm

Originally posted on Eliza Lynn Taylor's You Never Know! January 27, 2013...

Living in Northern Wisconsin is a lot of fun for a lot of people. I am not one of those people. I do not enjoy snow or the sports one would engage in when it snows. I like to fish, but there is no way I am going out on a frozen lake to do so. I'm from Florida, so the cold and I do not get along, and I absolutely do not like snow.

That being said, for farmers wintertime should be a time of semi-restfulness, right? Don't count on it. Crops have to be planned for spring planting and equipment needs to be maintained so it actually works come spring and summer. Animals have to have extra care, especially if they are kept inside a barn, after all, either way, they can't feed themselves and there isn't any grass to graze on. If a farmer has a dairy, forget about any rest. As much as snow gets in the way and adds more work, it is also a necessary evil. Economic impact on the community that depends on it aside, snow, and a lot of it, is needed for soil moisture when planting time comes around. A good layer of snow is needed to protect hay fields. It keeps some warmth in and the freeze out. Doesn't make sense, does it? Snow also helps weigh down the grasses so that the freezing cold and ice isn't able to heave the delicate plants and kill them off.

We got some snow, but not a lot and it got really cold. Then we got the January thaw, which is temperatures in the forties that got rid of what little snow we did have. Then it got cold again, as in way below zero. I'm going with the notion that all that nice alfalfa and clover we planted is not going to come up this year. Also the unseasonal warmth we had last year during January and February sent our fruit trees for a loop. They bloomed out and then the blooms of course froze when winter returned and we got no apples. It affected the entire state's crop of apples and cherries and other berries and fruits that grow up here. There is a good possibility of more of the same this year.

Now comes the 'fun' part. It got so cold last week that our entire water system froze. We've been having to take a torch to the cow watering system, as in pipes, bowls, and mechanisms so they could drink for several weeks now. We have a barn full of cows so that is a lot of water bowls and pipes. When I say the entire system went down, I mean no water to anywhere, including the house. We had to use an old drag-type spray rig to water the animals by hand (think buckets) and buy water for the house. Thank goodness we have relatives nearby so we could get water for the animals. After finally giving up getting things going on our own, we had to call a well company to get the ice out of the lines. I give up using the automatic watering cups for the cattle though. Until it warms it a bit, I'll just have to keep on using buckets. Even though there are a lot of cows, it takes longer to thaw the lines than to just give them a bucket and babysit them to make sure they don't dump it over accidentally. The barn cleaner chain also froze down so we couldn't run the chain to clean the beds out. I thought we were doomed to the old Armstrong method (two strong arms, a shovel, and a wheelbarrow). The tractor can be used, but it still has to get to the tractor, which cannot fit into the bottom of the barn where the animals are. My poor husband spent hours with a sledge hammer breaking the ice loose so we could get that cleaner going again. He's not too keen on the Armstrong method either for cleaning.

Next week, it's due to get way below freezing again and we might have to do this all over again. Thankfully we got some snow and so we pushed a nice pile around the building where the well is to keep some of that heat we keep going in there where it belongs. So, wish us luck.

Think this is unusual? Probably not. Farming is like that. On good days, the work is not too bad, the equipment works the way it's supposed to and things go smoothly. I do enjoy my cows in spite of all the work, and bucking hay and scraping stalls is some great exercise. But the bad days tend to be really bad, and most farmers know what I'm talking about. Like to gamble? Skip the casino- go into farming.

Mornign on the Farm - What a Way to Start the Day

Originally posted on Eliza Lynn Taylor's You Never Know! December 30, 2012...

It's a great way to start the day. You go out to the barn and something just seems--wrong. It took a minute to figure it out. Someone was missing- Black Jack the steer. Suddenly there he was, on the wrong side of the barn in the feed aisle. Oh man! He had somehow managed to unhook the clip holding his neck chain. They seem to be rather talented in that area of late.

First one must catch the naughty fellow, and believe me, he is not all that small- about 300 pounds. He also has decided he just isn't ready to go back to his stall quite yet, so he ran up and down the aisle with me calling after him. The aisle isn't that big and it's not worth chasing a cow around the feed aisle, you just have to wait for him to calm down a second, although every time I walked up to him to put the rope on his head, he took off again. Hmmm. He's being extra naughty today. Usually I can get him the first time, but then, he has made quite a mess of things and he may be under the impression I'm going to get onto him somehow. It's a cow; it doesn't do any good, as I have told my husband repeatedly. Finally, I got the rope the on his head and he decided at that point to just drag me down the aisle, only I jerked the rope to one side as one would a rein on a horse and he stopped in his tracks. "Now, if you're quite ready to go back home," I told him, "I can clean up this mess and feed everyone." I also told the other cows to give him a hard time since it was his fault they wouldn't be fed for a while as I had to clean up the feed aisle. Yes, I know it doesn't do any good to say such things to them, but it made me feel better.

He still wasn't ready to go back home but I got him out of the feed aisle and into the center walkway, so I tied the rope off in his stall (which thankfully is literally across from the short walk aisle between stalls on the side where he had taken refuge.) I got behind him and gave him a little smack on the rear to get him motivated. He tried to turn and run down the walk aisle but when he reached the end of the rope, he flipped completely over. I just smiled and chuckled a bit. "So, are we ready now?" He got up and went to his stall. I had to motivate him to go on and cross the gutter and move forward enough to hook him back up, but he went.

My goodness, what a mess he made! He managed to knock down five of six bales of hay we had thrown out of the hay mow the night before and pulled the hay string off of two of them, scattering one all over the place. The hay that had not been eaten was no longer fit to eat as he had hygiene issues (that's safe wording right?) in the hay so I had to spend twenty minutes just cleaning the hay out of the aisle and making sure I could actually give the cows their grain before haying them again. At least the concrete was not in need of disinfecting since it all managed to land in hay piles. (That was good trick too.)

Since we have a doorway (minus an actual door) leading to the silo room (we aren't using them) we blocked it off with a piece of plywood and some old straw bales to insulate the barn against the cold. It is at the end of that walk aisle between stalls I mentioned earlier. The water lines and bowls tend to freeze there if it isn't blocked off in the wintertime. That rascal pushed on those bales until he broke the cords holding the plywood up and knocked it over. The bales actually stayed in place, thank goodness. After the mess was cleaned up and the rest of the chores were done, I went outside and around to the other side of the doorway and put the plywood back up, only this time I nailed it to the framework and them braced it with some long two-by-four lumber. Let's see him knock it over now!

Have you ever had days like that?

Green Acres is the Place for Me!

Originally posted on Eliza Lynn Taylor's You Never Know! December 2, 2012...

Okay, so this time of year, we don't necessarily have green acres, but do you remember the television show Green Acres? I do, and I can still get it when the weather cooperates. Growing up I lived on a farm pretty close to that one, sans the closet door emergency exit. We were only there for a little while, but I thought all farms were that way at the time, even though my grandparents lived on a farm with a nice house. I always liked the barn my grandparents had, even though the boards didn't quite meet and if the wind blew it went right through it. I think it was supposed to be that way since my grandparents raised tobacco and they dried it in there- this was before the fancy drying buildings with the heaters and blowers on them.

We moved into yet another farm house when I was a teenager. It was huge, but the bathroom was an add-on and it wasn't level so the bathtub didn't drain properly. It didn't have a barn, but it was a crop farm and they raised watermelons the year we moved out. I loved walking the fields to the fishing pond.That was cool. The house was oddly laid out too. If one wanted to go into the kitchen or the dining room, they had to go through a porch that had been enclosed. We found snakes in there once in a while. Come to think of it, we did at the other one too. Yuk. 

My husband and I moved onto a rented farm shortly after we married and it had a nice house- one of my favorite houses where I have ever lived. It had small outbuildings but it had a lot of acreage and we raised beef cattle and raised wheat, soybeans, and truck cropped vegetables that we sold at the State Farmers Market in Thomasville, Georgia. I enjoyed that too. We had live water on the property, which means a spring-fed creek to cool off in on really hot days. That was nice.

I have lived on several farms over the years and my husband has yet to put me in one that is Green Acres-like. We did live in his old homestead in Missouri where he grew up that was interesting. It was built on a log foundation with rocks around the edges. A groundhog had gotten in where the rocks had been removed to retrofit plumbing for the bathroom (yes, it was that old). The rascal had gnawed his way almost all the way across the floor joists. He was huge! My son and I watched him through the living room window eating flowers and acorns in the front yard. There was squirrel that used to hang out on the front porch and look in the door through the baby gate and my other son. I think he tried to talk to it, but since no one knows what babies are saying, who knows? We moved into a newer house a couple years later and it was eventually torn down. We had cows and hogs then.

In Wisconsin we lived in a huge house with six bedrooms and a hidden toilet at the top of the stairs. That was interesting! Careful going up those stairs man! It was an old house and we couldn't quite figure out what rooms were supposed to be what in the lower level. The bathroom was built into an alcove under the stairs so it was small and it had a pocket door for an entrance. I still really liked the house, even if it was too big and the bathroom too small. Now we live on another farm with a big old barn - I love big barns. The house actually needs more rooms just to accommodate grandchildren. But, oh man, do I have fun with the cows. They are a bunch of characters. My husband thinks I spend too much time with them since most have names and I can pet them like dogs. But then I have fun on my little tractor too, and wandering the nearly 120 acres with my Labrador retriever. And, I have creeks all over the place- the dog really likes those. Too bad it snows and has to ruin everything.

I have been  in cities and to tell you the truth, I can't sleep there. I can't breathe there. It is way too loud and the houses are too close for my comfort. So, yes, the line in the Green Acres theme song holds true with me, and the only time I'd wager anything is to say that it probably does with a lot of farmers too. "Green acres is the place for me," and especially, 'Take Manhattan; just give me that country side!"

On the Farm- Raising Sheep

Originally posted on Eliza Lynn Taylor's You Never Know October 14, 2012...

I got talked into obtaining a few long-horned sheep about eighteen months ago by someone with sheep who was buying hay from us. I wouldn't have to have them shorn since they didn't have wool since they were hair sheep and the hair is more or less usless. They were supposed to go either for meat or the rams for their horns once they started having offspring. The entire 'herd' was a ram and five ewes. Oh my, what an undertaking that was. The ewes were raised on the bottle as their mothers had rejected them so they were very tame. Being tame, I named them and made pets out of them. That is always a bad idea, but somehow I always manage to do it regardless of the animal, be it a cow, a pig, or a sheep.

Raising sheep is an adventure, make no mistake. One weekend, since my husband was ill, my eldest son decided to come help mom get caught up on things that needed done around the farm. One such chore, was catching the sheep, which by this time had multiplied due to the ewes having had babies in February. We needed to tag the lambs. You talk about a rodeo. The adults were already tagged and I wondered why the previous owners had waited until they were loading them to do it. They seemed to handle so well when they got them for us and we had only some trouble getting them into the barn when they lambed- they follow a feed bucket pretty well. The lambs, however, run like the wild little critters they are. I had built a divider fence out of fence wire and, with my husband's help, finally lumber in order to separate the lambs from the ewes (they kept going through the wire). That's when I noticed the difference in the ewes and the rest of them.

The ram is also wild as we were told not to make friends with him or he could get where he wasn't afraid of us and charge. I took that to heart- he has some nasty looking horns and I have seen him charge my poor dog when I was trying to find his water bucket. After about an hour of trying to catch the lambs to tag them my son was swearing a blue streak and, as he is much too old for me to wash his mouth out with soap, I couldn't very well stop him. He looked at me and then I surprised the heck out of him. I was just as hot (it was nearly 100 degrees) and ticked off as he was at their speed and agility, and one even jumped straight up four feet over the fence back to mama. I told him to go ahead, just make sure he put in a few words for me since I didn't use them myself. He broke up laughing and we gave up the project least we both have a heat stroke.

That was about the time I started finding the little ones had gotten into a deadly plant I thought I had been pretty good about keeping out of their pen. My youngest son told me over the phone right where to find it and he was right. The little jumpers had gotten over a barricade and then knocked it over allowing access to all. It was around the silos.  I lost three of the little ones- all rams. Darn!

A few months after that I listed the whole lot for sale on Craig's List. At first no one wanted them, and then a couple people only wanted the female stock. I listed the two rams I had left, the dad and one of the lambs with a nice set of horns himself. .

By law, they have to be tagged before they can be sold and the tags are farm specific. Only ones born to the farm have to be tagged with that farm's tags so that they can be traced to their original farm. The people who bought the sheep were pretty good at catching them, although we did manage to get them led into a corral of sorts first and I just handed them the tags and asked if they had a tagging device. They can tag the little suckers.

I think I'll stick to cows and maybe a pig or two, but the pigs will be for me to eat, and some chickens (for eggs).