Spring has sprung

Well, it looks like the sun has set on another winter.

Suddenly the temps are well above freezing during the day, and the snow is melting rapidly. Bodies of water are losing their grip of ice.

Everywhere we go, we hear the chatter of running water.

Sometimes it's more than chatter. Across the canyon, I heard the distant thundering of an ephemeral creek.

Yesterday afternoon, I just missed taking a photo of our neighbors riding horses along the road. Both these fine people have faced frightening health challenges in the last year, and to see them enjoying the simple pleasure of a horseback ride on an early spring afternoon was a welcome sight indeed. I captured evidence of their horses' passing.

Suddenly we're dripping with birds: red-winged blackbirds, robins, kildeer, meadowlarks, and of course swans flying over us toward the lake.

Everything is white and brown, blue and green as the snow recedes.

With this increased pulse of life, of course, we now find ourselves looking for any excuse to get outside. Taking Mr. Darcy for walks is one of those excuses of which he highly approves.

We dehorned little Anna, who was understandably not amused by the duct-tape helmet. We kept both mama and baby in the barn during this time.

Later, when we could finally clip off the duct tape, Polly and Anna stepped back out into the welcoming sunshine.

Meanwhile the rest of the cows and calves lounged in the warmth.

I decided to investigate the garden, much of which is still under snow. Here's the blueberry bed:

Some of the strawberry tires, with the garlic boat in the background:

I walked into the orchard and was distressed to see our young Gala apple tree on its side.

It must have just happened -- new buds were still looking healthy -- and probably occurred during a windy blast a couple of days before.

At least its roots were still (mostly) in the soil. I straightened the tree and re-staked it from four directions. I don't know if it will survive, so we'll see.

The rest of the orchard looked to be in roaring good health, so that's a relief.

I'm getting the itch to plant something, but it's too early even to start seeds in the house (since we couldn't transplant until late May or early June), so I'll try to be patient. But with spring in the air, it's hard going.

Dehorning Hickory

If there's one thing we prefer to do with our heifers, it's dehorn them. We've had cows with horns, and believe me, life is much easier without them. We usually don't bother dehorning the steers since they invariably have a date with the freezer when they're about two years old, and our philosophy is: Why waste a perfectly good dehorning on a steer?

But heifers become cows, and cows are generally with us for a long time, so we find it's best if they don't have horns with which they push others (including us) around.

We use dehorning paste. Another thing we learned (the hard way) is dehorning paste has a shelf life. Always look at the expiration date. We needed fresh paste this year, and at the feed store I noticed they had some paste expiring in 2018, and the rest in 2020. Guess which I picked up.

The first thing we needed to do was get Sparky and Hickory inside the barn, where we could separate out the calf into a smaller pen. In the absence of farm hands (i.e. our daughters), Don and I parked the vehicles to form a funnel toward the barn door. It worked.

Then we assembled our dehorning kit: Hair clippers, Vaseline, Popsicle sticks, dehorning paste, duct tape, and a light (it's quite dark in the pen). The hair clippers are to shave away the hair over the horn buds; the Vaseline is to draw a circle around the buds to corral the paste; the Popsicle stick is used to apply the paste and keep it off our hands; and the duct tape is to keep the paste from getting on the mother, either her tongue (from licking at the calf) or her udder (when the calf nurses).

There is a fairly small window of opportunity for using dehorning paste on calves. It's best used when the baby is between three and ten days old, and the little horn buds can be felt under the skin. One time we were going to dehorn a calf, but for the life of us we couldn't feel her horn buds; so rather than risk applying the paste and damaging her skull, we waited a few more days until the buds could be felt.

Here's the light we used to illuminate the pen where we worked. A friend gave us two of these lights. They're very bright -- 500 lumens -- and can be propped up or hung up. Very nice to have.

Both of us had our hands way too full to take photos of the actual dehorning procedure (if you're interested, we have an ebooklet on the process here), but it went fine even with Sparky bellowing at us nonstop right outside the pen. Distressed cows are LOUD.

As soon as Hickory's head was wrapped with duct tape, we released her to her mama, who instantly calmed down.

Many calves understandably fight the duct tape, but this little girl was very calm the whole time it was on.

We left Sparky and Hickory in the barn all day until late afternoon, at which point we separated the calf once more and clipped away the duct tape (this takes about 30 seconds). Then we released both mama and baby back outside.

What I like about dehorning paste is it's both aesthetic and painless (at least, if the calf's behavior is anything to go by). As soon as Hickory was released from the barn, she was galloping and skipping around in typical baby high spirits -- and we can look forward to a cow who will never develop horns.

Since we're keeping little Ferdinand as a bull, we'll also be dehorning him in the next few days as well.

Friday Roundup

Time for our Friday Roundup, where we post what things we've accomplished (big or small) during the week that moves us incrementally toward being better prepared.

It's Friday night as I begin this post, and Saturday morning as I finish it. In fact, it's a long post, so bear with me as I summarize our week's activities.

Unlike a couple weeks ago when we accomplished precisely nothing, this week has been tremendously productive. Isn't it funny how some weeks are like that?

At any rate, here's our activities for the week:

• We had a new calf born to Rosy, a little girl. She looks so much like her mother that I've named her Minnie, as in Mini-Me (remember Austin Powers?).

I got photos of the birth from start to finish, so I'll put them up later as a separate blog post.

• We got a huge amount of work done in the garden. Here are last year's "viney tires" (where I grew sprawling things like melons, cucumbers, etc.). The tires were still weed-infested from the winter. Don and I weeded them clean and planted tomatoes rather than vines.

This year I (cough) cheated and bought seedlings from a local woman.

I planted one per tire...

...and mulched them.

• We dehorned little Adina, who was born last week.

Then we returned Dusty and Dina to the rest of the herd.

• The strawberries are just starting to ripen, so we've been picking. We're not yet getting the great gushing quantities we'll get in two weeks or so, and for the moment we're all greedily hungry for fresh ripe strawberries, so we're eating them as fast as we pick them. Delicious bliss.

• I finally got around to mulching the new blueberries.

The young plants are doing beautifully and some even have a few unripe blueberries on them.

• I'm still doing a lot of weeding, gradually working my way through all the tires to prep them for planting.

I came across this large mother wolf spider, her back furry with tiny babies.

I scooped her up and tossed her outside the garden so I wouldn't accidentally bury her in dirt as I pulled weeds.

Gradually the garden is taking shape.

• We (mostly Don) got the drip irrigation hoses reinstalled in the tires...

...and tested the system.

• I got out all the seed potatoes I've been saving all winter and got 16 tires' worth planted (about 320 or so). Because I had so many, I didn't bother cutting them up into pieces with one eye per piece.

This strange sight (I called it the "Medusa crate") is our one remaining crate of potatoes harvested from last fall. These were stored in the darkest, coolest part of the house, which the potatoes evidently took as a sign to sprout like crazy. Obviously we need a root cellar for optimal storage, which we don't have.

While they're too soft for eating, they're perfect for planting. Since I didn't need any more seed potatoes, I gave these to a neighbor who is just getting around to planting his garden.

• Don brought me up loads of compost from last year's awning-cleaning and dumped it on a tarp in the garden for easy access.

• I got some of the compost moved onto the corn tires.

Corn is a heavy feeder, so I put two wheelbarrows' worth of compost on each tire and worked it into the soil.

You can see the contrast between composted and un-composted tires.

I only got three (out of twenty) tires done, so I'll continue working on that this week.

• Don got the drip system laid out in the potato onions (planted last fall)...

...as well as the five other tires I had planned for carrots.

• Yesterday afternoon I got all the carrots planted, about 400 seeds (hopefully they'll all grow).

• Don started on a long-overdue project, removing some ratty falling-down fencing in order to replace it with sound, well-built fencing. It's an ongoing project but he got an excellent start.

Now it's your turn. What did you accomplish this week?