Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

 Last week was busy.  Seems we ran from here to there and back again.   Here are a few pictures from last week: This weekend is the Purim.  Last Sunday I taught my chidlers (you would have had to have read The Big Friendly Giant to catch that reference to calling children "chidlers") the story of Esther.  It was a fairly abbreviated lesson, as I only have 30 minutes for the entire class, and we have to get in greetings and prayer time and general organization, but we hit all the high parts.   This week we are going to bake cookies.  The formal name for these are Hamantaschen.  That is the name the Jewish settlement in Germany gave to them.  And there is a whole history in itself with these cookies.  But in Israel they are called "Haman's Ears."   Since we only have 30 minutes I baked these up, but kept a few of the dough rounds for the kids to fill and then bake.  They take about 15 minutes to bake. This should b...

 This little fellow wouldn't cooperate with me for a good photo, but he is the first of our calves to go to a new home.  Gary registered all of our pure bred Angus calves.  This one is going to a place near Elkland, MO to a guy who is raising him to breed his little herd of Angus.   We have two Angus/Holstein cross calves; both heifers I think...one might be a bull, I am not sure.  We are not sure what we are going to do with them, but they will be privately sold.  As in; we will not take them to the sale barn.  Gary listed the calves as for sale on Craig's List yesterday morning and got a call just an hour or two later.  There is also a different guy who was interested in buying all of the registered bulls as he raises and sells them himself.  But he wasn't going to come look about them until the end of the week.  I'm kind of glad the guy got this first bull yesterday.  I like to know they are going straight to their new perma...

 Yesterday Gary had me come out and help him at the new corral.  We set up the new corral a few months ago and now he has added a squeeze chute on to it for the purpose of sorting, vaccinating and what not.  Gary attached a scale to the chute to weigh them as well.  He wanted me to help him set up and calibrate the scale.   It wasn't hard, so it didn't take long.  Then he wanted to test it, so he got some feed and tolled the herd up to the corral.  Most of the calves wouldn't go in...that would be this group here that you see.  A couple of them did though, and we got them in the chute and weighed.  Calf #286 weighed 575 pounds, and calf #284 weighed 560 pounds. Both of those are the calves from the Angus/Holstein cross cows.  They are not registered.  The other calves have been registered with the Angus association. I think they are all so stinking cute!

Gary has been setting up a better corral for us to manage this beef "herd" as it were.  We have 17 heifers/cows and about 12...maybe only 11...calves, so we don't have a large operation.  But in order to manage them we have to be able to separate them, vaccinate them...etc.  So here a couple months ago Gary invested in a fancier corral than he ever used for the dairy.  It has all sorts of swinging gates, both big and little, latches...etc.  In this picture above, which was almost 2 weeks ago now, we had moved 2 of the cement feed bunks from the dry cow field up to the new corral, which is in the field just west of the house here.   This involved a random misadventure on my part as I was driving the truck/trailer.  He had gone before me with the tractor leaving me with the rather vague instruction to follow to wait about 5 minutes and then go to what I understood to be  "where we have hay."  Which could potentially have been any number of...

  A couple of days ago, Gary and I moved the beef herd back into the above field.  It's good for Gary to have them close, so  he doesn't have to be on the road taking hay to them, and he can just walk across the back here to give them feed.  This cuts down on easy long walks for Bella and I though, because it the only flat place on the top of this ridge where I can walk without going up and down difficult hills.  So now I occasionally take Bella out to the dormant big fenced in garden to run some, when I am not up for a longer walk down to the creek bottoms.  I walk around and around in there and let her sniff in the rodent holes and runs in the weeds along the fence.  When the cows and calves are out there though, she assumes the above stance at the fence, ever alert to their presence, and is interested in nothing else. The calves are not used to her, so they will stand fascinated, just watching her.  All bovines are possessed of a large curiosit...