Well, this is 2017. I’ve been posting less and less on this blog over the past four years, with 56 posts in 2012 but only 16 by 2016. Hopefully this year it will go up again.
The first week of the year has been fairly uneventful. The money situation is slowly improving. This sudden summer heat is incredibly draining and we have no air-conditioning at this house.
Farm life is probably the most interesting thing to report on this week and I realize I haven’t said much about it lately.
We’ve got bulls in with the milking herd at the moment and they are making things very difficult. Not all of them respect people. Recently I was rounding up the cows on foot and one of the Jersey bulls started roaring and walking towards me. I was able to get to the round concrete water trough before he reached me, and for about fifteen minutes he stalked me around the trough, bellowing, before Daddy came back with the motorbike and scared him off. Now I always take a stick I can smack them with if they start threatening me.
There are several cats up at the cow shed, but they are much more wild than the farm cats at Pomborneit. But still, we’ve given them names like we always do. There’s Fatty Fluffy Catty, Gray, Plastic Cat, Stumpy, and Stumpy’s little black kitten who only just appeared last week and so isn’t named yet.
There is a young cow, “Stray,” who got scours last month and within a week had lost so much weight she looked like a skeleton with skin, and for a while I thought she would not survive. She was treated, but her condition went up and down a few times. By December 30, poor Stray looked like she would not live to see the new year. Her eyes sunk in, she was dragging her feet, she didn’t even have the strength to hold her own head up. But she is still here. We’ve stopped milking her but still bringing to the shed for grain, and she’s slowly putting weight back on, getting her strength back. Fingers crossed she pulls through.
Yesterday morning at 6am I was on top of the highest point on the farm, looking out at the sunrise. The air was already warm and the flies had woken up early because of it. About a quarter of the herd had escaped through an open gate at the top of the hill, taking an extra half hour to collect. By 8:30am, with milking finished and just the cleaning up to do, it was too warm for my sweatshirt. Another hour and a half, and I’d shed my beanie and waterproof overalls. It reached 37 degrees that afternoon.
Today, it was 30 degrees by 10am. Yay summer.
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