Summer’s Last Stand

It’s the second day of Autumn and this is the weather forecast for the next seven days. It’s only the second time we’ve had three days hit 35 and over in a row and the longest run of days over 25 in the past ten months. With no aircon, it’s been a struggle.

Our two fourteen month old pet rats nearly overheated despite bottles of ice and a fan and a bowl of cool water to dip in, and we had to keep putting water on them and bringing them their water to drink where they lay squished up against the iced bottle, because they were too hot to move even to get a drink. An occasional spoonful of ice cream or some frozen fruit also helped keep them from overheating and give them some sugar for energy.

 

On Sunday Mummy and me (and of course Sparkie) went to meet up with friends in the city. After the quietness of country life, the city’s crazy is always a bit of a shock. Luckily it wasn’t too bad this time. Sparkie as always handled it all amazingly with only a few small slip ups.

Preparation

Hard to believe it’s nearly the end of February already. The last three days haven’t even reached 20*C, and yesterday we had hail. And yet one night a few weeks ago didn’t even drop under 30*C, and on Wednesday we’ll have a day of 34. It’s been an odd summer. We haven’t even been able to collect any firewood yet because all our weekends off have been either 30+ or raining.

 

Over the next few weeks, the milking herd will get their pregnancy test done and then we start sending them on their pre-calving holiday, where they get roughly two months break from producing milk to rest before the new season starts. And branding the young heifers, some of which are starting to grow tiny udders already. It will be interesting milking them though, because they haven’t had much people contact in the last nine months since we’ve been living here and are quite flighty.

 

Our pet calves are growing so fast. From the tiny, fragile babies we brought home in the back of the car to these shiny fatties, eating so much hay at the moment because the grass stopped growing this month. By the end of the month the girls and Logan will be nine months old, and the big boy Spartan is ten months.

Happy Birthday to the MySparkie/HeroDogs Blog!

Fun fact: This blog is now five years old. I first posted on 21 January 2012. 145 posts and a name change later, it’s still here!

 

It amazes me the amount of people who own/work with cattle, and yet are clueless about how to handle them. From the farmworker two farms ago who had zero patience with cows and so terrified them with his roughness and loudness, to the neighbour whose Hereford steer broke through a fence into our calf paddock the other day because he was scared and alone and being chased too hard by a motorbike. There is a fine line between too gentle and too rough with semi-tamed and mostly wild cattle, and hardly anyone seems to know where it is. Too gentle and they ignore you, too rough and they panic.

After last week’s pleasant coolness, we had a weekend heatwave. Today it was forecasted to be 30. Well, it had already hit 32 by 10am and I was soaked with sweat feeding out hay and silage to the cows even with the air-conditioning in the tractor. The temperature is finally dropping now as the rain arrives, and a cool breeze is coming in my window, carrying the beautiful smell of rain on hot ground.

Trivial Details

Two weeks and three days into January. Nothing much to say really, but I said I’d post more regularly so here I am, posting some trivial details about the weather and what’s up on the farm.

 

We haven’t actually had much of a summer yet and we’re already over halfway through it. There’s been some warm weeks but only a few scorching days, and a lot of cooler weather.

 

Harvesting season is finished now, I think, although there might be one more paddock they’re planning to do at some point. They finally took the bulls out of the heifer and milking herds last week, so our calves (now seven and eight month olds) get to safely share a paddock with the heifers during the day. But unfortunately it seems the sick cow “Stray” didn’t make it.

 

What else? Skuggi’s doing good in his training. We went to George Taylor’s (farming/camping supply store) yesterday and he was amazing. We’re hopefully starting dog school again next month to keep up his socializing and confidence with other dogs.

 

We’re planning to start collecting firewood at the end of this month, in preparation for winter. Last winter we had only a week or so once we arrived here to collect wood before the rain hit, making everything not undercover too wet to burn. And it was a very long, very cold winter where the fire burned all day every day and the heater at night.

Hello, Summer

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.

Still Undefeated

2016. What a year this one has been. Very few positive highlights this time around.

At the beginning January I was in contact with a koolie breeder and on February 3 we made the trip to Melbourne to pick up nine week old Skuggi. Calving season started, and we woke up one morning to find the boss had taken all our new calves to a new home. We never got to say goodbye. On March 11, a cow stood on Freya and snapped both bones in her foreleg. That was a long, long weekend. She came home on March 17 and started the long road to recovery - twelve weeks before she was allowed to run again. On March 23 I went into the city with Sparkie to meet up with some friends, but everyone canceled. On the train home, I recieved news that our farm had been sold and we had four weeks left in our house. On April 21 we said goodbye to our beautiful calves that we'd raised and trained.

On May 1, we went to the Dog Lover's Show with some friends and Sparkie behaved perfectly. Six days later we moved into our new house. On May 17 Sparkie became very ill. It was one week before she was allowed to come home. We didn't get a diagnosis until the end of that week - inflammatory bowel disease. With a careful diet she recovered and was finally able to go back to work a month later.

While Sparkie was in recovery, we brought four calves of our own. We lost one to scours within a week. We brought another one to replace him, and we lost that one to pneumonia within the same time frame. The third replacement calf got coccidiosis and it was close for a while, but he survived.

On July 4, the day before we lost the second calf, Daddy came home from work and said he'd been laid off, because the boss couldn't afford to pay him anymore. We ended up working only on weekends to cover the rent.

Things continued to go downhill. Us kids were told we could have hay, grain, and milk for our calves as payment for our work at the farm. Well of course eventually we weaned our calves so milk wasn't needed. And within a few months he stopped providing hay, and by the end of October there was no more grain either.

We tried to find a new job, but nobody would take us on with our five dogs, four calves, rats, and a cat. Daddy got a part time job on another farm nearby but now they can't afford to pay us weekly as promised, and they're suggesting monthly payments. Which we can't live on.

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I wrote this on a dark, dark day, when everything looked so hopeless. The following morning, we got a call from our boss/landlord, offering us our job back. Maybe this is the upswing, finally. We will see. These last few days of 2016 are hanging on though, and it’s not just us that are struggling. The deaths of people I knew through movies and TV and even books are hard to hear of, gone too young and my heart breaks for their families left behind. May 2017 be better for all of us.

 

VIDEO “2016 || A Year In Review” (click for video)

The Christmas Season

Over the years I've noticed the feelings I have for Christmas changing. What used to be excitement as the end of the year approaches is now relief, and Christmas is less about "Jesus's birthday" and more a celebration that we have survived another year.

The Christmas season signals the start of the end of the year and in recent years, that can never come soon enough.

2011 was crap. 2012 wasn't much better. In 2013 things improved, but 2014 brought it all down again. 2015 was all over the place. And 2016 has been one struggle after another. Each December, I can't wait for the new year to start in the hope that things will get better. Maybe 2017 will be the year that it finally does.

We got our job back this week but it's not in time to fix our bank account for Christmas shopping. Our present pile is very small this year.

But, we are still here. Still fighting. Still hoping tomorrow will be better. And these days, that's what Christmas is about - the celebration that despite everything we've been through, we have not given up.