Don't worry, this isn't going to be a TOTAL downer post. I promise!
On Friday, I went to the barn and found 4 turkeys missing. Don't know what happened to them. Just gone.
This morning, my son goes down to the barn and finds one of the turkeys on it's back and still chirping. So I went down, and without being able to see real well in the morning light, I helped him back to his feed and figured he got chilled overnight (he was wet from his water). I got out the heat lamp, and found out what the REAL problem was. One of our cats, Peter the Great, crawled under the chicken wire and started to make little turkey his lunch. Now the little thing is missing his wings and in shock. I don't think he will make it.
I hate the uncontrollable parts of farm life. But you have to take the good with the bad, I guess. And you just have to learn, it's GOING TO happen. Nature will do it's thing, whether you want it to or not.
Now that we have the bad AND the ugly out of the way, now the good. We have cows! We went yesterday, and got us 2 big cows. Now these bulls will be dinner. Their names are Chuck and Porter. (Gaff's- You can choose which cow- Porter or Chuck- that you like!) And this is our first time at raising cows!
Here they are in the morning on the homestead:
Click on the pic above and you can see Porter is white faced, Chuck has brown and white on his face. Here is Porter:
They are, for now, sharing a field with Puck our male Jacob sheep. Puck isn't too sure, but I have actually seen the cows chase after him a few times when he got too close. We will move them from this field of dandelions soon, and then they will have a field of luscious grass. Little at a time. For now, we can be happy in the fact that we have veggies growing in the garden, eggs in the coop, and meat in the field.
Thank you God, for your blessings!
This crazy farm tale isn't over. We will daily have interesting, new things going on, good, bad AND ugly. We will just praise God for all of the experiences and learning, and pray we get better at all of this. Well, got to go for now, I see a cat in my house (barn cat!) and hear the baby goat at the back door crying for some attention. I need to get some clothes hung out before it starts to rain again this afternoon, and fight of the pain of this sunburn on my back and get back out there and mow.
Nature controls a lot with farm life. Rain, sunshine, predator, prey... I just hope we can keep up! :)
4 comments:
I hear on the good, bad and ugly! Poor little Turk. Part of the bad is having to make decisions about things like this. May be better to put him out his misery. Thank God for the little guy, and the learning experience.
The cows look good. We have two little calves, RibEye and Daisy Mae. RibEye will be a freezer steer (our last steer was Dinner Cow-an onery bugger too).
Good Luck!
Oh, that IS sad :-( I HATE that part of raising animals. I love them all and the thought of them getting hurt, sick or dying just makes me sooooo sad and upset. I should probably just stick with growing plants....my life would be less stressful. BUT, it would also be more boring because I wouldn't be able to spend HOURS watching the newly-hatched peeps play about and acting silly.
Neat that you got some cattle (technically "cows" are females, though, and the steers and bulls would be the males :-) Anyway, I remember raising some beef cattle, and I could NEVER eat the yummy looking steaks for the longest time after they were "processed"...anything that has a name just doesn't deserve to get eaten, you see, and when they canned Ada, that was a sad day. I have a hard time knowing Hubby Dean will be dispatching Ding Dong the murderous Welsummer rooster before too long. Sigh. All these hens that I've got will some day stop laying, and then what? I'm gonna have a million "PETS"!!!
How lovely! (Er... not the part about the turkeys.) Welcome to the world of cows! We have about 240 head of cattle over here. Two Angus bulls, 87 breeding cows, and the rest is made up of "young kye" ... heefers and stots. (Heifers and steers.) (Kye = cattle.)
You should get a COW cow. Fresh, raw milk ~ and you can love her because you won't be eating her any time soon hehehe!
Aw that is sad! But great about the cows. I wonder how much land do you have? While we are homesteading on less than an acre, it looks like you have much more. Very exciting! How are your bees BTW?
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