January 28
Last Saturday morning I noticed Sprout was having a little trouble eating when I fed her hay. That evening the problem was worse; she had some soreness in her mouth, sometimes tipping her head upward and to the side (as if to get away from pain) as well as spitting out food. I called Cid Hayden, a horse vet, and asked if he might be able to come out the next day — even though it was Sunday. He told me he’d be glad to come out early afternoon, after church.
Andrea came to help with Sprout when Cid arrived. He rinsed all the feed debris out of her mouth with a big metal syringe full of warm water, then examined her mouth. He couldn’t find anything except a few sharp points on her molars. He thought she might have scraped the side of her mouth with one of those sharp points; swelling in that area would make it to where she’d keep hitting the sore spot with a sharp tooth. So he sedated her and used a mouth speculum to hold her mouth open while he felt around in her mouth more fully, and rasped off sharp points on several molars. That seemed to alleviate the problem. After a few days she was eating normally again.
Read Also
Good weaning programs for valuable calves are worth it
Less shrinkage is worth much more money at today’s calf prices, so good weaning programs for valuable beef calves are worth it.
Our old woodstove has been smoking — the chimney was plugged. It’s been two years since we cleaned it. We didn’t put any more wood in Sunday, so the fire would be completely out by Monday morning. We didn’t freeze; we still had the pellet stove in the living room.
Michael and crew were here working again Monday, taking out more brush and trees in what will be three new little pastures for the heifers. They are piling and burning brush, opening up a large area that can grow grass.
Lynn got the tractor started and we put another big bale on the feed truck after we fed the cows. Then we took the stovepipe apart and cleaned out the lower end of the chimney. Nick took about 30 minutes off work to help us clean the chimney.
He and Andrea brought the tall ladder from the stack yard so they could get up on the roof. Nick was able to knock debris out of the top part of the chimney with a steel post. We cleaned it all out at the bottom. After we put the stovepipe back together and started the fire, the chimney worked very well.
February 5
Last Sunday morning was minus 22 C and the high for the day was minus 8. The wind blew all night, and the drifted snow was frozen solid. When Dani tried to go to work at 7 a.m., her pickup wouldn’t go through the big drift near the top of our driveway so she didn’t get to work that day.
The tractor to reload the feed truck wouldn’t start, even after being plugged in for about 20 hours. Roger helped Lynn carry the battery charger from the barn, and after being on the charger about an hour, we tried it again, and it barely started. We got the truck loaded, then Lynn used the tractor to plow out the snowdrifts in our driveway. The drifting snow resulted in many highways around the area being closed for more than a day.
Lynn’s sister Edna and her son Chuck were driving here from Billings, Montana and their roads were bad. They did make it here in time for a planned get-together at a restaurant in town with us and Lynn’s sister Jenelle. Dani, Em, AJ and Christopher came by briefly, and Em gave me an early birthday present — a book she’d had created from the first instalments of my blog (which I began after my book Beyond the Flames was published) — detailing the first 10 years of our lives from the time of Andrea’s burn injuries. It included some of the photos I would like to have had in the “burn” book.
The next day when Michael and crew continued work on the brush removal project, Nick and Matt sawed up some of the salvaged old fencing material they stacked last year during the rebuilding projects. Nick brought several skid-steer bucket loads of firewood to our diminishing woodpile. He brought a few more loads the next day — now we won’t run out of firewood!
February 13
We had a few days of warm weather and then cold again. Michael and crew got all the brush cleared from the area above the bull corral that’s been a jungle of brush, swamp and cattails for more than 40 years, with the swamp expanding because of all the debris in the waterway through there. Michael got it cleared and draining back into the main channel. This will help keep the flow going through the bull pen and the little pastures below it, and keep the water from spreading out so much and subbing through the corrals.
We’ll have more little pasture for heifers during the summer. With four small pastures to rotate through, plus three ditch bank pastures, we’ll have enough summer pasture to keep all our heifers until they are yearlings and then sell the ones we don’t need. The work that Michael and crew accomplish in creating these pastures will pay for itself in just a few years, and grazing those areas several times a summer will keep down the weeds and regrowth of brush so we’ll always have more pasture.
Last Friday they set 42 posts for the along the old ditch to create the new little pasture below the bull corral, and all the brace posts for the new fence along the bottom edge of the field to create a new little pasture below the one next to the barnyard and bull corral. There is almost a foot of frost in the ground but they were able to pound the posts.
Today is my birthday — another cold morning. Often by now the blackbirds have come back but they must be able to tell that it’s still very much winter here this year!
