May 21
Last Sunday was cold and windy all day. We were glad we’d branded and vaccinated the calves the day before. After we fed the cows, Andrea put the feed truck in the stack yard so Lynn could load another big bale, and hiked home to get her four-wheeler. Now that Charlie got it running again, she can use it and leave Lynn’s four-wheeler down here for him.
Tuesday was Lynn’s birthday — 80 years old — and he got phone calls from several friends and all his siblings. Andrea brought him a couple of gifts that evening when she came down to change the water on the field below the lane.
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The power (and phones) quit working for a couple of hours mid-day and again late evening, and was still off just before dark. Our electric fence around the haystack wasn’t working and the heifers might get into that stack during the night, so I locked them in the pens by the barn where there’s enough grass to keep them happy overnight. Fortunately, the power and phones were working again by morning.
The weather was hot for several days and we were immersed in thick smoke, drifting all the way from several big fires in Alberta and Saskatchewan. We checked on Heather and Gregory and fortunately there are no fires close to their farm.
I cooked a big supper (Andrea’s birthday today) and Nick joined us. He came half an hour early so he could help Andrea set four steel posts on our hill pasture where the range cows broke off brace posts last summer. Those cows will be out there again soon, pressing that fence, so we wanted to fix it before they start reaching through again. AJ, Emily and Christopher came to join us for dinner and it was a lot of fun.
May 28
Andrea and I moved the cows and calves from the field above the house and took them around to the lower swamp pasture above the corrals. They are so happy to have green grass! We put one group of yearling heifers on the ditch bank along the lane and the other group on the ditch bank between the horse road and the horse pasture. There’s enough grass on those corridors to last a few days.
We took salt blocks to the heifers and to the cows and calves in the lower swamp pasture, and noticed that Dwanna (Twanda’s heifer calf) was very lame on her right hind leg. She was fine when we took them to that pasture, so something must have happened when she got there. Maybe she stepped on a sharp rock in the driveway or got stepped on by a cow when they all went to the upper gate and were jammed there for a few minutes.
Andrea put up temporary fencing along the big ditch pasture above the swamp pasture where we’ll be going next with the cows. Allan Probst called and said he would be bringing us more rocks the next morning for the stack yard, and use our tractor to spread them around. So Roger helped us take the hay tines off the tractor and put on the loader bucket. Allan brought two loads of rocks and smoothed them out where we’ll be stacking hay, and pushed the rest of the old straw out of the way. Now it’s ready for Michael to set some tall poles to make a new backstop for that haystack.
That afternoon we had a rainstorm/downpour. We were lucky Allan brought the rocks before it started raining; it rained for several days and would have been too muddy for him to get in and out of the stack yard with the dump truck without getting stuck.
In spite of the rain, Andrea kept putting up more hot wire so we’d be able to move the cows to new segments of pasture. She improvised a way to spool out the electric wire while riding the four-wheeler.
May 6
Last Monday we brought Twanda and her lame calf to the lane by the corral and put the calf on the calf table so we could examine her foot more closely. We were suspicious that the problem was not foot rot. There was no swelling around the foot and she had some hair scraped off at the coronary band on the outside of that foot and a crack going down the hoof, so she might have gotten stepped on.
The little hoof was separated slightly at that spot. So we cleaned it up, applied antibiotic ointment, padded it with gauze and wrapped the foot with stretchy vet-wrap (that doesn’t stick to anything but itself). We secured that with adhesive tape and covered it securely with layers of duct tape to create a boot to protect it, then put the pair back in Breezy’s old pen. It’s the cleanest non-muddy place she can be, with the pastures so wet and boggy. With a little protection and support, the crack might heal.
The heel flies are bad this year and the cows run wildly to try to get away from them. Poor little Dwanna, three days of running around in her pen being chased by heel flies loosened up her little boot and it came off. But I got a close look at the foot the day after it came off, and the crack is tight together — the foot seems to be healing. She’s not quite as lame as she was.
Sunday evening our phones quit working again (they haven’t worked reliably for more than a week now. We can call landline to landline here on the creek but can’t call to a cellphone or to a landline downtown). Andrea wasn’t able to call and tell me that she had to take Dani and the baby to the ER in the middle of the night. The baby burped up fluid and aspirated some into her lungs. They spent a couple of hours in the ER and then came home again.
Yesterday the phones worked briefly off and on, and Andrea was able to call at 7 p.m. and tell me that they were on their way to the hospital again with the baby. She was having trouble breathing. There was a different doctor this time in the ER and he realized the baby’s lungs were severely compromised. A respiratory nurse put a tube into the lungs and suctioned out a lot of junk. They brought the baby home again at midnight.
