The last couple of weeks of April were quite busy. Gregory and John started working on the cultivators to get them ready for fieldwork. On April 24 John worked the home quarter in order to prepare it for seeding, and from there both seeding outfits were in the field nearly every day for over a week.
On April 28 we had our first foal — a cute sorrel filly. The mare is one that I bred to an outside stallion and so I was very excited to find a filly. If all goes well, I hope to use her as a future brood mare.
A day later we celebrated Joseph’s sixth birthday. He loves barbeques, so we barbequed for supper but had to come inside for the cake due to the cool breeze. Gregory and I gave him a new-to-him bike and he was quite excited about it. He had the chance to party the next day as well with his cousins who were visiting from Eatonia.
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The next evening, Joseph helped me get a foaling mare into the clean straw, and we welcomed a beautiful red roan colt. It was the first foal that Joseph had seen born.
Colt health issues
On May 1 we had a third colt. He seemed normal at first but by the time he was 24 hours old he was having trouble balancing and staying latched to nurse. I took him into the Unity vet in the back of my Explorer. The vet tried some IV fluids and then sent me home. When I got home with him, the foal was even worse, so we decided to take him to the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatoon.
Gregory couldn’t help with the colt as he had to go in the opposite direction to get a hitch put on his truck so that we could pull our stock trailer. Mike Lewis of Burn’N’Iron was going to squeeze us into his very busy schedule and we didn’t want to appear ungrateful with a sudden change in plans. To make things work, I called our good friend Bill Gessell and he graciously offered to help me get the colt into the vet college. I drove to Bill’s place and then he drove the rest of the way to the college.
At the college we were greeted by very helpful and friendly people and they worked on the little colt for two days. Unfortunately, they couldn’t make any progress with him, so on the May 4 they put him down.
It is always very upsetting to lose a foal. The poor mare, Jackie, was depressed for several days. We have six more foals due to arrive from mid-May to early June. We have to turn our attention to them and try again next year with Jackie.
We were behind again this year and didn’t get our seed cleaned ahead of time. Gregory was finally able to get the cleaning plant going and started cleaning seed on May 4. The next day we branded our calves and the later that week hauled most of them out to our Landis pasture. We are very short on hay due to the long, cold winter and the deer. We hauled the pairs to a pasture that we had grazed for only a short time last fall before we were snowed out and had to haul the cows home.
On May 10 we thanked God for the blessing of the first spring rain! We got three-tenths in a nice slow rain with no wind. The grass and the trees really perked up and it finally really felt like spring. The next day we started seeding. I hope there is more rain in the near future but we are very thankful for what we received.
