May was a very busy month. Gregory and John did the pre-seeding land work, picked rocks and worked on the air seeder, with seeding officially started May 3. We had more foals and all the mares did well and the foals were healthy.
In mid-May our good friend Josh helped us start to build the new cross fence and put up the old fence around what used to be a hayfield. We are converting it into a pasture due to the short grass this spring. Josh stayed with us several nights to get a good start in the morning, and they worked until they could no longer see at night.
May 14 we branded calves and vaccinated cows. The calves are looking really good and some gave Josh and Gregory a bit of a workout.
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A few days later, Gregory got things ready so that John could go seeding. Then Josh helped us sort cows into two different breeding groups. He then continued working on the fence while Gregory and I hauled cows out to the pasture. We hauled the heifers out to the native pasture and then started hauling cows to the old hayfield. The west side wasn’t quite finished so after we had the cows and the two bulls — one for the heifers and one for the cows — all out to pasture Gregory stayed to help Josh finish the fence. I went home to take care of the boys. It was a very long day but very successful.
John gave us a bit of a scare May 21. He was feeling poorly and was worried that he might have appendicitis. Gregory drove him into Saint Paul’s hospital in Saskatoon and Barb went with them. Many hours later they had ruled out appendicitis but were not too sure what was causing him to have so much pain. They sent him home with a few different things to try. He was happy to be home.
For a few different reasons, foaling season was stretched out this year. We started April 16, with the last one born June 8. In late May I took two mares to be bred by a well-bred stallion in hopes of getting some fillies to keep in the herd. Then in early June I took a third mare to the same outside stallion. The rest of the Quarter Horse mares and one Morgan mare will be bred to our main stallion, Juan Peppy Sailor, and three grade mares will be bred to our other Quarter Horse stallion. We are thrilled with this year’s foals and we are already getting excited about next year’s foals.
Conditions were quite dry
I didn’t plant my garden this year until May 24. The week before it had frozen several nights in a row. We also had no rain. We finally got around 2/10ths so I put the garden in.
June 2 we finished seeding and the next day the guys started working the summerfallow. A few days later we brought in all the cows that were left at home. We had left 15 pair at home for three weeks with the bull that we were planning to sell. So we were taking them over to the Landis pasture so that the other bull could do any cleanup work.
We were thinking of selling the two-year-old bull because his calves were very inconsistent this year and many were just too big. We lost one calf that we didn’t find in time to pull. Our plans were changed a bit when our four-year-old bull failed its semen test. So we picked out some mature cows to put in with the two-year-old, as we didn’t want to try to put all 39 cows with the five-year-old bull.
Our plans changed again when we sorted the bull away from the cows. We had been feeding them oats chop twice a day to supplement their hay and lack of grass, so we knew that the bull had been healthy. However, the day we pulled him out he had a broken tool. Instead of selling him to someone who would only use him on large framed mature cows, we ended up taking him to Provost Livestock Sales with the bull who had not passed his semen test.
On June 14 our dry spell came to an end. It began raining continued until the evening of the June 15. We got about an inch and 2/10ths. It was beautiful and was the perfect birthday present for Gregory, who turned 35 June 16.
