Our First Animal Sale!

On Saturday, I cleaned for ten hours or so. I had finally reached the limit of toothpaste on the bathroom wall, so I scrubbed and decluttered; I went through papers and vacuumed.

In the end, the bathroom looked astonishingly different; the living room, not so much.

Phil alternated work indoors with small tasks outside. We moved the cow, bull, and bucks to the bottom of our cleared finger, opening up the space where we can work. Phil moved the chicken pen out of the orchard and into the clearing. We were starting to see an occasional fly, so he wanted to get our natural pest control working (translation: we want the chickens to scratch through our cow pies).

After moving their pen so far, the chickens weren’t sure where to spend the night, and they tried to roost on the ground where their house had been. Phil and I gathered them up and moved them to their home after dark: they get slow and clumsy after the sun goes down.

I could get three chickens legs in one hand, and then would catch the fourth, but my hands were then full. Four was my limit. Phil, though, somehow managed to catch and hold SEVEN at one time. Which is also about 50 pounds of sometimes-flapping birds. (On Sunday night he caught NINE at once!)

We celebrated the coming of spring at a bonfire party at the Zach Bush’s. Zach has been learning about the benefits of going barefoot. Called “grounding,” as I understand it, oxygen often loses an electron which makes it a damaging free radical. By going barefoot, we can pick up the extra electrons on the surface of the earth.

After all, until 1910, when Goodyear started to make shoes with rubber soles, people were either barefoot, or shod in natural (conducting?) material, not insulated.

So I’m making the effort to go barefoot. As long as I’m not in a spot with many clods, I rather like it.

I planted out onions all afternoon. I was horrified and embarrassed to realize that, although my plants are still all upright and chipper, some of the soil blocks were dessicated and hard. How could those tender rootlets still be growing?

I almost threw up my hands at that point. My transplanted onions need watering. I need to keep transplanting onions. The greenhouse plants are not getting enough water with once a day watering. How is the little bum lamb? What about lunch for the boys? Have the chicks been fed and watered? Don’t forget to take photos of the beautiful leaves and flowers on the plum tree; the flowers on the peach and the apricots!

It’s a lot of mental gymnastics to keep everything alive!

But I decided to do what I could. Water the transplants. Water in the greenhouse. Check the chicks. See that the boys ate enough raisins to skip lunch. (!) Transplant as many onions as possible, and leave the rest for another day. (Didn’t quite get the camera out, though. Beautiful photos of flowering trees will have to come another day.)

The “just do the next thing” strategy worked well.

We also received delivery of another cow and her calf, sight unseen. She’s eight years’ old, and, apparently, milks out 2.5 gallons a day when the grass is green.

If so, she’s one of the cows that is almost too generous for her own good. While our cows are plump and glossy, the new cow is bony, with a saggy, dried, pendulous udder. We’ve never seen such an ugly udder before, and it was a bit disappointing.

This cow and heifer have a different face, convex, rather than concave. As a positive, she has a good straight backbone, and is due to calve in early July. She’s been hand-milked, and her calf has been (somewhat) trained to the halter.

As we were leaving, the driver commented that our little black lambs were the cutest thing he’d ever seen. This driver is a tobacco chewing, cell-phone talking man who drives his truck for Amish folk who have need. It was quite incongruous to have this tough farmer gushing (no, really: GUSHING) over our little black lambs.

It turned out that his young grandson has been asking for a black lamb for a few years, so I sent one home with him for a greatly reduced rate. He has a bottle fed lamb; Isabella now has only two lambs that will try to nurse; a grandson is happy; and I have one fewer sheep to dispose of.

It was our first animal sale!