Bitsy's Behavior

Saturday morning, Phil headed out to try to make the last swale in the peach orchard, and we hoped to transplant our plums there. He drove about five feet, slipping down the whole time, and turned and drove directly up, ignoring a previously plowed swale. He managed to get out of the quagmire, but his swale-plowing was done for the day.

I planted all the daffodils I could (only about 200), and the planting was done for the time being.

This afternoon, Phil tried to plow again. This time he was successful. Tomorrow morning, I have a new project to work on.

Saturday afternoon, Phil installed a full-farm water filter. All the water from the pump will go through the filter first, and we are interested to see how quickly the filter clogs from sediment. That's been a "honey do" project almost since we moved, so it's quite a triumph for the farm to have that done.

The weather has finally turned cold, almost dipping to the teens. While last year, I think our water line froze in October for a few days, we didn't have frozen lines until yesterday morning: the 11th of December! While we waited for the water to thaw so we could shower, we had a relaxing morn, and showed up at church for the final prayer. Some days are like that. And, while last year we had no running water for days after that first freeze, this year we were without for only hours. We're doing better in our systems management.

Today, Phil spent much of the morning getting sixteen bales of hay from a couple sources. We wanted to get all the hay we need until after Christmas, and we think we're set. That's a good feeling.

And we made a new bale feeder, in hopes that the dry lotted cows won't waste half the bale as they have been. Fern was more persnickety than usual: I hopped outside the fence and watched Phil deal with her grumpiness. It was hard to watch.

Last Thursday, I mentioned to Phil that I thought maybe Bitsy had been spayed. After all, we'd had her seven months, and no sign of heat. Friday morning, a male dog came around, and Isaiah, barely awake, glanced out the window and exclaimed, "He's mounting Bitsy!"

Since we've never dealt with a dog in heat, we needed to look at what that meant. Apparently, an average dog has a heat that lasts 21 days: a week coming in to heat, a week in which she can conceive, and a week of coming out of heat. She will bleed some, too, and attract male dogs for miles around. Of course, since conception is a natural process, there's plenty of leeway in that.

The boy dog, "Brindle," we call him, seemed pleasant enough. Friday through this morning he has been a fixture around the farm. We kept Bitsy inside overnight, and he slept in her doghouse. We took Bitsy up to church, and he was waiting for us when we came home.

We tried putting Bitsy in the cattle dry lot, with her doghouse in the cattle trailer. This worked well for a few hours, when one of the cows raked her with her horn. About that time, Brindle apparently tried to go after our chickens in the electric net. Phil and I knew nothing about it until we heard a terrific yelp, and saw the hapless fellow tear up the driveway, tale between his legs. We haven't seen him again.

Bitsy was relieved to be out of the cow pen.

So is Bitsy bred? We'll know the first week of February.

For the record: I feel sick about this, and have spent many hours blaming myself for not taking her to the vet and making sure she was fixed. I was practically hysterical after the potential breeding: it seems so trashy to have mutt puppies, a confirmation of white trash that I secretly wonder if I'm becoming. Phil, however, always regretted that he fixed our previous yellow lab, and is hesitant to do anything permanent. While on one level, he realizes we don't need the hassle of puppies, on another level, he's intrigued by the newness of the opportunity.