Farm Fresh Blog

Yesterday Liz (Vic Aust.) asked about the cat on the barrel.  Because I'd been knee deep in making that photobook and had also included a picture of Faith the Fuzzy,

 I thought Faith was the cat she was asking about.

Imagine my surprise when I realized she was asking about KARMA!

 Karma was my Rat Warrior.  My old barn cat, Chelsea had just disappeared and we were in the middle of a rat infestation. When I say 'infestation' I'm not kidding. If you can catch sight of a rat during the daylight hours, you've got a crapload of rats.  I simply refused to put out rat poison and we were catching rats daily in traps.

Then one day I saw a car speeding away from my mailbox shortly before a heavy rain. I didn't think much of it until I later heard a kitten crying. I followed the cries and suddenly a half-drowned creature dropped out of a bush and wobbled toward me. It was honestly the ugliest cat I'd ever seen, but in that moment, I knew three things:

A) Chelsea, my old barn cat, was dead.

B) That car speeding away had dumped a kitten

C) God had just sent me the perfect Rat Warrior

I named the scraggly thing Karma, because I assured her there was a special place in Hell for people who dump kittens and Karma would repay the bastard. Then I brought her inside. I had faith that she would be my Rat Warrior. After all, God had sent this little beast. No matter that she was tinier than the rats, I knew that she was destined for greatness.

And she was.  She became the best rat killer we ever had.  Karma was proof that God will provide if you just have faith. I knew without a doubt that despite her size, she was the answer to our rat problem. After all, God had sent me a warrior. She lived up to her name. She was a rodent killing machine.

Karma preferred to live outside and did so for most of her years. One cold night she came to the window to announce that she wanted inside. I obliged and let her spend the night in the spare bedroom. I awoke the next morning to find her dead on the floor.

Karma was buried beside an apple tree.

She will always remain a part of that farm.

In hindsight, no, she wasn't buried under the apple tree. She was buried under the Pecan tree.

Read: Vaya Con Dios

“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.” 
Pema Chodron

There is wisdom in these words. I have just taken a bittersweet journey down Memory Lane and find myself in wistful regret. As a birthday gift, a company gave me a free Shutterfly photobook. I could have chosen any number of themes for my photobook, but I picked "Failte Gate Farm."

Although I sold my little farm to buy the ranch in North Texas, I still miss its tattered charm and wanted a way to remember it in its glory.

  Walkway from house to barn covered in climbing roses and grapevines

In their effort to turn the property into yet another cookie cutter subdivision house, the new owners tore down, cut down, and burned down the very things that gave the farm its character, so that today it is a mere shell of its former self. I have shed many tears over roses, grapevines, and trees cut down for any number of obscure reasons such as 'the trunk wasn't straight enough.'

So when faced with the offer of making a free Shutterfly photobook, I immediately began searching my files for pictures of the old farm as I wanted to remember it. Soon it became apparent that the farm wasn't simply the land itself, but the faces on the land.  It is said that "home is not a place, it's a time."  Perhaps this is true, but a farm home is also the animals during that time. Little faces, big faces. Many faces make a farm.

Some faces had been forgotten, but others hit me with a pang of regret. These faces shouldn't have been sold. And perhaps there's a lesson there too. If you think for a minute that you might regret the sale, don't do it. There are goats and sheep that I wish I'd never sold. The money just wasn't worth the regret later.

This age of digital cameras has been a blessing, for as memories blur, they are recovered in full color. The camera doesn't lie and thus it captured both the glories of the farm, and the stark realities. Just as it recorded the brilliant colors of the flowers, and the pairing of aged wood fences with lush green plantings, it also revealed that the wood fences were in disrepair, and that the property flooded more than my glossed-over memory recalled.

I lovingly hunted through hundreds and hundreds of photographs in my search for the twenty which would represent the farm as I wanted to remember it. Some were romantic favorites,

   but others made the cut even though they were poor quality because I wanted to remember some little face in the picture.

 Dora The Explorer

 Karma The Rat Warrior

 Zena The Perfect

After I selected my photos, I was then given the option of different lay-outs, text, covers, etc. Since I love quotes, I began to pair favorite quotes with my pictures. Ironically the quotes helped center me and put things in perspective.

“Never regret. If it’s good, it’s wonderful. If it’s bad, it’s experience.” 

Victoria Holt

What started as a promotional card that I almost threw away has become a really nice journey both into the past as it was, and as I'd like to remember it.

Several years ago I began to cut down on my sheep flock. We had combined our ranching operations in order to sell one farm so we could buy the ranch in North Texas and this didn't leave us with a lot of space for sheep. I needed to cut down my numbers, but didn't want to lose those genetics. Nevertheless, I still ended up selling some of my best girls and my favorite ram. I kept a few old ewes that I was fond of, and some lambs that had genes I wanted to keep, but for the most part I was no longer breeding sheep.

No popcorn. No little white babies bouncing around the pasture. I won't lie. I missed it.

And I started getting worried. My old ewes are getting older and I really don't want to lose those genes.  It's funny how selective breeding works. On paper, you still breed the best to the best and hope for the best, but over the years, my idea of what "the best" is, has changed.

I have Dorper sheep. These sheep naturally shed their hairy wool so they don't need to be sheared. They are grazers, and yet they are also selective browsers, like goats, thus they thrive on weeds and scrub. They're hardy in the heat, and pretty parasite resistent, thus I haven't had to worm in years. I don't worm by the calendar. I worm if I see a problem. If I find that I regularly have parasite problems in an animal when the rest of the flock is doing fine, it's time to cut that animal from the breeding program. This has resulted in a relatively parasite-resistent flock.

I like a certain phenotype in a sheep, and began selecting for that years ago, but this creature was the exception. This is Ma.

She was in that first group of sheep I ever bought. In the beginning I favored the other ewes with a more traditional Dorper look, but over time, this calm and steady old girl outshined them all. Her first lamb for me was such a fireplug that I named him "Hulk."  After I saw Hulk, Ma had my attention. Over the years this old girl has consistently produced really nice lambs. She is also good leader. Not given to silly hysterics, this ewe makes handling the others so much easier. Over time, younger, prettier ewes were sold, but Ma has stayed.

And then there's this creature:

She wasn't the type I wanted to breed either but through a turn of events, she ended up with me, and I'm forever glad of it.  Shortly after I bought Roanie, Husband's patrol dog got into the isolation pen with the new arrivals. A malinois can do a lot of damage to livestock, and she did. Ultimately one ewe died and Roanie was so seriously injured that for weeks we considered putting her down. But she hung on.

This little ewe has the heart of a fighter. She now has a permanent limp, but not only did she live, she thrived. Roanie has produced some really nice babies for us. And although her phenotype wasn't really what I wanted to reproduce, her will to survive was exactly what I wanted in my flock. Her last baby was a single ewe lamb that really didn't impress me much at birth, but I kept her simply because she was a ewe lamb from Roanie. And wow, I'm glad I did.

 That's Chuck's fat a@@ beside Roanie.

Chuck grew up to become a really nice ewe. (As a very fat lamb, she once got stuck between the tire and wheel well of a truck. She was "stuck like chuck." This forced us to use a high lift jack to raise the truck and free her. Since then, her name has been "Chuck." If I'd known at the time that I was keeping her, perhaps I'd have put more thought into her name, but since sheep don't tend to come when they're called anyway, I give them names that help me remember them.

(Such was the case with Flower Pot, the lamb who got a plastic hanging basket pot stuck on her head and ran around the yard hysterical while the rest of the flock ran from her in terror.)

A few months ago, I started noticing how absolutely fat my sheep were getting. I'm talking 'hippo hiney fat." Since the only grain they get is a tiny smidgeon to reward/bribe them for coming into the back yard, their bulging waistlines just reminded me how little it takes to allow a Dorper sheep to thrive. And this got me to thinking about genes. And about what kind of sheep I wanted when we moved the entire flock to north Texas. And about losing genes. Roanie is getting old. She doesn't have a lot of teeth. She has a growth on her chest. But typical Roanie, she's plugging on along, happy for every day on this side of the grass. So I got to thinking about breeding sheep again.

Since moving some of the cattle to North Texas, we have more room here now to get the base flock I want again. So I called a friend just to see if she had any ram lambs left. It was late in the season, and she normally bands everyone, but what the heck, what's meant to be is meant to be. So I gave her a call.

Wonder of wonders there was one little guy that she hadn't banded because she was considering him as a ram prospect for herself.

She also gave me the option to lease his father. Other Half wanted to do that so we didn't have to deal with a ram later. I initially agreed to lease, but the more I worried about the responsibility of someone else's livestock, the more I leaned toward just buying the ram lamb outright. I looked him over. I liked his structure. I liked his parents. And since I didn't have to have babies right away, his age wasn't a big drawback. There was something about the way this little guy stood which hinted that he was going to grow up to be a nice ram.

So into the truck he went. He's adjusting pretty well. The girls are still mean to him. He's taken a few hard knocks, but they're grudgingly allowing him to graze with them now.

At the moment I'm still coming up with a name. His sire is named Dodge.

I started calling him Dodgie but he needs his own name soon before that one sticks. If he isn't careful, I just may call him Orville because when I watch him in the pasture, he reminds me of the lambs that will someday be popping up in my pasture again like popcorn.

Orville Redenbacher

Even though our cattle are 'dog-tick' fat, and don't need us to give them groceries, we still call them up and feed them from time to time because it's a handy way to count heads, check for new babies, look for injuries or illness, and keep them tame. 

Most ranchers have some kind of siren mounted on their truck to call cattle up out of the forest. Other Half has one of these sirens too but I never have to use it because I have my own cattle call. So what is this call which is guaranteed to have cows running out of the woods like third graders racing to the cafeteria?

 "It's that loud-mouthed black & white dawg!"

Yes, from the time we leave the cabin, Lily barks her silly head off as we drive down the road to feed the cattle. Her barks bounce off the trees and echo across the pasture, never failing to call up greedy hippo-hiney cattle.

"You're welcome. This is just one more service offered from Barbed Wire Border Collies, Inc."

Actual Phone Conversation Overheard Between Other Half & His Old Friend:

"Whatcha doin'?"

Friend responds.

"Oh man, I need your help working some cows. I gotta take some stitches out."

Friend responds.

"No, it'll be real easy. Just move 'em into the headgate, hold 'em, and take the stitches out. Real easy."

Friend responds.

"Well hell, you know what they say, "It ain't no fun if nobody gets hurt!"

Friend responds.

"Ok, I'll see you in a little bit."

And that's all there was to it. He was on his way. When you can call a buddy to help you work cattle in Texas, in August, and he's in your driveway in a under an hour, friends and neighbors, that's a true friend. Nothing quite siffs through your friends like asking someone to help you work livestock. And friends like this certainly pan out like gold nuggets.

Time and use has worn down the rough patches so these two work together like a well-oiled machine. 

With very little set-up or ceremony the pair settle into a comfortable pace.  They been working cows together for over 35 years.

And now, all these years later, they're still the same cowboys - a lot older, a lot wiser, and a lot more gray hairs, but like a dusty old pair of boots, they just fall into stride together. That's the thing about old friends . . .

We just returned from another trip to North Texas and, as always, it was eventful. We were there all week, but not together. The boys went up on Sunday and brought some furniture, and lots of lumber to build deer stands so they can murder my animals. (just sayin') I came in on Thursday just as Son and his friend were finishing up their trip. Other Half stayed Thursday and then left Friday. I stayed until Sunday. That left me alone in a remote area with limited cell phone coverage. Several people asked me,

"Aren't you afraid to be there all alone?"

First of all, I'm never alone. I have Lily, and Dillon, and Ranger.

You are never alone if you have a Blue Heeler. You will always have a body guard. A Blue Heeler is like having a platoon of marines by your side.

Then there is the fact that I am a trained police officer for a large metropolitan city. Once you've gone toe-to-toe with crack heads and drug dealers, somehow creatures with smaller brains aren't that frightening. And we have already established the fact that I have firearms and won't hesitate to use them. Being a crime scene investigator in a large city will remove any hesitation you might have to pull the trigger.

Thus, I felt pretty safe. The only thing I worried about was one of the dogs getting bitten by a snake. Other Half has a friend who lost his Blue Heeler this weekend to a rattlesnake. They rushed him to the vet but he died anyway. So.... even though I'm a tree-hugging, environmentalist, and I normally practice a 'live and let live' philosophy, when it's your dog dying on that table at the vet clinic, we can discuss ecology and my willingness to shoot the little bastards on sight.

So if I see them, all copperheads and rattlesnakes die around here. End of discussion.

I have, however, forbid the boys to shoot my coyotes, raccoons, bobcats, and any cougars. (That may change when my sheep and dairy goats move up, but for now, it's live and let live.)  That said, perhaps you can weigh in on this:

There has been much discussion about what left this. My first thought was that it was a giant hairball - coughed up by a really, really big cat.

Other folks say it's coyote poop. I can see that too. If the fecal matter has fallen out already, then I could see this being a coyote poop. On the other hand, I've had some big dogs, and that's a really, really long canine poop. Of course, maybe Wiley Coyote had a Thanksgiving dinner and left this giant Mr. Hankey. (See! I'm not so old that I haven't seen some of the cartoons you young folks watch. For those of you in my generation and above, google South Park and "Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo." I'm not a big South Park fan, but the boys loved it.)

Anyway, the majority seem to lean toward coyote poop. When I found this, it was coiled, more like a poop than a cat hair ball. 

And speaking of poop!

Check this out! These poops were all over the ranch! Someone has been eating a lot of prickly pear cactus!

You didn't realize when you sat down at the computer with your cup of coffee that this would be a blog about poop, did you?

But that's the thing about living with wild things. If you want to study them, you've got to study poop. There is even a word for it - scatology! I remember learning that word as a child and being fascinated by the study of animal poop. (I was a weird kid.)

Okay, but let's get away from poop for a minute to share some of the other wildlife I found this weekend.

These guys were everywhere. Now we normally have lots and lots of bugs, so it takes something really interesting to get my attention, and these guys did it. We were inundated with these green bugs. I counted over 15 in a 2'x2' patch of short weeds.

But it wasn't so much their numbers that earned my attention. It was their bad-ass attitude. Friends and Neighbors, when a little bug acts like a bad-ass, I begin to wonder if there isn't some truth to it. So I took lots of pictures, and warned the dogs not to chase them. (Catching grasshoppers is a big sport that I discourage.)

How does a bug behave like a bad-ass, you ask? Trust me, you'll know. Since I was curious, I studied them a bit. Most bugs are oblivious of you. You are no more than furniture to them. But these bugs will puff their antennae forward and trot toward you in an aggressive manner if you put your hand too close. Hmmm.... Bad-ass Bug!

Since I didn't have reliable internet access, I had to wait until a friend could post the pics for me on her facebook page. The result:

Blister Beetle - one of perhaps 380 different bugs called a blister beetle

     That made sense. Son's friend had blisters all over the back of his neck where something stung him. I had crushed something in my pants a few years ago that resulted in a nasty long blister above my knee, so I knew we had blister beetles, I just didn't know what they looked like.

     Oh well, since we have no hay fields we plan to use for horse hay, outside of keeping the dogs from eating them, they are no more a problem for me than wasps. Therefore when I caught them in the house, I just tossed them outside. See? I really do try to practice a 'live and let live' mindset.

     I will admit to stomping a scorpion in my office though. I had a weak moment. In the future I'll try to toss them outside. That should last until the first time I step on one in bare feet in the middle of the night, or the Labrador eats one. Then I may have to go back to stomping them. We'll see.

 Scorpion-free zone

The internet is filled with unique alarm clocks designed to separate even the most dedicated of sleepers from his pillow. We don't have any of those clocks around here though. Other Half is the kind of heavy sleeper that makes you want to take his pulse to decide whether you need to call the Medical Examiner or not, so getting him out of bed is a chore that should begin an hour before you actually need his feet on the floor.  I have, however, discovered the best alarm clock on the market:

The Obsession Alarm Clock!

The Obsession Alarm Clock cuts the hour-long wake-up time into a mere 15 minutes! Yes! Fifteen minutes. Installation is easy!

Merely open the bedrom door, insert the Obsession Alarm Clock, toss in a ball, and close the door. The Obsession Alarm Clock does the rest!

No more trying to reason with an unresponsive lump in the bed. No more shaking the sleeper. No more pleading. No more pulling back the covers. Simply insert the Obsession Alarm Clock, toss in a ball, and forget about it!

The Obsession Alarm Clock works with state of the art efficiency to poke, prod, and scratch even the most heavy of sleeper out of his slumber.

And all this can be yours for the simple price of -   

$19.95 + shipping and handling!

But WAIT!  There's more!

Just pay additional shipping and handling charges and we will ship not one, but -

TWO Obsession Alarm Clocks! 

Act now! Supplies are limited!

(Ball not included.)

     By the light of the smuggler's moon I listened. Yep. There it was. The sound of trouble. I padded back into the house, locked up the rest of the dogs, and flicked a finger to confirm to Lily, that yes, once again, she was the "chosen one."  The little dog raced to the front door and waited while I put on my boots.

    I stood on the front porch and listened again. The water well was still running. Since I'd done a livestock check before the storm swept through that night, I knew no water spigots had been left on by humans. That meant a cow had rubbed her head on a spigot and turned on the water. It was now 1:30 am. The water could have been running since 8:30 pm.

     And it was. By the light of the full moon I could see that the damned calves had flooded the barnyard again. This was what had gotten them locked into the back pasture in the first place. They had only been up in the front pasture for two days, and on Day Two they flooded the pasture. Clearly it was time to lock them in the back again. But first, they must be sorted.

     Just this week Other Half bought a few more little heifers to add to the gene pool. They are considerably younger than the other calves and I'd noticed that they weren't getting their fair share of groceries. Thus they'd been separated from the big calves.

But Other Half had just decided to turn everyone together in the front pasture to enjoy the lush grass that was growing so fast that even the sheep couldn't keep ahead of it. Well, scratch that little experiment. I turned off the water spigot and glanced at the Border Collie beside me. Her eyes bore into me, blazing as bright as the full moon over our heads.

     No rancher wants to sort cattle at 1:30 in the morning. No Border Collie doesn't want to sort cattle at 1:30 in the morning. So with a sigh, I turned toward the pasture. She gave a happy bark and off we went. I trudged through the high grass while she bounced along. No one should be that happy in the middle of the night without loads and loads of caffeine. But despite my bad humor, her happy bounce tugged a smile out of me.

     Ready. These dogs are always ready. And with a quick salute, she raced out and brought the calves up. The youngest calves had never been worked by a dog, but this actually made it easier to sort them from the rest of the crew who wanted no part of that little black & white face with the crazed eyes which glowed in the moonlight.

     The younger calves were a bit bewildered by their nighttime visitor who momentarily stared at them like a serial killer, but then moved on to other victims. She selected the big calves and pushed these troublemakers into the arena, where they could be released into the back pastures.

     It took me longer to walk out there than it took the Border Collie to separate the cattle and push the offenders back into jail. And by the light of the smuggler's moon, we walked back to the house. She had that jaunty little trot with her gay tail waving in the air like a flag raised to the world. It was a good night to be a farm collie.

     I couldn't help but smile as the moonlight shone off her bright eyes. She searched my face, hoping for more chores ahead. I listened in the silence. The water well was quiet once more. It was a good night to be a farm collie. It was a good night to have a farm collie.

"Closing the gate on one more chore!"

   We have a fig tree in the back yard. I pay little or no attention to this tree except when Other Half goes bat-shit crazy because the goats or sheep have been pruning the leaves and breaking limbs in their attempt to prune the leaves. Frankly, I think they've done the tree a favor. Five years ago, it was little more than a sprawling woody bush with branches going everywhere. Now that sucker has learned to grow up, Up, UP! It is now a tree. (You're welcome. Ruminant Tree-trimming Services available everywhere for a small fee!)

Anyway, not only is it becoming a nice tree, but it's bearing fruit.

 Unfortunately we didn't notice it had fruit until other members of the family brought it to our attention. Other Half looked out the living room window, saw this, and stroked.

  Really? He should have learned by now. And he should be happy that I'm not charging him for tree-trimming services on his fig and pecan trees. Just sayin'.

But this time he accused them of not only eating leaves, but eating FIGS! He called them: FIG THIEVES!

I call them budding scientists. They have discovered Isaac Newton's theory of gravity. In 1687 Isaac Newton saw an apple fall from a tree and began wondering if the same force at work on the apple also affected the moon. This led to questions about why the apple fell to Earth but not the moon.  He puzzled on this a while and came up with a theory.

"Every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle with a force that is directly proportional to the product of the masses of the particles and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them."

Did you get that? No? Let me put this way:

"If you shake the tree, a fig will fall down."

Yes, our young physicists have discovered that if they shake the tree, rotten figs will fall to the ground, thus providing fig newtons for everyone!

I love this shot of Sparrow with her foot on that branch shaking it like a palm tree in a hurricane!

Growing up in a place thick with rattlesnakes, my momma imprinted this lesson on me pretty early:

"Thou shalt not mess with ratttlesnakes! If you, as a tiny child, get bitten, we are too far away from the hospital to save you."

Alrightie then. So as children, although we regularly saw rattlesnakes, we did NOT under any circumstances get up close and personal with them unless the head had been cut off. Then and only then could you play cruel jokes on Mom, like stuffing the body of a 5' rattlesnake under the back porch just enough so that his lack of a head was hidden.

This particular snake had to be pulled back into place multiple times before my mother saw it because the body kept crawling off without its head. YES! Snakes do that. You learn weird facts like this when you live in the boondocks. So we pulled that sucker back into position many times. It was a pain in the butt, but the payoff when she came home carrying groceries and saw that giant snake sticking out from under the porch gave us riotous amusement. Forty years later, I'm still laughing. (My family has always been a little twisted.)

But I digress . . .

Each year Other Half simply MUST attend the grand Hunting Show which hosts booths and booths of vendors with plans on separating the hunter from his money. This is DisneyWorld for men. I get dragged along each year just because Other Half enjoys my company. (I guess that's the reason.) Anyway, for the most part, Father and Adult Son run around with starry eyes like children, darting from booth to booth. I have little or no interest in the booths, except one particular one.

  Yes, those are rattlesnakes. Lots and lots of rattlensakes. This is a large pen and they are clustered along each wall, and underneath the lawnchairs and table in the center. The pen is made from a double layer of hardware cloth (1/4" wire mesh) tacked over 2x4 boards. The wire is the covered with 1' boards on the seams. This gives a relatively snake-proof enclosure. The humans step through a raised doorway to enter the pen. Thus no snake can squeeze under an ill-fitting gap between the door and the floor.

I tell you these things not because you, or I, ever plan on containing a hundred rattlesnakes inside a convention center. No! I have studied this man's enclosure because he uses it effectively to keep snakes inside. I plan to use something like this to keep snakes OUTSIDE! Outside my flower garden. Outside my dog pen. O-U-T-S-I-D-E!

I plan to fence this area in a pen similar to his rattlesnake cage.

And so that's my only real reason to look at this excuse for nightmares. That, and I'm morbidly curious about the people who do not police themselves and their children around these things. Last year I watched older kids lifting themselves up on their elbows to lean over the railing. Their feet weren't even touching the ground. This pen was not designed to support the weight of multiple small children using it as a jungle gym. There is only ONE man inside the pen to interact with the public, and not manage to get bitten by snakes himself.

 Those snakeboots work. I watched this guy get bitten multiple times. He's a walking adverstisement for snake boots.

My point is that this guy cannot be responsible for YOUR CHILDREN! This is not a babysitting service! This man is trying to look out for you, your kids, and himself, but it is your responisibility as a parent to keep your kids from hanging on the fence, poking their fingers through the mesh, and putting their faces up against the wire. Yep. I've seen it all.

And my conclusion is that these are future Darwin Award Winners, parents who expect the world to be so sanitized that it's safe for their child to be nose to nose with a rattlesnake because the snake is behind a wire cage.

 Alrightie then.

I was also able to talk to the main snake guy regarding my copperheads. It has come to my attention that  many of my copperheads that are the size of adults still have yellow tails which indicate they are still juveniles.

 I noted that my juvenile copperheads were much larger than the copperheads in his display terrarium which had the solid red tails of adults. My question was: When do juvenile copperheads lose the yellow tail?

He looked at my photograph and assured me that yes, indeed, that was a copperhead. Yes it was a juvenile. And yes, that was a pretty freakin' big copperhead to still be a baby.  Hmmmm....

I thanked him for his time and took more pictures of the way he built his snake cage. If this size snake is a baby, my flower garden definitely needs a snake fence around it.