A whole lot of manual labor

We have been super busy building fences for awhile.  The way the hubby wanted it done the fences should not be going anywhere for decades...unless a semi or something plows into it or something then it's a complete different story...
We bought a bunch of 4x4x8s, field fencing, and A LOT of quikcrete.  The wood posts go about 30 inches deep, then we put the posts in then pour concrete in to secure the posts.  That's a lot of work!  Originally we got an auger from Harbor Freight, which for a little over $200 worked pretty work.  But after digging about 30 of those holes you get pretty tired...so we finally broke down and bought a post hole digger that you attach to the back of the tractor from Tractor Supply.  Man, why didn't we just get this post hole digger sooner?  This thing worked soooo well and cut our digging time probably by like 80%!  No kidding!  We just wished we would have just gotten it sooner.  But oh well, this beast is worth every penny!

Now we have probably 70% of the fencing done around our property and the cows have more pasture area to graze and roam around.  We might not have done a professional job on the fence, but it looks good enough and we saved a bunch of money.  And now I have a new found respect and appreciation for manual laborers!

This is the County Line post hole digger I mentioned.

It works so well we are pretty pleased with it.  It made digging holes so much easier!

See our fence doesn't look too bad.  And we can see our cows when we look out our front window.  

Congratulations!!!

Yay!  Yesterday Miracle Baby got promoted from heifer to cow, she gave birth to her calf!  So far this first-time mom is doing a great job protecting her calf and did a good job hiding her calf!   

And we were actually able to get close enough to pet this little calf.  All the mama cows are soooo extremely protective of their calves that we were never ever able to get close enough to touch the babies.  But this time we were lucky and Miracle Baby actually let us pet her precious little baby.

This calf I must say is the cutest calf we've had thus far.  The calf has a very very unique color, not like any color calves or cows we've ever had before.  The color is almost like chocolate milk color.  So this time I will be naming this calf and I shall name "it" chocolate milk.  Gender to be determined (and no, I will not be allowing the calf to determine what gender it wants to be identified as)...I have yet to see where pee is coming out from to see what gender it is.

Meet the newest member of our herd.

Isn't Chocolate Milk just the cutest?!

So lucky we got to pet it!

Look at that color, so unique, so cute!  Doesn't
that look like chocolate milk color?

A lot of happenings part 2

This is Nutella's baby, also Jr.'s offspring.
She's so cute and I just LOVE her color.
It's like chocolate color.  Maybe she will
produce chocolate milk when she gets
older.  hahaha

The last post was getting a little too long so I decided to just start a new post.

With at least one section in the back all fenced,
we were able to bring all of our cows to our
property.  It was so nice to finally be able to
have the cows here with us!  But because right
now we don't have enough grass for them to graze
we have to supplement with hay.

Now that we had the back section of our property fenced and
our cows here with us we decided to work on a different project
and finish the rest of the fencing later.

We purchased this Lifetime Adventure playset online recently.
We are thoroughly happy with it so far, and so are the kids.
The playset is made of metal and hard plastic, very study and
heavy duty.  We didn't want to have the ones made with wood
because we feel like the wood kind is more high maintenance. 
The wood rots and deteriorates and the colors fade and you have
 to re-treat the wood every couple
of years.  

I don't get paid to "review" this but we are so happy with it I
just want to share my 2 cents with everyone.  This playset took
hubby and I about 8-10 hours total to assemble.  But it's so
worth it!  The kids LOVE this thing they play on it all the time!
It's rated for up to 8 kids playing on it at a time and up to 1200
lbs.  The swings are rated for up to 135 lbs.  This is a playset
I would highly recommend!

Recently there's a bird who actually built a nest
and laid eggs in the middle of our gravel driveway.
Out of all the places she could have built her
nest she picked our driveway... so for weeks
we had been trying very hard to not run her and her eggs
over when drove on the driveway.

Here's mama bird trying to protect her eggs.
We would go out there everyday to check on
the eggs and it's been kind of cool.

But....sadly...after about 2 weeks or so...all the
eggs started disappearing...we believe they were
eaten by snakes.  So sad.

So excited we finally got to harvest our grapes!

We have a decent amount of grapes we were
able to harvest.  We also harvested a few blueberries
a few weeks ago.  And our lime tree is flourishing!

While they might not be super big, they were
actually pretty sweet!

Though the baby birds didn't survive or even got
the chance to hatch, we discovered other surprises
on our property.  A family of ducks were at our pond.
We are pretty sure all 11 ducklings were all born
probably around our pond somewhere.

Here you can see the daddy and momma

ducks walking around with their little

ducklings in tow.  So cute!

A lot of happenings

So it has been a few months since I last posted anything on this blog.  A lot had happened in just a few months and we had been so busy I just didn't have the time to blog.  I will attempt to keep this as brief as possible so it won't turn into a super duper long post.

I mentioned in my earlier post that we sold our flooded property.
We had 30 days to move our cattle out of our old property.  Originally,
we were gonna hire someone to do the fencing around our new property.

But to make the long story short things
 didn't work  out with the fence guy so
we decided to do all the fencing ourselves. 
But before we could start working on the
fencing we needed to get the other half
of our current property cleared.

There were a lot of trees cut down and mulched down.

And we now have a very big burn pile waiting to be burned

But it looks really nice now that the land is cleared.

This boy was admiring this dozer and probably
wishing he could get a ride on this beast from the
land clearing guy.

Because it took a little bit longer to clear the land
than anticipated we were left with only 2 weeks
to do at least a section of the fence so we could
bring our cows to current property before the
deadline.

So we did a mix of t-posts and wood posts.  Around
the house and along the driveway we want to do
all wood posts just so it looks prettier.
We want the fence to last a long time so we did
extra work to make sure they would last.
We used 8x4s treated wood posts.  Dug the hole
around 2-2.5 feet deep, then cemented each wood
post in.  It was a lot of work and manual labor!

I think our hard work paid off.  I think we did a really good job
and the fencing is looking great!

We did a good job making sure all the wood posts
are straight and all lined up.  But we worked our butts
off!  We worked from 8am to 8pm for days in the 90
degree weather!  The heat and humidity were brutal! 

While we were busy getting the fencing down,
Black Pearl decided to get Mastitis (ok, I don't
believe anyone would actually decide that they want
Mastitis).  Her udder was engorged for a few weeks
but first we thought the engorgement would go away
because she was about to calf and that's what usually
happens to her udder.  But this time it was different...
it was engorged for a long time and it just got worse
and worse.  So we decided maybe we should do something
about it.  The day we decided to go help her treat the mastitis
we showed up to the old property and noticed her udder was
deflated.  At first we were happy that maybe her mastitis somehow
just disappeared.  But when we got closer we noticed
a big gash on her udder.  We think it got so engorged that
it finally burst!

That poor girl!  She had a 3 inch rip on her udder and
we saw liquid draining out of it.  We didn't want
her to get infection or anything so we thought
we would take her to the local vet.  Our local
vet told us that they might not be equipped for an
emergency such as this so they referred us to a vet
hospital about an hour away.  We took her in and put
her in the squeeze chute...and boy, was she mad!  She
mooing and everything and she was so mad she wouldn't
even look at me!

The vet told us that there are several kinds of
mastitis.  One of them is dangerous and life-
threatening.  And Black Pearl had the bad life-
threatening one.  Had we waited longer we could
have lost her.  The vet gave her a shot of anti-
biotic and squeezed all the "cottage cheese" out
of her udder and sent us on our way. 

                                                                                             

The vet told us that her udder would most likely
fill up again since she's nursing her calf.  He told
us calves usually could tell and know if the milk
is bad and wouldn't drink from that quarter if it's
bad.  But he told us to still try to make sure the
calf doesn't  feed from the "bad teat" just to be
safe.  If the bad quarter fills up we should try
to empty it.

We had never milked a cow before.  So this is
hubby attempting to milk it...let's just say it
ain't easy!  After about 5-10 minutes of attempting
we got only a little bit of milk out...hubby threw
in the towel.

Not just 1, not just 2, not even 3, but 4 calves (and possibly 5)!

Remember not very long ago (maybe a few months ago) that we bought another bull to replace Dexter, and we named him Jr.?  And remember how I was saying that I had a feeling we would be getting a couple of calves soon?  Well, it turned out I was right!  Jr. definitely was doing his job!  He got at least 4 (possibly 5) of our cows and heifers pregnant!  Peanut Butter already gave her to a calf probably about 2 weeks or maybe even 3 weeks ago.  Unfortunately, and very sadly the baby was just about 2 days old when it died.  The cows are still at our flooded property right now (waiting to put up fence at our current property so we can bring the cows here), so when we went to check on the cows a few weeks ago and to see if there were any calves, hubby found the calf lying on the grass under a tree...and the lifeless calf had all of his guts eaten out of him...so we think the coyotes must have gotten to the baby somehow and killed it.  So sad!

But on a happier note, Black Pearl gave birth to a healthy little girl a few days ago.  (I confirmed that it is a girl...Yesterday I saw it pee from you know where.)

This is Black Pearl's newest baby.  This is when
she was first born.

Precious mama and baby bonding time.

This picture was taken a few days after birth.

And yesterday when I went to check on the cows I first noticed a black cow with a calf standing next to her and I just automatically assumed it was Black Pearl with her calf.  And as I walked closer I saw Black Pearl standing with her calf in a different area of the pasture.  That's when I realized the black cow and calf I saw at first were not Black Pearl and her baby, it was Nutella and her baby.  Nutella must have given birth yesterday.  The baby looked so cute and so spankin' new!

Congratulations to Nutella, the first time mom!
Baby was born yesterday.  Mama and baby are doing well.

Nutella turned out to be a very good mother,
and she's so protective of her calf.

 What I found interesting is that even though our cows are very used to us by now, they would come up to us for cattle cubes and every once in awhile let us pet them, but when it comes to their babies, ALL OF THEM are super protective of their calves.  They won't let us come too close to them at all.  Yesterday when I was trying to get close to Nutella and her calf just so I could have a good look at the calf, EVERY TIME I got maybe about 5-10 feet away from them Nutella would turn around and start walking away and then her baby would follow behind her.  I guess it doesn't matter if you're a human or animal, the mother's protective instinct is definitely there.


Rainbow is also pregnant and she looks like she's ready to pop any time now!  And her udders are getting bigger as well.  Miracle Baby is the possibly 5th pregnant cow that we have but we are not a 100% sure yet.

Rainbow is getting big.  This heifer will soon be
graduating from being a heifer and getting promoted
to Mama cow.

Third flooding anniversary

Three years ago today, our lives forever changed.  The little property on the river that we were living our dreams on was flooded.  We lost almost everything that we've ever owned.  But of course, we were very grateful that our lives were spared and for the love and support our friends and families had shown us during that crazy time of our lives.

One last look at this beautiful property on the river that we made
so many happy memories on.

And just right before our third flooding anniversary we sold this property that we loved so much.  We really do love that property on the river that's why we held on to it for the past 3 years.  But now we are finally ready to let it go.  And at this time it just felt right to sell it.  Little did anyone know, and I didn't think the flood would affect us so much, but for the past 3 years we actually suffered from what I believe to be PTSD.  Every time it rains hard, we get really really nervous and really really worried about our cows.  Especially hubby, he gets really anxious and would constantly check the weather and make sure he would be able to go get the cows out if we needed to.  So with this place being sold, I think it would help us get some "emotional relief".

The Plant killer

So I've been wanting to get into gardening for quite some time.  But I was afraid to do so because I am a plant killer!  I murder plants...not intentionally, of course.  I wasn't born with a green thumb, ok?  So don't judge.  But last year I was given a couple of fruit trees/plants by various friends.  I was determined to NOT kill them this time.  And guess what?  Hard work paid off!  Look at all the fruit trees/plants they're all bearing fruits!  It's so exciting.  I never knew this gardening thing could be so exciting!  Everyday I go outside to check on the plants and see that the fruits are growing bigger every single day.  I never knew it could be so rewarding and satisfying.  Now I can't wait for them to grow big and get ripe so I can pick them and see what the fruits taste like!

So a friend of mine told me about Permaculture gardening a little while ago.  I've been looking into it.  It sounds so interesting.  Permaculture by definition is: "the development of agricultural ecosystems intended to be sustainable and self-sufficient:"  So there's a lot of companion planting involved.  Basically you pair up plants that will give each other the nutrients and nitrogen that they need to thrive.  Also they serve us natural "pest control" and "weed control" for each other.  There are just so much to learn about this whole permaculture and companion planting thing.  I think I'm just barely scraping the surface as of now.  Couple of years after planting, your garden should be self-sustaining.  There will be very minimal maintenance involved.  I really love this idea!  I'm not quite to the point where I'm ready to do a full permaculture gardening yet.  Life is busy and everything costs money.  So we will just work on one project at a time.  

If you have any good tips or advice on permaculture gardening, do share!  

Grape vines are looking awesome!

Look at all the "baby grapes".  I can't wait for
you to get bigger and ripe so I can eat you!

Check out this blueberry bush!  It might not
be super big right now.  But there's quite a few
blueberries popping up.  We actually have 2 blueberry
bushes.  From what I've learned if you want to plant
blueberry bushes you need to have at least 2
so they can cross pollinate because blueberry
bushes don't self pollinate.

Can you spot the ripe one?

We pruned this lime tree a few weeks ago and
planted it in our garden area.  I will be working
on the companion plants to help it grow even better.

Lime tree might not look much, but there are
limes coming up everywhere.