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.  

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.

Good Friday

So on Good Friday, we decided to take our cows in for their shots.  They were due for their shots.  We loaded them up in the trailer and off we went to see the vet.

Waiting in line to get their shots.  Surprisingly it went by pretty quick, even for 6 cows.

The Vet is doing his thang.

Another project we did on Good Friday was that we put in an automatic sprinkler system and laid down some sod.  Let me tell ya, that was a lot of manual labor involved!  We wanted to put sod all around our home so we had to dig trenches all around the home as well for the sprinkler system, and we did it manually!  Man, I'm too old for manual labor.  And after we were done digging trenches we put down some sod.  It sure was tiring, but it was fun being able to work on projects together.  The sprinkler system we went with is the Rainbird sprinkler system that we bought from Home Depot.  So far so good.  It's pretty easy to install.  The hardest part of installing the sprinkler system is digging the trenches.  Other than that, it was not bad at all.  

Digging trenches is not an easy task!

Of course we solicited the help from our children, AKA our little slaves
with digging trenches and laying down sod.  Dirty boots don't go
inside!  They stay outside!