December 30, 2016

Tralah, tralee, today's my birthday, lucky me.  I'll give my animals a treat, for each what he likes best to eat. . .(From The Jolly Barnyard , children's book.)

So today for my birthday we got to work on a project I wanted to work on, and that is refurbishing the greenhouse.  One, I sometimes have skin problems in the winter and can get sun in the greenhouse, and two, I want to get so much better at starting our plants from seeds.  I would really like a rocket mass heater in the greenhouse, but we shall see. . .In the meantime, the plastic on the ends of the greenhouse had deteriorated to the point of not being there, so today we replaced it with UV resistant plastic (like has lasted on the body of the greenhouse.)

We had an appointment to take one of our steer to be processed.  However, we couldn't get either of them into the trailer to go.  We had bought a two horse trailer (since it will be rare that we are transporting more than one full grown steer at a time).  We had parked it in the pasture to let them get familiar with it.  We thought they would follow us onto it when we were holding a bucket, but that didn't happen.  We are now feeding them in it every night, so we will see if that helps get us to our next appointment on January 23rd.

For insurance, we bought some materials to put together to make a bud box.  While we put it together
ourselves (much cheaper than buying a sweep gate set), we seem to have so much money in cattle (with fencing, trailer, bud box, feed, etc.), we are hoping perhaps the 20th one will pay off?  Anyway, the cattle have certainly been entertaining.   They even figured out how to open the gate to the pasture.  So in the end, we were worried about the cattle letting our dogs out of the fence. . .lol

The front pasture was not looking too green this time of year, so we had to move the cattle to the back pasture where there was a lot more green from different forage (our growing area).  We were worried that they would not have enough pasture, so we expanded the fence by putting a large gate in the growing area and adding a line of solar electric fence off to one side.  It seems to work well.  We watched as the cattle received their "training", as we were worried the day before when we were building it and they ran right through it and tangled it up and broke a few of the step-in posts.


We also had to get another stock tank for the back area, as we got tired of emptying and moving just one.





As far as equipment for ourselves, our kids surprised us with some protective gear for our feet for Christmas.  They are steel toed Wolverine hiking boots.  What thoughtful presents!