Calf Sale!

Arriving at work today, Tuesday, which is in fact my Monday, having asked a number of coworkers how they spent their weekend, I found I was feeling a bit confused.  One hundred percent of survey respondents stated their weekends were filled with lazy, dog-days-of-summer activities.  One hundred percent of those I asked reported going to the lake.  Other activities included “going to the fair,” “visiting family/friends,” and the delightfully general, “relaxing.”  Why was I feeling confused?  My thought was, “Why did all of these people have so much extra time for “relaxing?”  What happened to my weekend?

 

Yes, it’s true I have a four-day weekend.  By that I mean I work at a wage-paying job in town three days a week.  By no means are the remaining four days are spent idle.  My weekend typically involves gardening either at my house or in the big gardens at Tom and Carol’s, calf-chores, shuttling vehicles with Jeff, helping with cows, housework such as laundry, cleaning, cooking, putting up food from the garden… any or all of the above. 

 

To be clear, I am not trying to be one of those martyrs to being busy.  You know the type… “I’m so busy! You can’t possibly understand how busy I am all the time!  I don’t have time for anyone or anything but all my important, busy tasks! No one is as busy as I am!...” listing all their many, varied, “important” activities.  That’s not my point. 

 

What is my point? Summer is busy!  We’re all busy. Well, all of us except everyone I unofficially surveyed at work in Chester today.  My guess is that each of them were busier than they let on, but who wants to say, “Why, yes my weekend was filled with banal but time-occupying tasks around the house and farm…”  (The Busy Martyrs, that’s who!)   Truthfully, I’d rather be busy than not.  Besides, after being away from home so much in the first half of the summer, at this point it still feels satisfying to dig in to home and farm tasks and feel the sense of accomplishment that comes with them.

 

This weekend was a big weekend for the ranch side of our operation.  Friday and Saturday were spent moving each of the four bunches of our herd which had heretofore been split into four groups in four different pastures, with the bulls in each respective group.  Each group was brought back to the yard, the bulls separated out, and fly-treatment administered.  Newsflash: Cows get flies. Cows get flies realllllly bad. Bulls get them even worse than cows!  Do you like getting fly bites? Me neither.  I can’t imagine constantly having so many flies swarming around me.  I tend to reach for the bug spray pretty quickly.  Animals can’t apply it to themselves, so that’s where we come in.  They really seem to love the fly spray, which is mixed in with cool water.  On a hot summer day, it probably feels pretty good to get a cool shower and be rid of your bugs all at once! 

 

Yesterday was also important as it was the day our calves sold.  I’m not positive, but I think the selling price was another record high, and the calves look like they will weigh out pretty good at shipping time, so that’s good, too.  The past few years we have sold our calves in a video-auction format.  So, a local representative from the auction company visits the farm and takes a video of our cows and calves.  The video is posted on their website for viewing before the sale.  You can check out the video of our calves here: http://www.northernlivestockvideo.com/catalog.php?lot=19673&SaleID=816  The sale itself is televised.  Prospective buyers place their bids online or over the phone. Kinda crazy, and I’m sure I’m not explaining it very well, but it works. Even though the calves sold yesterday, we will continue to graze them until the shipping date in late October.  Tonight for dinner we are eating beef (spaghetti with homemade meatballs!) to celebrate our calves selling so well!

 

And speaking of food, another of my major accomplishments over the weekend was food prep.  Harvest is nearly upon us, so I have been trying to prepare planned-overs to have on hand for harvest meals.  I have also done some putting-up of produce from the garden and from our Bountiful Basket.  Right now, we have snow peas and regular peas in full force and green beans starting to come on.  Shelling peas is a nice activity for watching baseball games.  Snow peas have been eaten plain, in salads, and frozen for later.  Green beans will most definitely be processed into delicious pickled beans—one of my favorites!  I also tried a few new recipes this weekend for home-canned goods:  Strawberry Dessert Sauce, and Blueberry-Maple-Pecan Conserve.  Both of which were absolutely delicious when I scraped a spoon in the pot to clean out the left-overs, and both super easy to make. 

 

All of the activity over the weekend carried the decreasingly-subtle hubbub of harvest preparation.  It’s likely we will be cutting peas within a week to ten days, and there’s lots to do in the meantime before we start.  That electric excitement is starting to gather in the air, however. 

 

The other busy creatures this time of year are the rattlesnakes… More on this in my next post, due later this week!