Spring Cow Feeding

Hello to my (tiny) blogosphere of readers! (Thanks mom!)

I have been MIA for over a week and I missed last week's Thankful Thursday.

Here's Why.

Stressful caseload at school + busy track season + busy farm season/homelife = not enough sleep + little time for myself = SICK KATIE!

Yep. I spent the good portion of the weekend without moving from my bed. It started with a sore throat last Wednesday. Thursday I spent the entire, long day, which also happened to be cold and damp, outside for a track meet-- throat got worse and add to that neck and head aches. Friday I woke up with a fever in addition to the other symptoms and subsequently spent more time in bed sleeping than I did awake. My throat hurt SO BAD. I felt pretty awful the rest of the weekend, but thankfully felt OK enough to go to school starting this week. Today, Tuesday, I feel pretty much back to fine. I'd say I'm at 95% of 100.

Needless to say, blogging was a nonessential activity while I was trying to get back to feeling semi normal. I don't know if it was some version of Strep or the flu or what, but I was pretty miserable for a few days there. Thankfully, I never got a runny nose or cough--you know, the really annoying cold and flu symptoms. Just had the painful ones. My lymph nodes were so swollen I thought they would burst if I touched them wrong. Ugh. I managed to somewhat dull the pain and the fever by simply taking Advil the whole time I was sick. Better than nothing!

The whole weekend felt like a weekend that had been full of plans but ultimately, some things got pushed by the wayside.

What I DID do over the weekend:

• Jeff did convince me I was feeling OK enough to join some friends of ours for a lovely dinner on Friday night. Surf and Turf with beef from their ranch and shrimp from Pike's Market in Seattle. So good! Great conversation and company, too. 
• Jeff and I also attended North Star's Graduation Commencement ceremony on Saturday afternoon. We arrived right before it began and left immediately after it was done. I felt bad about not going through and shaking hands with the grads and visiting with friends, neighbors, and coworkers, but I was just feeling so awful. Still, glad we went. The speaker was a man named Flint Rasmussen, who is actually a Rodeo Clown by profession. He tours with the Professional Bull Rider circuit. He was a really great speaker and had some good advice for the kids. 
• Sunday, I felt good enough to get outside a bit and help Jeff with some cow chores. Photos will follow later in this post!

What I did NOT do over the weekend:

• Household chores and cooking. OK, I did laundry on Sunday but that's really about it. Special kudos to Jeff for taking my turns with pet chores and other household drudgery.
• I didn't do any blogging or spend much time at all on the computer. Mostly, I was asleep. Priorities.
• I didn't do the 10K trail race in Ulm, MT that I've been sort of planning on for a long time. (If I couldn't even get up to walk from my bed to the kitchen table, how could I have run 6.2 miles, hmm?) Honestly, as the weekend approached, even before I got sick, I was leaning toward not going anyway. Ulm is nearly 3 hours from my house and since I'm gone so much in the spring anyway, it was starting to look like a good idea to stay home. Turned out to be cold and rainy on Sunday morning in Ulm anyway. Hopefully next year. 

So, lets get back to the pictures and info of what I did do on Sunday, which was help Jeff feed cows.

Jeff, Tom and some neighbors spent last Thursday (while I was at the track meet) sorting our cows and calves into breeding groups, administering vaccines to the calves, and hauling the groups of pairs to pasture. We have four breeding groups and we breed the "old fashioned way," meaning that we don't use artificial insemination to breed our cows. Here's a post I did a few years ago, specifically about how we breed our animals: http://prairieponderingsmt.blogspot.com/2014/02/matchmaker-matchmaker.html. The post is worth a look especially for the YouTube video at the end. Anyway, this is the time of year when the magic happens.

These gentlemen are about to be let out into the world to do work.

Get ready, ladies!

Our cows and calves are already out at pasture and the men will join them tomorrow or Thursday. It's going to be quite a bit like the Discovery Channel around here. This time of year, the cows get a little extra feed supplement in addition to the grass they eat at pasture. It's called range cake, or just cake. We drive out to their pastures and dump little piles of it on the ground for them to eat. It just helps with their overall nutrition as they are rebounding from calving and supporting a growing calf, and spring grasses are still a bit short. Here is a post I did back in February that has a lot more information about range cake: http://prairieponderingsmt.blogspot.com/2015/02/cake-walk.html. If you want to learn more, I highly suggest you click back and read through that one!

I went with Jeff on Sunday to feed the range cake. When we drive into the pasture and get close to the group of animals, Jeff will roll down the window and hit his hand on the outside of the pickup door and yell, while honking the horn. The cows know that this is the dinner bell and typically come running. It always makes me giggle to see them run this time of year because their udders are still so big! They get pretty excited about their range cake, though!

The cows know that the cake comes from inside that bag and they are pretty eager. Some of them will eat it out of your hand if you hold still enough. I love that our cows are so gentle.

 We pour the pellets out into little piles in the grass and the cows munch away. You can really see in this picture how the cows have lost their winter coats and are down to their short, summer hair. The light wasn't great on Sunday, but their coats are actually really gossy and nice-looking right now. Overall, the cows and calves look to be in really good condition. The calves especially are bouncy and happy.

Jeff snapped this photo of me dumping out some cake for the girls. I like cow chores where I can be in among the herd. While you do have to be aware of the cows--where they are and what they are doing--overall, they're used to people and are really pretty gentle. It was nice to be outside.

The astute reader will have noted that I made mention to rainfall and was wearing my rain coat and boots in the photo. Yes, it did (finally!) rain a bit over the weekend! We ended up with between .5 and .6 of an inch of rain, with about .7 on our farmland to the north. There were PUDDLES in the yard! I had nearly forgotten what such a thing even was! The rain was a good drink for the crops and the pastures, but we'll certainly need more before too long, since we were so dry to begin with.

So that's what's been going on around here! What did you do (or NOT do) over the weekend?