Alpaca Lawn Mowers

The herd grazing the barnyard grass. 

We've had such warm weather this month and the grass in the yards around here has grown enough that I noticed some people mowed again this third week of December.  Last year we were covered in snow all month!

Since the alpacas seem to be only interested in eating grass I've been letting them out in the yard to "mow" the lawn, much like folks used to do with sheep long ago.  The alpacas nibble the grass down very short.

This morning though I notice Hollywick munching some ajuga, also known as bugle weed.  I love this semi evergreen ground cover. It is very hardy, covers the ground quickly, blocks most weeds and has beautiful blue spikes of flowers in the spring that go so well with daffodils.  

Belle and the ISA Brown hens hang out near by.

I had not however, counted on the alpacas finding it tasty.  A quick check of a couple of plant sources told me that all was well - ajuga is not poisonous to animals.                                                              

Rest In Peace Goldie

This morning when I stepped into the chicken house to feed and water the flock I found my sweet little chicken friend Goldie had died in the night.  Goldie was the matriarch of the flock and would have been eight years old this spring. She was the last of her hatching.

I call her my special friend chicken because she followed me around the yard like a dog and would stop and squat for me to pick her up and carry her when she became tired.

Goldie was the adventurous one who spent most of her days scratching through the yard and flower beds, rather than the open pasture, where she could find quick cover from hawks and coyotes under the shrubs or the back porch.  The ISA Brown hens took to her right away.  She was theit leader in foraging and they followed her willingly around the property while the rest of the flock has always preferred to stay near the chicken house.

Goldie, a Buff Orpington,  greeted me always with enthusiasm, spreading her wings and running across the yard to say hello and ask for a hand out.  This fall I noticed she had a hard time getting around and had quit spending any time with the ISA Brown group.  I knew she wasn't long for this world.  I buried her this morning where the yard meets the woods on the east side of the house and marked the grave with some flat creek rocks. Rest in peace little friend.

Too Much Land

My house has been for sale for a year as of November 1.  In that time it has had only three showings.  Yes, the price is well above average in this market, but so, at least to my way of thinking, is the house. It is afterall, a fairly good reproduction of the Locust Grove history house in Lousiville, Ky sitting on 8.3 acres surrounded by some of the most beautiful scenery anywhere in southwest Ohio, includes two barns and pastures and a chicken house.

Last week we had a broker openhouse to introduce the house to a variety of realtors and review some of its important features.  We also wanted to get an idea of what realtors in general thought of the house.  The general consensus was that the house included too much land!  This was amazing to me, because I thought its secluded location at the end of a quarter mile lane with barns and pastures for animals of all kinds was a real plus. I envisioned the house being purchased by a 50 something couple with young grandchildren who would love to come to their grandparents"farm" and see the chickens or maybe even ride a horse. I guess I was wrong.  Animals do tie you down if you don't have good back up care givers.  The result is I'm looking at stripping away half the acreage and selling it as building lots. I think I'm the only one left who values it as Locust Grove Farm, much the pity.

Late Summer Asparagus

One of the first things we did the first spring we lived at Locust Grove Farm was to plant an asparagus bed. We planted 50 crowns in two rows about two feet deep.  Our high PH southern Ohio soil is perfect for asparagus and by the third spring we were picking asparagus every day for a month. We ate it fresh of course, but also froze enough to have the other eleven months of the year.

Asparagus fern from August cutting with bindweed growing everywhere.

A few years ago around the first of August, I accidentally mowed over a few of the ferns. Within a day or two fresh green asparagus spears appeared in their place. I'd read that you could cut the ferns down in early August and get a second crop and here was proof. We harvest so much asparagus in the spring that I decided a second crop was not really necessary and have always just let the ferns grow, When the ferns dry and turn golden brown in the fall, mow them down and add them to a compost pile.

Single plant, then weeds, then the rest of the row.

But this spring with the cold and the rain, the asparagus crop was late in coming and skimpy as well. Weed were a bigger problem then usual which was a concern. I ate fresh asparagus sparingly and froze as much as I could. I decided then and there to mow the ferns in August and see what would happen.  The result was a small but very tasty second crop which I enjoyed fresh and shared with family. The ferns grew back very quickly and have stayed green with no signs of fall color here in October.

The calves are enjoying this little bit of pasture in front of the house. They are all weaned now, their mothers have forgotten all about them and they are happy on good pasture containing a good mix of grass and clover.

This shot was taken in early evening, hence the demon like glowing eye. That's Boxster by the way, the one with the eye.  He is an Angus crossbred bull, nice enough, but is destined for a short, happy life on the way to my freezer. At the moment the girls and boys are all together,  By the end of this month I'll bring the girls over to winter with the Alpacas and Belle the donkey.  Laredo, the herd bull, will join the little boys.

Learning About Alpacas

Here is a kind of scary Halloween sort of picture of Hollywick and Ginger, two of my alpaca girls. Ginger is older, seven or eight years, and is displaying the long bottom tooth these animals grow. I don't have any idea why, but the tooth sort of comes and goes as she is able to break it off sometimes. It could also be trimmed off by a human, but this human hasn't the nerve to try that--yet.

Keeping alpacas (I have no male and so I am not raising alpacas) is very different from raising cattle or chickens.  They are sweet, gentle little animals with no real natural defences except a little kicking and a lot of spitting.  And after living with Ginger and company this last year and a half, I'm come to realize the spitting is really a communication device. Also, the spitting's noxious quality seems to depend on age.  Ginger spits fluid from her stomach which smell like vomit.  The others, who are only about two years old, seem to just spit a saliva like substance. The spitting indicates mostly anger and impatience, though when the girls first arrived they seem to spit at me as a defensive move.  Now, the only time I get spit thrown my way is if I'm in the firing line of one alpaca spitting at another.

Tabitha, the gold colored alpaca with one of the ISA Brown hens. Background grey is Pixel, then Hollywick.

Apple Roses

Someone of my Facebook friends shared a video post showing how to make these apple roses for dessert. Last night it was my turn to bring dessert to our family's Monday night get together, and since I have Monday off, I decided to make the apples roses.

The video is really well done, but I am not a visual learner.  I like to have instructions carefully spelled out in writing. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but I finally made 8 apple roses using dark red Jonathan apples from Irons Orchard next door.  I wanted a really red apple that would also bake well.

My apples roses were a hit! They were not nearly as pretty as the pictured rose, but every body said they really liked them.  I served them with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a spoonful of apple crisp which I had made for my two year old niece.
I've shared the post and here also is the link: http://cookingwithmanuela.blogspot.com/2015/03/apple-roses.html.

Cooking with Manuela: Apple Roses

Cooking with Manuela: Apple Roses: Impress your guests with this beautiful rose-shaped dessert made with lots of soft and delicious apple slices, wrapped in sweet and crisp...

Summer Sunsets

In between all the rain we had some gorgeous sunsets.  This is the view from my back porch.

Don't Save Those Hybrid Seeds

The fruit of hybrid pumpkin seeds

The garden books always warn you that the seeds of a hybrid vegetable won't produce true to the hybrid parent.  That was proved to me this year with the "pumpkins" pictured here.

Last fall a neighbor tossed a load of round orange pumpkins over the fence for the cattle to eat.  The cows loved them and this spring the pasture had a nice patch of pumpkin vines.

The cattle didn't eat of even trample the vines and when we went to mow the field this month we found they had produced these strange oblong, soft skinned fruits that look nothing like the traditional Halloween style pumpkins from last fall.  I've been chopping them into piece with a shovel and feeding them to the chickens. They are soft like a big zucchini and have a center cavity with large pumpkin like seeds. The chickens think they are great!

Belle Has Hypothyrodism

I noticed Taco Belle, my little donkey, wasn't acting as perky as usual last spring.  She seemed downright lethargic.  A visit from the vet who drew a blood sample confirmed she was anemic. Further test pointed to hypothyroidism.  I purchased a jar of medicine from my vet - it is called Thyro-L and is a thyroid medicine for horses and other equines. It is a gray powder you sprinkle on grain or other food.

Taco Belle last spring. I call her the dog in a donkey suit. She wants to be petted all the time.

Belle is a small donkey. I don't imagine she weighs much more than 250 lbs.  I figured the most I should give her was about 1/4 of a teaspoon a day. Yesterday the vet came to visit for a follow up and Belle is still showing low thyroid levels. We've upped her dose to 1/2 a teaspoon which I blend with three peppermint pillows that I crush with a meat mallet each evening.  Belle loves peppermint candy and licks the bowl clean. Hopefully this larger dose will do the trick.

ISA Brown Hens Lay Eggs

Brown eggs are not any better than white eggs but for some reason I just like them best.  Often the shells have different intensities of brown.  I like the darkest ones the best.

ISA Brown eggs. 

I've been very pleased with the ISA Brown hens so far.  They are prolific egg layers and seem to be very smart little chickens. Their eggs are not as big as the Aracanas, the New Hampshires or the Black Jersey Giant hen's eggs but they are big enough to qualify as large eggs.

Goldie the Buff Orpington with some of the ISA Brown hens.

Heifer Calf Bought at the Fair

Heifer calf Sally Jo with her 4H member Shelby.

I hadn't been to the county fair's junior livestock sale for several years, but this year I decided I'd attend to see how the sale might go - given the high cattle prices in the market right now.

The Warren County Fair Junior Livestock Show is like any other county fair show - the kids work hard to bring a good animal to the fair and also work hard to drum up support for their animal the day of the sale.

I was expecting big prices since the "truck" was paying $2.33 a pound on the hoof.  the "truck" means the sale barn where cattle are sold at auction to the highest bidder and truck loads of these calves are collected to send to feed lots out west. Businesses who buy cattle at the sale for advertising purposes, rarely keep the animal but send it on the "truck" to be resold at a sale barn.

Most of the calves sold pretty well - above $3.00 a pound and some even in the $4.00 range. Anyone buying and putting the animal on the "truck" would only really have to pay the difference between $2.33 and their final bid - which is a deal.

This was Shelby's first time showing cattle.  She was not well known so didn't have a lot of potential buyers.  I purchased Sally Jo for $2.75 a pound or $1171.62 - a real bargain for this nice heifer calf. Shelby is delivering her tomorrow.

Cattle Prices Skyrocket

Calving season is always fraught with worry.  Each calf born is the product of years of selective breeding and represents the farms profits for the following year.  If you've checked out the cost of beef in the supermarket or elsewhere you know that the value of this little guy is twice what it was just three years ago!

As I write this in mid- May all but one heifer has calved for the spring season. Unhappily we had one calf that did not survive - Samantha, a two year old heifer calved unassisted in March. I came home from work to find her crying over a dead heifer calf, with no reason for the fatality that was easily discernible.  Samantha is a very sweet cow, one of the Buttercup daughters and I was so looking forward to her first calf.  The loss is doubly sad because the value of that heifer calf was about $2500!.

Valentine with a distended rumen

My herd is full of lopsided cows. Cattle are ruminants which means they have an extra stomach that sort of digests their food, then they regurgitate it as a cud and chew the food more.  The rumen is where they store the hay while they go through the first digestion.  A cow who has eaten a lot of hay will have one side very extended.  That's the side with the rumen.  Right now, with this very cold weather, all my cows are lopsided with lots of hay in their rumens making heat to keep them warm,

How Many Round Bales More to Go

600 to 800 pound bales of hay

In November the hay man arrived with his long trailer holding 18 of these beauties.  I unloaded them with the front bale spear on my tractor's front end loader and lined up the load along the driveway. A few days later he brought 18 more. I stored those up by the barn.

The hay was bought to feed five cows, seven heifers, a bull, two bull calves, five alpacas and one donkey.

At this writing there are only five bales left - although everyone has at least one bale in their feeders tonight as the temperature drops down to single digits.

18 bales stored at the equipment barn yard.

The bull calves are eating away at their third bale.  The alpacas and donkey are working on their second. With just five bales left, the first purchase should last through the end of the February. I had hoped they would last the winter. That's because the cattle stayed on pasture almost through December and by the end of December I'd only put out 12 bales.

But as the cattle enter their last trimester of pregnancy they have begun to eat a lot more! The bull calves have grown over the winter and are also eating much more.  Even the alpacas and donkey are munching hay all day now.

L to R:  Ginger, Tabitha, Pixel and Hollywick

Hay is mostly carbohydrate with enough protein to meet the cattle's needs for a good fodder.  Eating carbs keep the cattle and other animals warm. So when the weather get really cold they needs lots of hay to keep their body temperatures up. The cows have thick warm hair covering and can take cold weather as long as they are dry and out of the wind.The alpacas have thick fleece coats that keep them really warm.

At this time of year everyone is bored with nothing else much to do they just keep eating.

Taco Belle, or Belle for short.  She keeps the alpacas safe from predators and hollers at me every morning.

Voles for Cat Breakfast

A dead vole

Our winter has been gloomy but relative mild, unlike a lot of the northern part of the country. One morning this past week while sipping my coffee and enjoying the view out the back porch French door, I notice a cat cavorting on the back porch.  It was Little Joe tossing something in the air which landed with a thump. Jasper, Harmon and Zeke were still in the house and begged to be let out to see what was going on.

Woodland Vole

Joe had captured and killed a vole.  I knew it was a vole because it was so much bigger and fatter than the little field mice - which are still resident in the barns. Satisfied that the other cats had seen his prize, Joe carried the vole off and promptly ate it.  A couple of days later Jasper brought another dead vole to the porch door, proudly displaying it for his brothers' admiration, then devoured it in front of them.  The amazing thing to me is that the cats ate the voles.  I feed these cats twice a day with a good quality dry cat food, which they seem to like very much.  Most of them do not like any kind of cooked chicken, though Jasper will eat bit of raw beef trimmings. Most of them like canned tuna fish but neither Zeke or Pippi touch the stuff. But they will happily eat a mouse or a vole, bones, hair and all, leaving just the intestines behind. No accounting for taste.

Voles can do a lot of damage to the roots of plants. I've lost a lot of perennial flowers to voles who I suspect live under the back porch all winter feasting on my expensive bounty.