Rosebud Says, "Hello, I'm Ready to Grow!"

Rosebud was 8 days old today, so she has passed that first week danger period!  The vet said that if she did not get enough colostrum her first 12 hours of life then she would likely die during the first week.  We were concerned since she could not get her mouth on Dandelion's teats those first couple of days,  but it appears that we did ok with the bottle!  She was full of bounce and energy today and was excited to get out into the pasture.

Timothy thinks it is really neat to have a "baby cow" around. 

 

These pictures were taken when Rosebud was 4 days old and still in the barn full time.  I think Timothy and Rosebud are adorable together!  That last picture shows that Dandelion was close by and keeping an eye on everything.  I'm glad she is being a good mama!

Since we were concerned about Rosebud nursing, I thought these pictures were really nice.

To celebrate Rosebud passing the one week test, we decided to introduce her to the rest of the current herd of animals sharing the pasture.  Violet and her calves seemed curious about the new calf.

Those calves sure have grown since we got them in September!

Here are some pictures from the pasture this afternoon:

Here are a few pictures that I liked of Christina and Timothy outside the fence on our gravel road:

Simon helped with the chores of feeding and watering, but then he went to explore one of his favorite places: the dump.  Near the pasture (in a secret location) we have a treasure trove of discarded junk from previous owners over the past decades.  Simon was having such fun, after awhile Christina and Timothy joined him.

One of these days we plan on cleaning the junk out and selling most of it for scrap metal.  But for now it is just a place to explore and find all sorts of neat stuff!  (I wasn't going to take pictures of such an eyesore, but I decided that we may appreciate having this record some day.)

It was getting late.  Time to leave the pasture and ride off into the sunset.

We give God thanks for sunny days, loving family, green pastures, newborn calves, and even old junk!

Free Venison

Both life and death are part of a homestead cycle, it seems. About 50 yards away from the barn that just saw the birth of a new calf, the highway and a car joined forces to cause the death of a young deer passing by. Matthew and Simon saw the truck that hit the deer, and since the deer was not messed up at all they hoisted it up into Matt's truck. I was amazed that he had it skinned and had the hams and tenderloin ready to be washed off within 10 minutes of getting home. It should be a couple of very nice venison meals for this homestead family!  Ya gotta love a country boy!

  Added later:  We had never had such a young deer on our table before.  The meat from this animal was excellent!  I guess being younger makes a difference in the tenderness and flavor.  Even if someone thought they did not like venison, they would have found it difficult to not like this.  Delicious!

Enter: Rosebud!

On Friday, March 15th Dandelion finally calved!  We think the little heifer must have been born around noon.  Here was the scene shortly after Matthew discovered the calf, around 3:30 in the afternnon:

We named the little calf "Rosebud" and she seems to be very healthy.  It has been fun watching her prance around playfully as her leg strength improved during these past couple days.  She has had plenty of energy!

Dandelion, the proud mama, has some trouble, though.  Her back two teats are not working and we are afraid she has mastitus in them.  Her front ones have been overly full and have been too large for Rosebud to nurse off them.  That's not related to the mastitus, but since Rosebud was not nursing, we have been taking the milk from Dandelion's front teats and bottle feeding Rosebud, and we are afraid Rosebud might not nurse even after Dandelion gets straightened out.  Dandelion has been cooperating wonderfully, but we would much rather Rosebud nurse naturally.

We got some mastitis medicine for Dandelion yesterday from Tractor Supply, but was unsuccessful getting the syringe into the back teats.  We are very concerned that this will mess her up as a family milk cow for the future.  Today the vet is supposed to come and look at her and see what he thinks.  As soon as he gets finished at the office he is going to call and meet us at the barn.

I'll post again with an update after we know more of what is going on with Dandelion.

Update After The Vet's Visit:

I am very happy that Mark Ratliff is such a fantastic veterenarian and doesn't mind making house calls!  He knows his stuff, charges what I consider a very fair rate, and is rather personable as well.  I guess we visited for about an hour in the barn after he had examined Dandelion and looked at Rosebud!  He's a good Christian fellow and it seems that we have a lot in common.  If he had more time I think we could have found many more things to talk about, but he had another call to make at a farm in Blaine.

Concerning Dandelion, Mark had some good news and some bad news for us.  The good news is that she does not have mastitis!  She is perfectly healthy as far as any bacterial infection or anything!  The bad news, however,  is that she has what he called a couple of "blind teats", which means that she was born without any milk canals in those two back teats.  That is why we could not get any milk out back there even though her udder was so swollen!   

Dandelion's two front teats are producing plenty of milk for Rosebud and we saw more good news today:  we got Rosebud to actually nurse off Dandelion on her own!  I had to guide Rosebud's face to the teat, but when she found the teat, she latched right on and drank!  We did this several times on both teats until Rosebud got full and laid down for a nap!

Hopefully we got enough colostrum milk into Rosebud within her first 12 hours of life.  Mark said if she did not get the colostrum needed, then she will be sick by the time she is a week old and would likely then die.  She is very playful and energetic right now, but we really won't know if she will make it until she passes that one week mark, which won't be until this Friday.  But she did drink over a half gallon of her mama's milk from the bottle that first evening, so I think she should be fine.

The two front teats will be enough to raise just one calf, and we will still be able to get a large quantity of milk for the family over the next year.  Mark recommends that we do not breed her back, however, because it is too risky to have those back milk glands fill up so full with no place for the milk to go, which he said would happen every time. 

So the bottom line is that we should be able to raise Rosebud and milk Dandelion for as long as we want, or until she starts to dry up, and then we will probably need to sell her.  Mark said that this condition is not necessarily hereditary, so Rosebud could likely grow up to be a good milk cow. 

We are thankful for God blessing us with this adorable little calf, and for the fact that both mamma and baby are basically healthy!  We'll feel much better after we know that she is nursing on her own whenever she wants to, and after she is a week old.  I'll try to get back for an update, especially after she passes that one week mark if I've not checked back in by then. 

It's time now for us to go back to the barn to make sure that Rosebud has nursed again and that everything else is ok.

Homestead Happenings

I thought I would share a bit of what has been going on since my last post a couple weeks ago.  This will be a hodgepodge overview of a post.  On one hand it feels like nothing much has been happening around here, but after I think about it I can come up with quite a few small things.  A few small things tend to add up to a rather large post!

Spring and Winter have been battling it out as we've had some freezing nights and snow as well as some sunny days in the 60s. 

Based on these Daffodils, I think that Spring is going to win!

Christina has been enjoying working with her rabbits. 

 Here is some of the angora wool she has gotten.

It is softer than kitty cats!

We were told that the tan rabbit and white one in the same cage were both girls, but it turns out that the dark one is a boy!  We were planning on saving any breeding activity for a later time, but since they have already been together we wonder if the female could be pregnant?  If she is it will take only about 21 days for kits to be born! 

Earlier today the rabbits were again enjoying some time in the sun!  Christina has been putting them in our garden spot that has a fence around it.  Pretty soon I will need to till it up, but for now it is a nice safe rabbit run!

This tan one has recently discovered his masculinity! 
Christina has named him Wilely.

Here is Snowflake, the female. 

Her twin brother is named Big Guy, but we did not get a picture of him today.

I think Wiley is the cutest, even though he is a boy!

Augusta was keeping her eyes on them through the fence! 

Speaking of our canine friends, the original owner of that little beagle dog came by and claimed her.  We miss her, but not as much as Gusta misses her.  They were such pals!  Little Dog wandered up back in December with no tags and we had been taking care of her ever since, but her owner acted like he thought we were wrong for keeping her!  He was not nice at all.  Some people are just naturally rude!

Lisa and Christina have started some tomato, egg plant, and jelly melon seeds over the past couple of weeks.  We already have plants coming up!

Matthew has also found a few more days to work on the house at Lawrence County.  There is much that needs to be done with that project and I am amazed at how proficient Matthew's carpentry skills are becoming.  So far he has done everything with only Simon, Christina and Timothy's help.

Timothy liked helping with the flooring removal.

Here is what it looked like soon after Matthew had removed the wall separating the kitchen from the "long room".  It really opened the area up!

Matthew is also going to re-do the ceiling.

Here is a piece of the ceiling removed showing the higher rafters. 

We're toying with the idea of taking out the whole plywood false ceiling and working with the rafters to make sort of a cathedral ceiling effect.  We would loose some attic space with that plan, but it would really look and feel nice!

On another day, Matthew made some advancement on raising the floor in the long room to match the kitchen floor.  He's using 2 x 4s covered with rough cut lumber.  He's going to put smooth ply-wood over the rough lumber sub-floor.

The fireplace could not be moved, but I think that I like the way Matt fixed it.

Since the floor is being raised, the outside doors also need to be raised. Tonight Matthew was working on raising the door going out to the carport.  You can also see the 2x4s for the subfloor.  Before too long, those windows next to the door are going to be replaced with a wall and a regular window.

Meanwhile, we were enjoying the beautiful day.  It was sunny and 65 degrees!

Lisa and Christina were working on cleaning out some of the flower beds around the yard.

The Hyacinaths are pretty.



We're not sure what type of flower these are, but we were happy to see them coming up in the flower bed!

I like the way Christina got the blue sky behind the daffodils in this picture.

The only other things I can think of to note is the other stock:  chickens, pigs, a horse, and cows. 

The chicken flock is doing good even though that little beagle dog probably killed one of my hens when she was playing with it.  Currently we have 16 hens and have been getting between 3 and 8 eggs a day.  When all the young hens start laying regularly we should get plenty of eggs every day! 

Our two hogs have really grown and we think they may have bred.  If so, we really don't know when exactly it happened, so we could be having piglets within the next month. 

Gracie is doing fine, but no one has ridden her in a while.  Maybe the children will get back to riding her some as the weather continues to improve.

The Jersey bull calves are getting bigger and bigger and Violet is doing well.  We still hope she will calve this summer.

And then there is our expectant 2 year old Jersey milk cow, Dandelion.  It's been two weeks now that she has had milk!  We used to think milk was a sure sign of an impending calving at any moment, but now we've read that they can have full milk for up to a month before they calve!  She has been put up in the barn for the past 2 weeks now.  Tonight her udder was so full that her teats were protruding at angles instead of hanging loosly down!  I really think it will be any time now.  Instead of a December calf, we should have a March calf!

Well, that's a glimpse into some of the happenings around Purewater Hollow Homestead as we finished up February and started into March.  We're looking forward to the Spring and Summer that's soon coming up and all the adventures they will bring!