Posted: Thu Jun 15, 2006 1:04 pm Post subject: Hello, I'm Mary
Hello, I'm Mary, Book 1
Welcome to my journal. My life is not very average, so it might be interesting for you to read.
I am 63 years old and have been a born again Christian since April 1963. My husband and I have been married for 46 years and are the parents of 2 sons, and we are grandparents as well. We have had an interesting life, certainly nothing like we would have expected. At some point this winter I will fill you in on the details of that. Spring, summer and fall are very busy with outdoor activities, whereas winter is long and slow making me look for interesting things to fill the time.
Last edited by Mary on Wed Aug 29, 2007 9:24 am; edited 2 times in total
Although it looks like I'm replying to myself here, while I was out in the pasture changing the irrigation water I thought maybe I could make this thread a daily or few times a week narrative to give you an idea of the events (or non-events) of life here.
Neut, our 15 pound cat who thinks he needs to help with everything, followed me out along the ditch, meowing, then hiding under the edge of the plastic irrigation tarp, then meowing all the way back to the house. I try to sneak away from him when I am going way down in the field so that I won't have to carry him back. Sometimes I put him in the shop when I go because I don't want him to go so far out into coyote territory. Today's water change was within sight of the house.
I have my 2nd planting of corn to put into the vegie garden today, weeds to pull, potatoes and beans to hoe, watering to do, horse trailer to clean and pack for my trip to another endurance ride tomorrow, so I had better not be sitting here. See you soon.
Woof Woof!
Smokey the dog greets you!
Sounds like you have a lot of work to do there _________________ You might be a dog lover if: There are more dog toys than people in your bed.
Today was lamb weaning day. We put the ewes (about 120 of them) and all their lambs through a narrow single file chute and sorted all the lambs into a corral. The ewes will be kept in another corral for a couple of days (fasting) to help them dry up their milk supply, and the lambs will be put out on to a good fresh pasture this afternoon. They will miss each other for a few days and we'll be hearing lots of sheep music. Baaaa, baaaaaa.
The rest of my day will be taken up with changing irrigation water, doing laundry, mowing the lawn, watering the vegie garden and other more domestic things. There is a lot of catching up to be done after being gone for the weekend to my endurance ride.
We are moving the ewes down the road from the corrals to my pasture this afternoon. First the neighbor needs to get a hot fence set up and the lambs moved to another field so they won't see their mothers going down the road. Our neighbor leases pasture from us, so we sometimes have sheep here, sometimes cattle, and sometimes both together.
This morning I got a few broken bales of new hay for my horses. They didn't like the old (last year's) marsh hay from the stack that he brought yesterday, but they finally resigned themselves to eating it overnight and this morning. I had 2 horses looking over the fence at the house for a couple of hours last evening expecting something that tasted better. Even horses can be fussy about their food.
I went to an endurance ride over the weekend and returned home Sunday about noon. There was a dead ewe out in the pasture, so I called the owner to remove it. Later in the evening we saw a coyote returning to the carcass. We could tell that he had been there before, he wasn't following scent, he was going to a place where he knew there was an easy meal. He is history now. The ewes are still in our pasture, content and feeling reasonably safe, well, as safe as sheep ever feel. They are flighty animals, completely defenseless, and the more I have learned about sheep over the years the better I understand people. The Bible has quite a lot to say about sheep and people acting like them.
Today I helped my neighbor with cattle. We brought the cows and calves to the corrals, sorted them, branded and eartagged a few calves, then moved them up the county road to a fresh pasture. It's a slow trip, lots of it is uphill, the cows just amble along at a slow walk, wonder where their calf is, stop and get a few bites of grass, move again when somebody makes them move, stop again, socialize with cows across the fence, eat again, you get the idea, it is SLOW. It took over 2 hours to go 5 miles. It was a hot day without any shade. Breezy likes moving cattle, it is a nice change of pace from endurance events.
Summer on farms and ranches is a busy time. The neighbors are all making hay while the sun shines. We hear balers working at 4am since there is some moisture in the air, and on the hay in the windrows, early in the morning, making it pack just a bit better when it is compressed into a bale. The tricky part is to have the windrow dry enough, add a bit of dew (we have very little of that out here in our desert climate) and have the bales at the perfect amount of moisture so they don't get moldy.
Sometimes the baler doesn't tie a bale for some reason. My neighbor lets me pick up the broken bales and bring them home for my horses, so I have been busy with that in the last few days. He will deliver several loads of mostly grass hay in a few days that will be stored in the barn for the winter, but this is getting us by right now for the horses that can't handle grassy pasture (too rich and it causes problems). Last year's hay is gone. You can see that farming is pretty much of a balancing act in many ways.
Today I am leaving for another endurance ride. I'm still a few rides behind with the postings in my 2006 journal but eventually I will catch up. That's another balancing act between activity, time, and sleep.
Today was another sunny, hot one. I worked in my vegie garden most of the day, taking breaks to cool off. The weeds have really gotten ahead of me but I'm gaining on them. While I weeded I had the overflow water from the spring running through some miscellaneous pipes that just get stuck together any old way to carry the water to the rows. Even through the garden is on a slope, the water only runs so far over the ground and then I add another pipe to carry it farther. This system takes a lot of tending, adjusting, and time, but gets a lot more water into the ground than the sprinkler, and more of it where I actually want it.
A couple of weeks ago I took my lame horse to a ride so that a vet who was working at the ride could give him a chiropractic adjustment. Now I have to put a lot of long slow hours and miles on him to build up the muscles that hold everything in place. I prefer to ride in the morning before it gets hot, but today I was busy with watering and so I rode this evening just before dark. The sun was just about to go behind the hills when I started out, and soon the sky ahead of me was a peachy color, and when I started home about half an hour later the sky in the other direction had pink streaky clouds. There was just enough breeze to feel pretty good even though the temperature was still about 80.
On my way home I met my neighbor on his 4-wheeler motorcycle, with his new Border Collie puppy going for her first ride. He stopped and we talked about the sheep who have been getting out of the pasture where they are supposed to stay and getting into my horse pasture every evening. I have to watch them because they will eventually go under another fence and be where I really don't want them, munching the flowers. The pup was worried about the horse, and the horse was suspicious of that wiggly black and white thing on the 4-wheeler, so I didn't stay long.
You may wonder why the pup was getting a ride, well it comes in handy to train them to ride there because often we move the sheep or cattle several miles and then the dog who has been helping can get a ride back to the ranch.
The ewes have been here too long, they are bored and looking for someplace with fresh grass. We had them in the small orchard pasture for the past 4 days and they really did a mowing job on it, but then yesterday started rearranging the hot fence. Somehow they didn't realize the fence wasn't there,(short grass on their side, taller grass on the other making a visual barrier) and so they stayed on the right side of the line until this evening. Good thing because the owner was gone for the day. He got back just in time to hear my phone message "the ewes are escaping" and came over to put them somewhere else, which was right back where they had been a few days ago. Now it is almost "new" and might satisfy them for tomorrow. After that they will really get a new place to go.
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