So, most of the garden was left completely to its own devices.  We did pick some melons and okra but the poor tomatoes withered and died without attention.  Now, I do not eat squash, zucchini, cucumbers, black eyed or purple hulled peas, or most other healthy produce (yes I have been forced to eat my fair share of these in my lifetime and really, really don’t like them.)  Of course, these are the things that Nathan loves and then plants 5 MILLION of.  In case you don’t know one squash plant could feed about 10 families.

Anyway, I don’t have a lot of incentive to go out and pick and put up the billion squash that I won’t eat anyway.  I do make and love pickles but the seed people lied to me and all of the cucumbers were the salad kind that I don’t eat.  The things I enjoy from the garden are the okra (I LOVE okra) tomatoes, green beans, and some of the melons.  The other things I really love–asparagus, artichoke, broccoli, carrots, and spinach–either don’t grow here in our climate or soil, or I have never been able to keep alive…I’m still trying though.  I just found out that young cattail roots taste similar to asparagus so I guess next time I’m craving asparagus I’ll go dig around in the pond mud.

This year I was sad that there would once again be no fresh tomatoes :(  So, imagine my surprise and delight when about 30 tomato plants came up of their own accord in one of our pig pens.  We give the pigs overripe produce from one of the farmers market vegetable vendors and apparently some of the tomatoes seeded themselves.  Luckily this was in a small pen where we had a group of piglets and was easily closed off to allow the tomatoes to grow.  I didn’t have a lot of faith that they would make it, but despite 2 big storms when they were still tiny plants and no other care whatsoever, they have not only grown but thrived.

I had planned to stake the plants and water them but since they seemed to be doing just fine on their own and most of the tomato plants I have “cared” for died, I decided to let them be and see what happened.  These tomato plants have literally not had any water in over 2 MONTHS and they are not only still growing, they are making tomatoes–in 100+ degree heat!  I would love to be able to see the root system on these plants because they must be incredible to be getting enough moisture to stay alive.  I have to give a significant amount of credit to the fertility of this soil as apparently pig poop makes great tomato food (who knew?)  They are also shaded about 1/3 of the day which probably helps.  They are mostly cherry or other small type tomatoes which is fine with me because my favorite thing is to pick and eat them right off the vine–and popping a cherry tomato in my mouth is much easier and less embarrassing than popping a fist sized tomato in my mouth.  

I ate my first fresh tomato just this week and it was heavenly.  If you haven’t had the chance to eat a sun warmed and ripened tomato surrounded by the pungent smell of tomato plants, mmm, you really haven’t lived.  (At least in my opinion–fresh tomatoes make Nathan puke, which is fine by me since I get to eat all of them.)

I’m not sure what I will do next year.  I’m tempted to let the pigs run on our garden spot for a month or so and then just throw tomato seeds out, we shall see I suppose.  For now I will continue to marvel over these tomato plants and enjoy the fruits of their labor.

I have lived in Texas my entire life and here on the blackland for over 4 years so you would think I would be used to lack of rain and the cracks that come with it, but it never ceases to amaze me.  I can’t help but go, wow, what a bummer our grass is drying up and our animals will soon have nothing to eat, but JUST LOOK AT THESE AWESOME CRACKS!  ”Hey Nathan watch this! I can stand up to my knees in this one, Oh whoops, I just fell into that one and almost broke my leg…” (yes, I am very easily entertained, but I live in the middle of nowhere so I take my entertainment wherever I can get it.)

Some of our blackland is actually worse than others.  We have one section of Houston blackland that is cracked so badly it looks like little islands everywhere–without the water of course.  This creates an interesting experience when walking across this field in the dark with buckets of feed for the pigs, (we do a lot of feeding in the dark with this kind of heat) and while Nathan always has his handy dandy light strapped to his head I would rather stumble around in the dark falling into cracks and exclaiming “Hey, you’ve got to come see this one, I just lost a bucket into it, it’s huge!”

These are actually fairly minor cracks in our yard.  The ones in the fields are 4 ft deep or more, but I didn’t feel like traipsing out there with the camera to take pictures–knowing me I would drop the camera into one and loose it      forever.

Once we get this far into July it is  unlikely that we will get anymore  rain until September, which does  not bode well for  our  pastures.  We  have had more rain than a lot of the  rest of the state so I am thankful for  that.  We also have 50 acres of bottomland established with native grasses which develop  incredible root systems and continue to grow even in drought conditions, but this weather  forces us to use it for grazing rather than baling hay which we will need for the winter.

Many ranchers sell off stock when this happens and then re-stock the next year.  For us  this is a very very last resort because we have worked so hard to select our animals for the  ability to grow well on grass alone and have exceptional meat, not to mention they are all  rare breeds that are difficult to find.  So, we do what we can, find the humor where we can  ”hey look at this one, you could play hide and seek in this crack!” and leave the rest up to God.

These hot dry times of year (105 every day) are very hard on the animals, especially the pigs since they don’t sweat.  We keep mud holes, shade, and plenty of water available to them and for the most part they do fine.  But, sometimes things seem to conspire to foil our best attempts at keeping them cool and happy.  Yesterday, between checking on them in the morning and that evening when I checked on them again, 2 pigs died of heat exhaustion.  One of our old boars (mostly a pasture ornament nowadays) was laid out in the sun, instead of the shady shelters or the mud hole, panting and obviously in distress when I found him.  I immediately got a water hose on him and while I stood there desperately trying to cool him off, he died.  Then, as Nathan and I were making the rounds re-filling mud holes and making sure everyone else was okay, we found one of our sows that we raised in a pasture she was not supposed to be in that had no water since we had no animals in the field at the time–she was also dead.  This all happened within a few hours during the hottest part of the day.

The evening before we had a sow farrow and her entire litter of pigs disappeared–we assume some varmint found and ate them, or the piglet rapture happened, I really have no idea.

Last night, after checking cows and taking care of everything else, we had to haul off the dead pigs, which took until 1:30 in the morning.  While trying to haul them off (600 lb carcasses are not easy to handle) pigs kept appearing in the field they weren’t supposed to be in.  We would chase one back in the correct field and turn around to leave only to find two more back out.  Finally we found the hole that the sow and all of the pigs were getting out of and repaired that so that we will hopefully have no more pig tragedies.

I have no idea why a pig can go through a hole to get out without any problem, but then can’t get back through the exact same hole to get water and keep themselves alive.  Pigs are supposed to be very smart but sometimes I really have to wonder.  Also, one of the gates leading out of the waterless field was not fastened, just pulled shut.  Now any other time when we were trying to keep her in, that sow would have pushed that gate open and gone on her merry way which would have included finding water and not dying, but oh no, yesterday when she needed desperately to get to water she didn’t push the gate open.  Sometimes I just feel like banging my head against a wall.

While all of this was going on, one of our cows who has horns somehow got her head stuck and then proceeded to flop around trying to get it out until she fell over and was hanging herself.  My sister Gracie was right there when it happened, thank goodness, and was able to get her out or we would have had a third dead animal in one day.

But, on the bright side of things, we got to work when it was much cooler, albeit in the middle of the night, we have 3 new calves who are doing very well, and most of the animals are alive and healthy.

A couple of nights ago we ended up getting back into town from meat pickup at almost 10:30 pm, (about an hour later than the cows were supposed to be milked) so we went straight to the dairy to milk.  Of course, I had forgotten to bring a sling for Ada but she was sound asleep in her car seat, so I figured, this will be no problem, she’ll stay asleep and we’ll be able to milk, right? WRONG.  Almost as soon as we got there she wakes up and will not go back to sleep.  Here I am holding a baby on my hip while cleaning a cows udder, putting the milker on, etc.

Nathan comes and takes over that part while I get the bottles ready to feed calves.  I’m holding the bottle in one hand trying to get the calf to stop running in circles and latch on, Ada is on my other hip, and finally I get the calf going and everything seems to be working out.  Ada proceeds to lean over as far as she can behind my back and grabs a leaf off of the nearby willow tree.  Of course, it immediately goes into her mouth.  I have no free hands to remove said leaf so I use the only thing available, my mouth.  I spit out the leaf and try to maneuver away from the willow tree with Ada again leaning out as far as she can to get it–my arm is killing me at this point.  Finally the calf finishes and Ada grabs the slobbery nipple on the bottle, I pull it away and her hand, now covered in milk, calf slobber, and who knows what else, goes into her mouth, *sigh*.

An hour later as we are finishing up, I realize that Ada has three spots of manure on her face, I have no idea how they got there, but there they are.  By midnight she is finally asleep again in her car seat headed home, manure, milk, calf slobber, and all.  And in case you are wondering, no she doesn’t really have a schedule, and yes, she is a very flexible baby, in more ways than one.

On a side note, apparently calf bottle nipples make great teethers–this is the only thing Ada has enjoyed chewing on while getting 4 teeth at once.

Some of these flowers and plants are very beneficial to wildlife and livestock, some are basically just ornamental, and there are some that are poisonous, although we have had very few problems with animal poisonings related to our native forbs.  I also found that some have traditionally been used for teas, herbal medicines, as well as other uses.  I have enjoyed this project and hope to continue as the different times of year bring out different flowers.

The names I chose for these pictures are just one of many for each flower, most have 2-3 common names.

So, last Friday we had a plan.  We were going to finish baling the hay, me raking with Ada, and Nathan baling, then we would get the cows up from the bottom pasture in the evening.  On Saturday morning we would get started working, castrating bull calves, and sorting the cows as soon as it was light and after we sent friends off to run our farmers market booth, finish the fence to turn the cows out onto new pasture, feed the pigs, and hopefully be back in the house around dark.

Here’s what actually happened:

Friday:  Nathan’s Aunt and Uncle come in from out of town to bring us a load of slaughter lambs and goats they raise and we spend a wonderful morning catching up with them.  That afternoon we get to the field to finish baling and find that the high winds of the past day have blown the windrows all over the field so that what I had already raked had to be raked again (argh! Here goes more $4/gallon diesel down the tubes.), then after one round, Nathan stops on the edge of the field with the baler and signals for me to stop.  Yep, the baler is broken down so no more baling for today.  We discuss whether to get the square baler, which would mean spending the rest of the day plus most of Saturday hauling hay out of the field, or work on the round baler.  We decide to see if Nathan’s uncle can help work on the round baler–he can, but not until Saturday.

So, we will work on fence instead.  As I’m waiting for Nathan to get the baler ready to take back to the house, I notice that there are buzzards circling the field where the cows are and I can see a momma cow trying to run some off that are on the ground.  In the past year we have had a problem with Mexican Buzzards attacking newborn calves and calving cows (Yes, I realize that buzzards are not supposed to attack living animals, but I have seen these do it with my own eyes so it does happen–they peck the calves eyes out and sometimes attack the cow as she is down also.)  Realizing that this could be happening, I race (as fast as you can race in a tractor pulling hay rakes across a bumpy field) to the truck and then take the truck across the remaining field.  Sure enough, there is a new Dexter calf who ended up on the wrong side of the electric fence and the buzzards are after it–luckily the cow was aggressive enough and I found it in time that it was not hurt.

I leave Ada in the front seat of the truck with the air on while I pick up the calf and deposit it on the right side of the fence.  Our crazy donkey then spots the new calf and rushes over to claim it as her own and keep the cow away, ARGH!!!  (As as a side note, I can totally see why the old term for a donkey become a slang term for someones rear end because by this point I was yelling at her, “Noel, why do you have to be such an a**!” and other not very nice things that all included that particular term.)

So, I pick up the calf again with the agitated cow trying to circle around the donkey and take it across the fence to another area close by under some trees.  The calf is also very hot from laying in the 100 degree sun for who knows how long so I make sure she is in shade.  By this time Ada is screaming in the truck because she has been left alone, and Nathan is heading over in the other tractor to see what is going on.  I retrieve Ada and try to figure out how to get the donkey out of the field.  At this point we decide that we might as well go ahead and move the cows up to the barn and separate the donkey as we go.  The calf is loaded into the back of the truck and Nathan holds her on the tailgate while Ada and I slowly drive through the field calling the cows.  Eventually, about two hours later, we made it up to the house with the donkey deposited back with the sheep where she was supposed to be anyway and the calf cooled off and reunited with her mother.  Whew!  By this point it is dark and there is no chance of working on any fence or anything else.

Saturday:  We are able to get the cows sorted into their various breeding groups and get the Dexters out to their field, get the pigs fed, and by evening the baler is fixed and ready to go.  I have to rake the hay about 100 feet in front of the baler to keep it from blowing away, but we get it finished, yay!  But, no calves castrated or fence built.

A week later we just finished the fence and moved the cows.

I really don’t know why we even bother to make plans anymore.

I come into the house after getting my legs caught in plastic electric fencing twine.

Nathan “So, how did it go moving the horse?”

Me “Oh, it took a few minutes but it went fine and he’s happy now.”

Nathan “Mhm…(turns around and looks at me for the first time) OH MY GOSH WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR LEGS!!!”

Me “Oh, it’s no big deal I just got rope burn from getting twine yanked across the back of them.”

Nathan “YOUR LEGS ARE BLEEDING!  YOU COULD HAVE CUT YOUR LEGS OFF!! WHAT WERE YOU DOING!  WHY            WEREN”T YOU WEARING PANTS?!”

Me “Wow hun, it really isn’t that bad, and I was wearing shorts because it’s hot and I didn’t know that I was going to have twine wrapped around my legs.”

One week later…

Nathan “Um, your legs that were ‘fine’ look infected and they are still oozing and you have a huge black bruise too.”

Me “Yeah, I’ve been thinking about putting some antibiotic ointment on them, they are kind of sore…the bruise is from something else anyway.”

Nathan “From what?”

Me “Oh, I don’t know, it just popped up.”

Nathan “Hun, bruises don’t just ‘pop up’ you have to do something.”

Me “Well I don’t know and I’m fine anyway!  Gees!”

Nathan “Mhm, you’re fine, I’ve heard that before…”

In my defense, I’ve never broken a bone, or not a big one anyway, well I did have that stress fracture once, but I was fine, really…