It’s a Sunday evening out here, just came into the house, legs are tired right along with the rest of me. I stayed out of the fields today, Sunday you know, but have been tending to the cow herd today after church and also putzing in the garden. Just got the peas in [...]
Oh the joys of getting Jersey heifers used to being milked! We had a jersey heifer give birth to a nice calf Friday night and now we are attempting to get this newly freshened heifer milked without any of us getting killed. I called a neighboring dairy farmer to see if I could try out [...]
We got an inch and a half of fairly warm rain this weekend, fairly warm compared to the snow and below zero wind chills of a couple of weeks ago! Calving is starting to pick up steam here somewhat with the main hit coming the next couple of weeks or so. So [...]
Last Saturday was a day with a lot of excitement and lessons learned. Saturday morning I started down the hill to go do chores at about 5:50 hoping to get and early start to the chores that day because I was supposed to rain later on in the day and I wanted to [...]
Here in southern Minnesota, the pastures are starting to green up. It seems that in the next few days the countryside will come alive with farm machinery moving on the roads and in the fields. A neighbor stopped by tonight and we decided that it would be another week or ten days before we can [...]
My old bones are so tired tonight I figured I’d give em a rest here on the computer. Got a million jobs I could do tonight but there comes a time when a person has just gotta stop. Worked over a hundred cows today, three people, and got done around 1 [...]
It’s drying up around here at a fast rate. Around a week ago I couldn’t even imagine what spring would be like. But a few days of sunshine and some clear western air coming through sure does fix things up in a hurry. We’re starting to calve this last week, slow starting [...]
The Winter That Wouldn’t Let Go
By The Mesko Family
As we sit here in April,
Huddled against the cold,
The winter of 2007
Is getting very old.
It started in October,
With rain and freezing temps.
The cattle braced against the sleet,
And looked like four-legged wimps.
November brought the first snow,
And we started feeding hay,
The sheep preferred to forage
Out in the pasture day [...]
This spring, er, winter, er, spring, I mean, this season has been good to us. This is really our first year raising sheep. We purchased a run down, over burdened flock in June of ‘06. They had been fed primarily grain, with very little hay, and no grass.
We got a [...]
This past Saturday I and a portion of my family had a couple of interesting experiences. As we were finishing chores, an 18 year old girl named Anne, who lives about 5 miles from us called on the telephone, asking us to come look at a sick goat. So we quick finished off the last [...]