You may remember a photo from last year of Jill and her prize heifer Dorothy. They won Reserve Grand Champion (that's a fancy way of saying second place) last year at the PGX. Jill entered Dorothy with her calf this year and they won Grand Champion! Yay! We're very pleased. The previous winter, the cows had come into spring looking a little thin so we added some alfalfa hay to their feed last winter and that may have done the trick because they all kept their weight up.

Happy New Year

I know it's already March but I didn't get a chance to post a Happy New Year post because my laptop died. About the time I got the new laptop and sorted out all the new issues, learned a few things, lost all my files, found them again, and then bought a new power cord because the cat chewed through the fancy new extra thin one...just when I thought I was ready to start posting again...I lost the camera. Yep.

Oh sure, I could use my phone to take pictures, if I hadn't cheaped out on a phone with the cheesiest excuse for a camera...but I couldn't afford a better phone because my laptop died...

Anyway, the news is: first calf born a week ago to Dorothy! We missed the whole thing but it was obviously a success and Little Nameless is running amok and schmoozing with all the soft-nosed horses.

Photos pending.

Last Hay Run

I organized the last hay run of the season and this is how the day turned out. Ugh. But we had a big team of bale-throwers and got three hundred more bales in the barn without getting stuck even once. We're set for winter now!

The Almost Finished Project

While my horses napped all summer in order of biggest to smallest...


I was busy mucking in the mud.


We had the wettest summer on record here, so these piles of forty-year-old manure that were scraped away from the barn sat amongst the rain ponds for weeks and weeks before it was dry enough to get the dump truck in to haul them away.


Eventually, it dried out, the piles were hauled out, the water lines were dug for three yard taps (only one burst a week later and had to be redug and repaired) and we built the fences.


Here are some of the new fences and the new manure bins (which will have walls on them in a few days). The outhouse has a new home next to the manure piles. I didn't look into a permit for that biffy...but as long as no one complains...


I have a round pen in the works. I plan to brace the top with white boards and string three strands of white poly-coated wire.


Here's another before and after from the back of the barn. Here the old manure has been scraped away and we're waiting for things to dry up before digging the water lines.


And here are two finished paddocks, with the new road and gravel path.


This is one of my boarders in his new paddock.

It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better...

Today's post is a series of before and after shots. This photo shows a shed attached to the barn on the right of the photo.


Shed gone. Imagine the little Tinkerbell ring they used to have with those Disney audio-assisted picture books. Yeah, the shed disappeared like turning the page on one of those books. That's right. No sweat or fiberglass slivers or convoys to the dump at all.


Here we have an array of graceful fencing. That fence in the middle distance is made of rusty old pipe. One chop saw and five blades later, it and the rest of the pipe fence from behind the barn were in manageable pieces that my helpers then loaded into a bin to go to the metal salvage place. I don't know how much it all weighed, but the bin was 18 feet by 7 feet by 4 feet, and it was full! I got cash for all that. It was kind of like logging my property.


Here's the same spot with most of the fence gone and the horses living in temporary electric fence set-ups, which they regularly escape from. There's a new ditch in the foreground. (I apologize for the poor photography. Most of these pictures are snapped with one hand while grasping muddy gloves, tools and lead ropes under an elbow at the same time as fending off two or three cats and a herd of contractors.)


This shows (sort of) the paddocks behind the barn. The ground here actually rises up above the floor level of the barn, so that all the spring melt ends up in the barn. The ground is higher than the barn on account of forty years of poo building up. The other phenomenon that occurs with that kind of poo accumulation is it acts like a sponge and water won't run off even if the ground is sloped. So the excavator guy spent a whole day scraping that layer of decomposed manure off until he got down to the actual ground level.


Here it is with the ground scraped. Uh, just ignore the scary-looking barn. We'll deal with that later. For now, the idea is to get the right ditching and the right slope on the ground to allow for proper drainage, and then when I actually do fix the barn, it'll stay fixed because the foundations will be dry. That's the theory.


Here's the excavator among its piles of forty-year-old manure. Most of the manure is being taken to a neighbour's place and I'll keep a small pile for future gardens or for putting into tiny bags and selling for $40/bag in downtown Vancouver.


Things are looking dreadful now after a week of rain, but at least the view from my little deck is relaxing, and will stay that way through all this destruction and rebuilding. Oh, except for a trench for the electrical upgrade from the house to the barn...

Gate Inventory

As I'm getting my plans organized for the new fence layout, I'm taking stock of what materials I have on the property. A previous owner must have been a metal-worker. The gates are a full curious range of lengths:

3ft9
6ft4
6ft10
7ft1
7ft7
7ft8
7ft10
9ft
9ft8
10ft
11ft5
13ft2
14ft

How do I plan standard gate openings with those kinds of sizes!?

Okay, don't despair. The gates are quite lovely and light and will last a long time yet, but I still need to plan for the day the gates will have to be replaced with the standard 6,8,10,12 or 14 foot gates. I plan to put in the gate posts so that the standard gates will fit. Which means some of the gates I have will extend past the gate post, and some will have a wee gap between the gate posts that I may fill with a 2x4. It has taken some figuring but I've got it working on paper. We'll see how it all turns out...

Some Ways to Get Your Cow Ready for the Parade

It's World Naked Gardening Day!

Sorry, no photos.

Art as the Illusion of Function

Here are some pieces of fence art I've found around the property. Sadly, the exhibits you see here will be dismantled as soon as the frost is out of the ground, so view them while you can!

This is a particularly fine piece of sculpting done by a series of horses over about two years. A group effort, but a cohesive one. They all had the same vision, obviously.


I especially like this piece, done in wood and metal, tied together nicely with the bright orange twine.


A fine antiquing effect was used on this linear piece.


One of my favourites, this piece gives the illusion of solidity with thick vertical lines, offset by the falling diagonal.


Septimus and his half brother, the newest patrons to the gallery.

Born Yesterday

One down, one to go! Connie had her calf last night (on her own birthday!) with a breezy three hours of labour. The calf was raring to go and was up drinking within an hour. His name is Septimus. Don't ask me why.

Here he is this morning.


I gave him his vitamin shots this morning (ouch), a one-time thing for calves. Tomorrow I'll put in his ear tags. As Corb Lund says, "Welcome to the world, little buddy."

Kasper

Kasper thinks cameras are for nibbling on.


I finally got organized enough to get him into the arena. He was a little nervous.


Noises outside the barn worried him.


But he settled down really well and we worked through a few of the easier Stage Three exercises (see previous blog entries) and he remembered all kinds of stuff that he hasn't done all winter. In this picture he's trotting circles around me. He stayed focussed on me in the arena even though he was off the lead rope the whole time, and he didn't seem worried that he'd left his friends behind. All very encouraging. A good start to the season.

Barn Cat Moves Indoors

At first, living indoors was pretty spooky for Ginger.


And then he discovered beds.

The Next Big Project

This is the next big project. It's not a horse. It's not a cow. It's an equestrian centre! I moved here in January, and am settling in. (And somewhat snowed in). The place has a barn with stalls and runs, several paddocks and some small pastures. Here are a few photos. These will be some of the "before" photos. I hope, by the end of the summer, to have "after" photos.

The first project in the spring will be new fencing. (The barn in the back is my neighbour's barn.)


This is my barn, which houses a riding arena, stalls, hay storage and tack rooms. It's thirty or forty years old. It's made of post and beam construction with huge pressure-treated posts. Which is great. But the posts have heaved with the frost and now the barn sides and roof swoop up and down like a sine wave. Apparently, post by post, this can be fixed. So, after fencing, the next project will be to change the foundation around each post to prevent heaving, level it all out, and put on siding. I'm thinking red tin.


This shows the swoop in the wall from in the arena.


Here's a shot of the central hallway.


This is the south side of the barn where the horses access their runs from their stalls. Snow is an issue! When the roof slides, the doors are plugged and have to be shovelled out. The roof slid just before I moved in so I didn't have to shovel that. (Phew!) But it's set to slide again...

A Refresher for CJ

Sleighing! The snow is piling up and the woods are gorgeous. Here's how I eased CJ back into the traces this fall. (Check out the posts from 2009 to see how I trained him the first time.)

Day One: ground driving with the full harness on. We weaved like drunkards.

Day Two: (which, as it happened, wasn't actually the day after Day One...) The following photos are from Day Two. I hitched CJ to the single tree and ground drove him. Steering was a little better than on Day One. He wasn't too happy with the traces coming tight against his back legs on the corners. He kicked at them at first, but he gradually kicked less as we continued. I added the tire. He had to pull the tire plus all the snow it dragged, but he didn't balk.
Here's a good photo of the harness.

CJ eyes the thing behind him.

Day Three: At the start of this refresher, CJ had been lazing around in the pasture for two months. So Day Three was a trail ride to see how he felt about being out in the bush without his buddies. We crossed several moose tracks, which made him flare his nostrils and look askance at the forest, but otherwise he was fine.

Day Four: With my dad's help, we hitched CJ to the stoneboat. (I'm a little short on photos here, but there are photos of all of these stages on last winter's posts...if I could figure out how to include a link, I'd link you...) We did two laps of the barn-to-house road with figure 8's in the parking lot. I halted him a lot and rubbed him and walked around him and fussed with the harness. He wasn't too happy to stand still so I gave him a lot of chance to practice.

Day Five: Three laps with the stoneboat and lots of halting and standing.

Day Six: Hitched to the sleigh! The sleigh trail I picked out this year is along old roads through thick woods. This way the trail won't get blown full of snow like it did last year when I had the trail going across the fields. The only problem with this is that you don't get any warning at all if a moose steps out of the trees. And as an experienced teamster told me recently with a sad shake of his head, "Moose are hard on horses".

CJ was completely unconcerned about the sleigh behind him. He seemed a little confused about how to get the darn thing going. He bounced against the breast collar a few times to get it going, but once he had it in motion, he was fine. I'm driving him with an open bridle (no blinders) and he seemed to totally remember from last year what that thing was behind him. He never even glanced at it.

We sleighed for an hour and CJ did not sweat. Not even under the harness. It's not that he's in great shape, I guess it's just that the sleigh is light and horses are really strong brutes!

Day Seven: This time I took CJ out with a non-horsey helper as a test to see how we would do without my dad's help. He had a little trouble making the turn (CJ not dad) off the driveway into the deeper snow of the trail, so I had to hop out and lead him around the corner, but otherwise we did fine.

Day Eight: This was a warmer day and the snow was sticky AND we loaded four people in the sleigh. Not so good. CJ couldn't figure out how to get the sleigh going. He would push forward into the breast collar, meet solid resistance, and give up just as the sleigh popped forward. So he would then pop forward, hit the pressure of the breast collar, again meet resistance, and give up the very moment the sleigh began to move. It's a kind of bouncing ball effect. I let him try a few times to see if he could sort it out. He popped up off his front feet and I was about to hollar whoa, but the next try he got it. The sleigh was moving, he kept a steady push into the breast collar and off we went. Phew. But the next time we stopped, we unloaded some passengers to make it easier for him.

Kasper's New Toy

When horses do the mutual grooming thing, they nibble at each other and scratch each other with their top teeth. Cows just lick each other, so it seems that Red's not sure about Kasper's teeth, but Kasper seems happy enough to be bathed.

Weaning

Red, Sid and Jean.

Weaning. I didn't want to do it. How could I take babies away from their moms? I read about weaning and talked to farmers. The books said one thing and the farmers said another.

I hummed and hawed. If I kept them together, feeding and watering would be easier. But then I'd have to separate them just before the moms were about to calve and that could be awkward if the weather's terrible in March. What finally decided me was finding out that the cows teats can split if they're always wet in -20 C temperatures. Since the cows aren't too happy with me rubbing salve on their udders, I decided I better wean.

It turned out to be easy. I lured the cows into the corral with some hay. Just like that. No fuss. So Sid and Red could still hang out with their moms with only fence panels between them. They could even still nurse if they wanted to. No one was upset.

Three days later, I put Sid and Red in a pen about forty feet from their moms' corral. They could see each other but couldn't nurse. After about 12 hours, the calves started mooing, but hay settled them down. No one was frantic. No one was trying to bust through the fences.

After about ten days, when the moms' udders had dried up, I moved the moms to the far pasture where they will stay until they're ready to calve. This move was a little tricky because to get them there, I had to move them through an area where they could break away and get to their calves. With snow on the ground, I couldn't set up any fences that would stop them. So, three of us lured them with hay. The cows were hyper, jumping and leaping around but following the hay. They got to about ten feet from the gate, we were almost there, and then wham, they took off for the calves' pen. I sprinted beside them, hoping to turn them off, waving a big rake and hollering, but they split and went on either side of me and had a little party over by their sons. My helper and I ran after them, got them running again and they ran right back to the hay and scooted through the gate where I wanted them. Phew!

Then Sid and Red had to be moved from their pen to the corral where they'll stay until calving time. This was a little more worrisome, because if they broke loose on us, they'd hit a barbed wire fence and would likely hurt themselves trying to barge through to their moms. So we made a fence out of two trucks, the horse trailer, a car, the tractor, and five people with rakes. It worked! Phew again! Now everyone's settled.

In the next post, I'll show how Red has found a new mommy. (It's Kasper!)

Testing for Stage Three

Last week, I did my Stage Three test for Glenn Stewart's Natural Horsemanship program. To test, you have to video all the tasks, send the video in and get marked as "pass" or "resubmit" for each task. The above video shows the highlights from the test video. And I do mean highlights. These are the bits where it's all going smoothly. Now I should put together a video of the Stage Three Bloopers!

The Banff Centre

The Banff Centre http://www.banffcentre.ca/ is a world class facility for artists of all kinds. There are programs for writers, ballerinas, painters, musicians and even circus performers. I've been lucky enough to attend two writing programs there. The most recent one was this September. I was in a six-day workshop on children's writing with the wonderful Tim Wynne-Jones, a Canadian author who has published over thirty books. The above photo was taken from the top of Tunnel Mountain. The Banff Centre is the cluster of buildings at the bottom right, and across the Bow River up and to the left is the Banff Springs Hotel.


Here's most of my group celebrating a great week. Standing from left to right: Sue Farrell Holler, me, Don Cummer, Tim Wynne-Jones, Joanne Jefferson, Karen Spafford-Fitz, Leslie Carmichael, and kneeling is Ann Sutherland. Brenda Johnson was also in our group but she was off writing or something when the picture was taken.

In this workshop, we each brought the first 20-30 pages of a novel, read each other's work, and discussed what was great and what had to go. It was extremely helpful. When you get knee-deep into a manuscript, you often can't see the forest for the trees. With the help of Tim and the group, I was able to tighten up my first chapters and get my novel off to a roaring start. The trick now is to keep that roar going...

The best thing about The Banff Centre is that they set up your environment to allow for the greatest amount of creativity. They teach you, feed you, make your bed, guide you on hikes, invite you to free inspiring performances...and give you lots of space and time to write. Included in all this is the option to work late and sleep in. Could it get any better?

Pole Bending

I trailered Kasper to the arena yesterday for a change. Our trails are frozen solid (slippery) and the corral is frozen mud, so it was good to play around at the arena on some soft footing. In this outdoor arena, there is a busy road on one side and a busy parking lot (gymnastics club) on the other side. Kasper was worried about all the traffic but after about ten minutes he settled right down.

A Fall Ride

We swapped horses for this ride. Here's Lena on Kasper.


And me on little Peter.