Good morning everyone,
We posted this on Sunday night – as we have an early start on Monday morning
HOME STUFF
We always have a few stray wild cats round the farm. We don’t mind too many – it keeps the rabbit population down. In fact we always leave a plate of cat bickies outside our back door.
Over the last few months, one of the female stray cats has become quite tame and now is happy to be patted and become one of our outside family. We decided to get her spayed, and noticed she looked like she had had a litter – with ever so slightly swollen nipples. The vet told us that the swelling was older – that she was not feeding any kittens.
In fact the vet was 100% wrong. She must have just had a litter, as shortly after her operation she arrived at the back deck with 4 tiny kittens in tow. They resided under the deck, until we decided that it was time for weaning and rehoming. They have been very entertaining and great time wasters!
We have now caught 3 of her 4 kitties, who now live inside, and are quite tame and very affectionate. Once we have caught the fourth one, we will send off two to the Cat Rescue, so they can find new owners. We will keep mum and two kittens here. Mum is very relaxed, and trusts us with the others, and does not seem concerned at all, which is nice.
I know we are a bit pathetic, but we know that if we weren’t here, a young cat with 4 babies would have struggled to survive. Just look at them now!
ON THE FARM
We have sold a number of our younger (yearling) Angus in-calf females to a farm in Taihape. With them we have also sold all but one of our in-calf black/white face cows, and two weaner bulls. We pregnancy tested a smaller group of heifers yesterday afternoon. Today we are pregnancy testing all of the big herd, to ensure they are now all in calf (and especially those bound for Taihape). It is a big herd to test, with both mums and babies. So early today we will separate all calves, and give them B12’s and a “7 in one” injection, to protect them all. There are a few calves we also have to tag, so it’s going to be a full-on morning. The scanner comes at 2pm, so we hope we have done all the calf work before then.
I have spent the last week literally full time hand spraying. We need to keep the electric fences on the edge of the lake weed free, otherwise we lose current through the farm. I need to make sure there is no weed growth there. We also need to spot-spray “californian thistles” which requires a special spray to kill the rhizome root structure. We hand grub all normal thistles (we only spray where we have to). Hand-spraying in really hot weather is not my idea of fun, but we need to do it.
In fact we had a huge old dead tree on the lake edge , and it finally fell over, and took out all the electrics. We have cut up the tree, and we are still waiting for our fencer to rejoin the wires. We don’t have any power to the fences, currently.
SPOTLIGHT ON:
It could not be more topical than to re-spotlight our super bull – TRISTAN. He must weigh very close to 1000kgs. With the power out to the fences, he just walks through them, and it has been a nightmare. He is pretty obedient and I walked him down to a small holding paddock (with battens – so he can’t push through it). There is no grass there, but he will have to stay until our fencer is back (hopefully today) and repairs the broken wires.
Tristan is a champ, and does like a head rub, and a scratch. He also likes to chew on my hands.
He is still genetically ranked as the #3 bull in New Zealand, which is a pretty cool achievement. He has served a lot of our cows over the last couple of years, and we have not had to assist in any calvings where he was the bull used. He is pretty much a perfect bull!
That’s all for this week,
We will definitely blog post every week – so see you next Monday!
Colinbr@gmail.com
Madeleine says:
What a lovely story about the cat and her kittens, they look so cute. Here’s hoping number 4 will be caught. So much for ‘retirement’ you sound so busy!