Why all the cow photos? I need to know how to manage my blog, so this is a learning experience for us all. The first photo, taken with the camera held vertically, transferred to the blog laterally. I went through the process of editing, and by some indulgence of the gods, succeeded in setting these cows on their feet.

The second photo, with camera held vertically came through as per, no editing necessary. Huh?

The third photo, taken this morning on my walk down the road, held horizontally, also came through as per. I do not get this!

I see I’m boring you. But I do have a story. Yesterday, Larry and I decided to walk down the road after lunch to get fresh air. When we topped the first hill, we saw the cattle truck parked down by the barn, and picked up the pace. We hoped the two guys we saw were here to collect Cow 15, pictured above, who’d been reported to be limping.

I wish you could see the choreography of the two men on their ATVs as they cut them out of the herd. Those things race across the pasture’s bumps and heaves fast enough to launch them airborne, you’d think. Not as picturesque as cowboys on horseback, I guess, but pretty entertaining anyway.

The cows understand the game and cow pandemonium ensues. I love this! It doesn’t take long for Jake and Scott to get Number 15 and her baby in the gates by the barn. Not, as the expression has it, their first rodeo.

The dance of the gates is interesting, too. I hadn’t paid enough attention to understand that there’s a series of gates which swing open and back to contain the chosen animals. Only thing missing in this show was a good ranch dog.

Jake and Scott are perfect in the roles — pretty beat-up old guys, don’t look much better than the truck they came in. Funny, nice. You’d like to hear their stories, or I would.

Back in the house, I looked up “foot rot,” the field diagnosis for the lame animal. Whoa. This is not a visual I’d recommend for the casual passerby. No wonder she was limping. The article referred to the “toes”. Strange. A cloven hoof, yes, but one doesn’t think of the component features as toes. Cow 15 and baby will be taken back to the barn for treatment, and I don’t know if they’ll be back here.

When I saw the rest of the herd this morning I wondered what, if anything, the animals make of all this. We seem to have two separate herds, with the ones I photographed all the Black Angus. I think. I asked Jake about this earlier, and he said all these animals had been in the same barn when calving. ( I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t say they were “friends.”) A couple of days ago I saw two adults rubbing noses, and earlier, have seem them licking one another. Obviously they have some connection.

See how far social isolation can take you? You have time to ponder cow existential questions. Larry’s back home with the news that Simply Mac cannot resolve his computer problem. His 10-year old computer. This probably won’t end well, so let’s go have lunch.

Well that was silly. I’m never going to France, so why would I spend any time learning French? I’m not that bored. So, no. Forget I said it.

Our herd of cows has multiplied again. Enjoying our morning coffee yesterday, our attention was drawn to the now-larger cow/calf herd barreling down the upper pasture northward to the barn. Huh? So Ryan or Jake must have been driving them, but when did all those new cows arrive and how did we miss them? Forty in all, my neighbor, who counts them, tells me. Larry took the ATV down to the barn to investigate, fearing that there had been a mass breakout from the barn pasture. But no, the gate separating the fields was closed, so there must have been human intervention in the move. Apparently it isn’t important to keep us informed, so we shrugged and came back to have breakfast.

Late that afternoon we got a call from Allen, who was picking up his bees in Eugene and would be here to install them by 6:30 Here’s what that looked like:

Okay I hate Word Press! It allowed me to edit the first photo but not the next. Does anyone out there know how to navigate Word Press? No wait. I can’t have a temper tantrum about my blog right now. Sorry.

So here’s the hive Allen made. Gorgeous, huh? There will be some thousands of bees and one queen, whom you can pick out in the photo directly above. I know, it would be easier if it weren’t sideways on the page. Grrr. Allen will be tending them, bringing sugar water to feed the “brood” who are maturing inside the cells you also see above. Interesting stuff! He doesn’t plan to sell the honey, but says we can have all we can ever use. Nice.

This morning we looked up from our morning coffee again and saw two wild turkeys in the yard. The male was puffed up, tail feathers spread open like a peacock (I didn’t know they did that) while the object, apparently, of his affection simply ignored the show. The display not enough, he began to sing his gobbling song, also to no avail. She kept her head down and meandered out of the yard into the pasture. Last seen, the poor fellow had crawled under the fence to join her, whereupon he adjusted his marvelous tail feathers and kept dancing and singing. Our neighbors tell us wild turkeys are a scourge and I believe them, but this grey morning we were glad of their company.

That’s all the livestock news for the day. I will tell you that I Googled the first plant from Integrated Resource Mgmt. list as per my set of intentions. Piper Willow and Sitka Willow. Both native, stream-bed shrubs which like to grow where their feet are wet. So that’s a start. Au revoir!

Okay, this is not about the virus. You can go ahead and read it. Just a story of two simple, old people grappling with life on a farm. Supposed to be funny, and I depend on Larry to provide material. He’s really good at it.

Last night I overheard him tell someone the phone: “no, we’re not doing much. Just hanging out. Reading.”

This from a man who spent the morning stringing wire between posts of the rail fence in order to prevent the new baby calves from wandering out onto Llewellyn. See, on Tuesday night a calf was found wandering on the road. A passing motorist and a neighbor managed to get the calf back behind the fence, and called our neighbor Terri, who called us. Who called Ryan, who didn’t answer. So, we’re it. And it’s raining. We’re not experienced at stringing wire, of using a “come-along” to tighten the wire. But we managed to string enough so that any calf who escaped up- stream from this work would still be confined to our property by the entry gates.

This from a man who weeded the daffodil bed in front of the orchard. Who planted 50 onion sets and 30 lettuce and cabbage plants, in the rain. Who cleaned the chicken coop.

See how funny he is?

This morning we decided to walk down the road in lieu of working out in our garage gym, and were surprised to see that our herd had doubled overnight. How did we fail to notice? And then there he was, a black calf wandering along our driveway. Oh man. If he turned left when he ran from us, we’d have a chance of getting him back behind the fence where his mother was mooing at him. If he turned right, he’d be out in the field where we’d never corner him.

Luckily, he went left, but in his haste to get away from us, struggled through the 2nd and 3rd strands of barbed wire governing that section. Ouch! We counted the newcomers and find we now have 28 animals:

Down at the barn we found a guy from Integrated Recourse Management, here to plant trees and shrubs along the creeks. His company is hired by Benton County, and he planned to plant 950 stems over two days. Wow! We had significant loss over the winter from the 6600 planted last year, so this was welcome news. I took a photo of his list, for my own benefit because I want to learn these plants. I’ll talk about this later.

Larry wanted to finish up his work load for the day (cleaning the gutters!) and then go play golf over at the school course. Alas, they’re closed, of course. If only he had listened to Charlie and built a couple of golf holes on the property. With golf off the table, he decided to go burn the 5 piles of slash down in the north east corner by the road, which we’d generated last fall from a tree fallen across the fence:

A reasonable exchange of entertainment. Who doesn’t like a good fire?

What I wanted to say about the plant list: I’ve been counseling myself that this is a great time to work on the many self-improvement projects that have lined up:

1. Practice my 5-string and memorize a set-list against the improbable day when someone asks me to play something.
2. Practice my piano and learn some credible songs. I don’t care if anyone asks me to play because who would?
3. crank up my Pimsleur French tapes and spend a specific amount of time each day at this.
4. keep studying Africa.
5. And look up, study and learn the plants on the list I mentioned. I could make a folder of them, then check on their progress through the year.

If any of you would like to choose one of the above and take it off my back, it would be a big help. Because, remember, I have to clean my own house now, cook three meals a day, help Larry with fence, burning, planting, and other farm-related chores.

Keep in touch. Write to me! I’d love to hear from anyone who reads this — I don’t know how you leave a comment on the blog, but you can always reach me at janeviehl@mac.com

Came in like a lion? Well, yeah, but I have nothing to add to all that has been said about our situation this March, so will simply go on to describe life at our farm.

I was walking up the driveway on Wednesday, noticed this truck backing up. We already had 5 new cow/calf pairs in the pasture, but apparently more were on the way and I was going to get to watch them unload.

I asked Jake, the driver, how old this baby is, thinking a couple of weeks. Nope, born yesterday. Seriously!

Here’s Momma, with another baby right behind. Mom’s a little behind on her hygiene, or maybe dirt happens when you’re riding in a cattle truck, but you’ll get an idea of how tiny the babies are.

They’re at home now in the pasture directly around the barn, where our wild daffodils are, at the moment, in bloom.

The weather is so gorgeous just now — low thirties at night, sixty in the afternoon. Too bad most of my chores take place inside. Yes, we did pay them anyway, but our cleaning ladies are on hold for awhile. I hope they’re enjoying this time off, despite everything.

But with all the fruit trees in bloom, the birds making nests, it’s clear that Mother Nature is simply ignoring the virus and bringing spring anyway. Thank you!

A story: our dear friends Ursel and Epi Scheffler, with whom we sailed the Baltic in 2018, sent us a note with a photo from Brazil where our same ship is touring South America. A later note informed us that the ship was experiencing the familiar cruise-line misfortune, at anchor outside Manaus, Brazil, with passengers unable to disembark. Even though no-one on board has tested positive for corona, the Brazilian government deemed them too dangerous to allow them to travel to the airport for their flights back to Germany. So they will now be sailing across the Atlantic, hoping to find a welcome harbor in Hamburg. Quite an adventure, one I’m amazingly grateful that I don’t share!

Another story, this one funny, has our friend Dick Edwards in his garden planting his onion sets. With his knee replacements, he was doing the job sitting on a bench or stool, tipped over backwards, twice, and reflected on how silly an old man can be. Our resident old man immediately took this as inspiration, and spent the day yesterday preparing the garden for his onion sets.

Today he’s similarly employed creating a screened planting bed for the cabbage and lettuce sets he acquired. This involves plastic tubing, some orchard netting, some boards and staples. This to keep the chickens from treating the new plants as their banquet. They’ve gotten very clever about flying over the gates we’d used last year. I’d show you a photo, but the time lapse between camera and computer mandates that it’s not possible. In any case, a good project to fend off the boredom of quarantine.

Tomorrow the folks from Benton County are supposed to come to add some 600 new trees and shrubs to the stream-side enclosures. The original planting of 6000 experienced a pretty big failure, so we’re hoping for better success with these. Also on the calendar for next week is the arrival of some bee hives, to be managed by Allen, who, you may remember, worked on the landscape. Should be fun.

A note from a vesper-sparrow research team asked if we’d allow them to set up a station on our property with the goal of establishing a colony here. This involves a play-back recording to lure the birds here, and periodic visits from the team to check. As the song of this bird is lovely, hence its name, we of course agreed.

This day has somehow slipped into lunch time. I’ll go check on the garden project, wish you all well, harboring at place in your homes. I hope you can find a way to enjoy this glorious sunshine, though it probably doesn’t include baby calves and intransigent chickens 🙂

Hey, where you been?

Yeah, I don’t know. Hibernating? On sabbatical? Daylight Savings tomorrow, by the way. It doesn’t look like spring out there, but cheer up!

So, moles are a good place to start today. I mean the moles that live in one’s nice newly-planted grass. Just Googled them, and while I couldn’t get a photo to share with you, they’re just little brown furry creatures, and don’t go thinking they’re cute. Here’s what he/they/it is/are doing to our lawn:

Those little flags indicate the place where our hired expert has placed traps. As we see, the mole is laughing at him. Yesterday Larry gave up and dumped poison down the newer holes, and yet another mound has appeared this morning. Back in the day he would have parked in a folding chair with his shotgun and waited. He didn’t think he’d need the gun when we moved to the city, and so gave it away. Bad decision?

Almost kind-of funny, man here on top of the food chain defeated by this wretched little pest. What he could be finding to eat that’s so delicious in our underlying pottery-grade clay is a mystery, but here we are.

This morning, Larry and Mitchell, our “hand,” are out cleaning up the remaining downed oak — the one that crushed the iron gate earlier this winter. Ryan, Cow Guy, says he’ll be bringing some cow-calf pairs onto the property in a week or so, which has inspired the lumberjack operation currently in progress. We don’t have skills or equipment to fix or replace the gate, so will have to turn that job over to Ryan’s crew.

Mitch is determined to burn the accompanying slash pile, but I’m not seeing any plumes of smoke. The county informs us of the dates and hours on which we are allowed to burn, and today’s the day. Not exactly raining, but the air is heavy with sweet Willamette Valley mist. Good luck, Mitch!

The Fish and Wildlife people have been busy spraying the 13 acres they’ve devoted to wild flowers. This means a flotilla of ATVs with boom sprays criss-cross in front and back of the house. I wish they didn’t have to use chemicals — kind-of not the point here, but we have to defer to their knowledge.

Meanwhile, Benton County sent a couple of crews to spray the trees and shrubs they planted along the stream beds. Well, I mean the weeds between the trees and shrubs. So, more spray. Damn. I recently had to complete a health survey (having to do with the fact that my doctor seems to think I’m old or something) and: am I exposed to agricultural poisons? Heck yes. (Do I have small area rugs in my home, etc., she just wants to keep me safe. Bless her heart.) With all this agricultural poison going around, what’s up with that mole?

Okay, the global pandemic. Are we over-reacting, or just being careful? California has declared a state of emergency — what does that mean? Are we going to be able to make our trip to Palm Springs with Tom and Dorsey next week? And why do people think that toilet paper is the one indispensable commodity to stockpile? The jokes have started showing up, so I guess that’s a good sign.

Larry has just returned from the back forty, and we’re heading out to stockpile some groceries for the weekend. Hope I don’t regret taking the virus lightly. You all be safe now, and I’ll see you next time.