Baby Ezra

Our new homestead calf, Ezra, was born on March 10th. Here he is at 1 day old with mama Linda, our half jersey, half dexter dairy cow. Ain't he sweet?

See more pics at my reader blog on Grit.com here: http://tinyurl.com/dl63c7.

Ezzy and Linda are actually up at Maryruth's place. He's got a collar on now and is being "socialized". That's right - he's cute as a button now, but when he gets to be 900 pounds and ready for the butcher (dexters are a miniature cattle breed), we wanna be able to get him into the trailer without us losing essential body parts. So now while he's cute, we start handling him and petting and walking him and hand feeding him so he's not wild later.

Grass raised dexter meat is so tender that even if they don't put on much fat, their sirloin steaks will melt in your mouth...mmm!

Hay Girl!

(half what we'd hoped for)

For the last month and a half we've been dealing with hay issues. There's no forage left, and with the cold weather, the critters are eating more, and that means TONS, literally, of hay. So in an effort to continue enjoying luxuries such as hot running water, DSL and phone service, we had to find hay we could afford. We did, 200 miles away. Having put our hay money loyally into the local economy for the last several years, we had to perform some deferred maintenance on truck and trailer. The trailer had big issues - the goats and chickens had been playing hide and seek underneath it, so the wiring was shot. The license plate was lost the last time we loaned it out. The hitch is hideous and heavy and involves hideous, heavy stabilizer bars and chains. So I decided to borrow my neighbor's trailer.

(home sweet home, just over the mountains)

So far, so good, until I got about 10 miles out of town and the trailer bounced off. No injuries, no damage, except to my nerves. Ended up having to deal with all the problems I was trying to avoid, except the license plate thing. Then, we had to remove half the load of hay because the weight of it was pushing the fenders onto the tires. Even then, the fenders did rub a teeny bit, so the going home was very S-L-O-O-O-W. But we did finally get back with our first load of hay, and have been there and back again, with our own trusty trailer fixed, for another FULL load since, sans problems. This is a good thing, because maybe now I can catch up with all those things I've been wanting to blog about here for the last 6 weeks or so.