Has it been an entire week since I last visited??

Spring on the farm is very busy and the days fly by, we had some more rain so we spent an entire day cleaning all the yards and buildings and Bruce hauled it out to the field. The easiest way to get the cows to move to another yard is to give them a bale of corn stalks, no driving required. It's kind of a cow beach party.

This little guy came into the world the hard way, his mother was a heifer, her first calf and she clearly wasn't getting anywhere with her labor. This calls for the calf puller.

She was in the maternity pen by the road and we had to move her to the barn. She couldn't have been more cooperative, she walked very quietly through the maze of yards, it was almost as though she knew we were there to help.

I'm not sure their bovine brain can actually think that but if one could, it would have been her.

When we saw the big feet and then the big nose, it was no wonder her mother needed help. He came out looking like he was dead, a limp pile of  hair and slime but a few licks from his mother and he opened his eyes and raised his head, searching for the reward that instinct told him was there, someplace.

He and his mother got a few extra days in the barn by themselves but by this day, he had his legs firmly under control. I needed to move him out of the barn so I could clean it and when he ran it looked like he was a little marionette with wires lifting each leg!

Our less than ambitious beaver is at work again, trying in vain to to plug the overflow out of the pond. Bruce was called in to rip out his hard work, we know he won't find it for a week or so.

Some of my free tulip festival tulips from last fall. Orange City has a tulip festival each May and the show is spectacular. After it is over, volunteers dig all the bulbs, put them in storage and plant the beds to flowers. Each fall there is a tulip bulb giveaway and this was the first time I'd ever participated. We were astonished at the trays of bulbs, for the taking! Now I'm reaping the benefits in the garden.

Love was in the air!! Each day I had to fish horny toads out of the skimmer box where they floated while in the throes of love. The day I found 3 pair and a single, I put a screen in front of the opening and that stopped that. After several nights of singing, their love was requited and the result is several strings of toad eggs and possibly some frog eggs. Toads eggs are in strings, frogs are in a ball and there is a ball in front of the waterfall. Otto?? Do you have a hidden girlfriend? Are you the girlfriend?

I made the chickens very happy yesterday by doing some cleanup in the garden. There are some very uninspiring asters that I decided to remove and replace them with something that deserved to be front and center. The chickens love it when I show up with a shovel and I soon had lots of help cleaning up the holes, removing all offending bugs and worms.

"Digging? Oh, no, that wasn't me!"

This is the door where the dogs caught all the rats, one day a tree rat (a squirrel) ran up inside the door when I came upon him eating corn on the ground. He kept his eye on me to see what I was up to so I surprised him...

....I flung the door open and he was in a tizzy, "where to go? where to go?"

Luckily I did not have the dogs with me, I like squirrels and to the dogs, they are just rats on steroids.

Bruce kind of thinks the same thing and he would be on the dogs side.

So here it is, Monday, another rain last night, we were driving home from Janet's and had to slow to a near crawl. The rain was coming down as hard as a cow pee'ing on a flat rock.

If you don't know, trust me, that's pretty hard.

So this morning was spent cleaning yards and making babies and mama's comfortable because that is what we do out here on the farm.

Come visit, I'll bake a cake.