Until the Cows Come Home.....They're Home!!

What is that funny little saying? "Until the cows come home." I always wondered what that meant so I Googled it.
It means a long time, usually defining how late
someone might stay up at night or out partying.
The origin of the phrase goes back to
a time when people were familiar with the time cows came home
(in the very early morning... 4 - 5 a.m.) because they wanted to be milked. That would be milk cows. Our cows are beef cows and being that beef cows are cooler than milk cows they come home the cool way. Last week about 9 days after the calves came home the cows caught a ride on a semi in a cow wagon and arrived home in the early afternoon.

Roger backing up to the unloading chute.



Coming down the chute. The girls are glad to be home.


Catching up with the rest of the herd.


They will graze in this pasture near the river until the feed runs out. Then we will move them to a field where they will be fed hay. Idaho has happy cows too!

Weaning The Calves

On November 11th we weaned the calves from the cows. The first is a picture of herding the cattle into the corrals at the ranch before sorting the calves away from their mothers and loading them onto the trucks. This is the only picture I took that day because it was a weird foggy and cold day. The cabin was a nicer place to be.


Here are the calves home in the cleaned out corrals bedded with fresh straw. They mooed for their mommies for about three nights and days after they were weaned. It's quite a noise to listen to!


The calves have been sorted into different pens by size and sex. The above calves are heifers. The best of these heifers will replace some of the older cows in the herd next year.


This is Roger at feeding time. He loads bales of hay into the hay feeder, cuts and pulls out the baling twine and drives the feeder around the corrals with the tractor. The feeder is chopping the hay bale then depositing the hay into the mangers next to the corrals where the cattle can eat it. The calves are fed twice a day.




This is a pen of steers. They will eventually be sold to feedlots where they will be fattened up for beef.


But for now they are very content, well taken care of calves.

Family Canning

Today we went to the church cannery to can a little food for our own personal storage. We being, Roger and I, my parents, Dale and Esther, Alan and Sara and Kimberly and Michelle. I made the appointment a couple of weeks ago. All the evening appointments were filled until the middle of December so we took an 8-10 a.m. slot. Mike and Matt were unable to join us due to day jobs. It was fun doing the canning together and we got a lot done. Doesn't everyone look stylish in their hairnets and gloves.

Halloween of Days Gone By

This Halloween is the first since we've had kids that no one at our house dressed up. The grand kids did visit in their costumes but I thought I would let their parents post their pictures. So I found a picture of a past Halloween .

Alan as Dracula, Adam a dead boy scout, Laura a princess and Rachel a baby doll. I think Kimberly was a teenager and gone:) Weren't they cute? I miss it already.

Tanner Day

Every Thursday my grandson, Tanner, comes and spends the day with me while his mom, Kimberly, works. Thus, we call it "Tanner Day". Today was such a beautiful fall day so we decided to go out and rake up the leaves in the yard. Tanner was a big help in the beginning then he discovered the fun you can have with a pile of leaves.

It was an awesome Tanner day. Sunshine, little boys and leaves are a great combination. I will finish raking the leaves tomorrow but I know it won't be as much fun without him.

Happy 21st Birthday Adam!

Scattering Sunshine

OK, I know most of you think of farming and ranching as a glamorous lifestyle where we drive around in John Deere tractors and Ford pickups looking good or ride our horses off into the sunset. I'm going to shatter that illusion in this post. There are quite a few stinky jobs that have to be done on the farm and this is one of them......hauling manure! After last year's calves were weaned in the fall, they spent most of the winter in the corrals behind Grandmas. After a winter of feeding the calves and strawing the pens when they got a little "gooey" the pens get pretty thick with manure. The calves were sold in the spring and the manure was left to compost over the summer. Now that it is time for this year's calves to come home from the ranch, the corrals need to be cleaned out. This job fell to Alan this year.

As you can see it is pretty deep. About three foot deep on the level.

He put the bucket attachment on the telehandler and started scooping

and scooping.

It takes about eight scoops to fill the manure spreader.

He then drove to the field behind our house and drove up and down while the manure spreader flung the manure over the field.

Cheap fertilizer!

The manure in our corrals covered about 90 acres. It took about a week to complete this task. There's a lot of driving between the corrals and fields. A spreader full only covers about a land and a half. It's a crappy job but somebody has got to do it.