My broody hen hatched her first chick sometime yesterday afternoon. She is a first time mom and a production breed, but is doing a fantastic job. There are four other eggs still under her, but now that the first chick is at least 24 hours old I don't have much hope for them. She originally had a clutch of 9, but 4 broke over the last 2 weeks and weren't fertile. 

This handsome young man is Jagger, the Doberman my brother and sister-in-law adopted last Sunday. He was seized from his previous owners who had him and his sister locked in a rabbit hutch most of their lives. He is only 18 months old and a complete sweetheart. Very polite with our three dogs and interested, but behaved, around the chickens.

Busy bumblebee working in the flowers by the front porch. Bees of all species have been having a great spring now that it has warmed up a bit. The clover has been flowering for weeks, the roses are exploding with blossoms, and the bees are out constantly.

Hooray, we are having a lovely cool spell! And just in time for us to lose our air conditioning because we are getting geothermal installed.

We've had fantastic sunsets the last few nights and it just started raining about six minutes ago. Hopefully we'll get a inch or two and my pastures will be happy.

It was already 70 degrees and 84% humidity when I got in from chores this morning around 7 a.m. The humidity has dropped a bit, but the temperature climbed to over 90. Isabelle is hot and unhappy, hiding in the barn with the fan on. I went out this afternoon to clean the stall and sprayed down the barn floors with the hose so she could get a little evaporation-induced cooling.

My dad, crazy man that he is, is out mowing the yard in the heat and I got him to detour out back to mow the barn pasture. Isabelle has had access to it for about 2 weeks and mowed it down except for some very tall clumps of grass that were going to seed. It is supposed to rain and cool down a bit this week.

It is hot and buggy. And muggy, now that we got an inch of much needed rain last night during a very impressive thunderstorm. When I went out to milk this morning I swear the grass in the yard grew about three inches overnight. There was nearly a foot of water in the wheelbarrow that I had to dump out.

Still waiting on a foster calf. I am pretty sure we'll have to wait until mid-June at this point for a boy. Isabelle continues to produce steadily and my mom is desperately tired of making cheese or yogurt every day.

My broody hen is staying committed. I redid her nest box so she can't shift the eggs onto the wire of the cage anymore and get her up every evening to check eggs and make sure she at least drinks something.

Farm excitements the last few days:

- I finally found a place to order a nice and not insanely expensive trocar and cannula, which I have been coveting for years and am now very thrilled to own. If anyone else is strange like me and wants one for their cow emergency kit Jeffers Livestock has them for about $13.

- The arrival of said trocar and cannula coincided well with me letting Isabelle out into the barn pasture after resting it for the last few weeks, because it is rampant with clover.

- My brother mowed the far pasture (where Isabelle grazed all the things she could down and the really tall clumps of grass were going to seed) and the fence-line. The poor mower bogged down an awful lot, but it got the job done and things look much neater now.

- Yesterday the cow gave 2 heaping gallons that were nearly half cream. It was mildly ridiculous. I was really shocked because she was an absolute turd during milking and it involved much yelling on my part, so I'm a bit stunned she let down so much cream!

- The locust trees are flowering and it seems like the whole world smells fantastic.

- This is the first year EVER that Isabelle is eating only pasture. And the pasture is so good she isn't even trying to snack along the fence-lines. I keep hay in the feeder just in case, but she hasn't had more than a few cursory bites here and there for probably 6 weeks. I know this is the norm for most people with cows and pasture, but for me, this is a stunning development, because just a year or two ago when I had just started my Better Pastures Through Poop Project I was still feeding at least 1-2 bales a week on top of the pasture. And a few years before that I was happy to see grass amidst all the weeds and bare dirt.

I'm thinking about getting a bull calf to bottle feed/foster onto Isabelle in the next few weeks. Her production is holding steady at 1.5ish gallons a day and I could push it up a bit with more grain. And she has been a tremendous pill at milking time the last few weeks. The cow who usually stands like a stone and never moves her feet has started kicking, dancing around, and generally misbehaving. Her udder is healthy, no cuts/scraps/bites on her teats, feet and legs and good, etc. A fosterling would let me skip milking her (and be a nice break from the daily battle milking is becoming). It would also be company for her, another mouth to work on the (shockingly productive) pasture, and beef ready in the next 16-28 months just when the freezer is emptying.

If all my schemes work out Izzy will be bred early summer or early fall and the fosterling will be fat, sassy, and ready to be weaned when she needs to be dried off. Our neighbor down the street has cows due in the next few weeks- either Jerseys, Holsteins, or Jersey x Holsteins are possible. I'm hoping for a cross so I can get some hybrid vigor and slightly faster growth, but really I'll probably end up taking anything healthy with testicles, since who knows if he'll have a bull calf if I try to hold out for one. The soonest cow due is in the next week or two with a pure Jersey.

Of course, now that I have this plot I've had to come up with a whole list of potential bull calf names, because that is how I operate. For some reason my brain is still a big fan of Germanic names (with a little Celtic, Greek, and Latin thrown in), a theme that has been ongoing since Gustav and Friedrich back in 2009.

Potential names are as follows (and watch, if I do end up with a calf I'll probably go with something completely different): Sigmund, Magnus, Macsen, Archibald, Hubert, Clovis, Siegfried, Hobart.

I have had an extremely productive few days getting some of the major spring farm to-dos checked off my list. Friday I emptied, cleaned, and reorganized the storage stall. Saturday was the big day- I cleaned out about a years worth of deep bedding from the cow stall (5 full loads in my 10 cubic foot wheelbarrow) with just a pitchfork and hauled it all out to the pasture. Normally we do this using a tractor with a bucket loader or a skid steer, but none were available for borrowing and I was so tired of the grossness that was developing with all this heat and rain, despite adding more straw every day. Next I shoveled up two big loads of gravel and put a fresh layer down in the stall.

Then I spread all of the old bedding. My shoulders and hands ACHED. That stuff was heavy and so clotted together because of the fibrous nature of the straw that getting it spread out in a thin layer was a heck of a job. That pretty much completed the Better Pasture Through Poop project on the middle pasture, which I started in March. Sunday I cleaned the hen house and nest boxes. This afternoon after work I took the rejected hay out of the feeder and finished the last patch of ground in the middle pasture. Then I emptied, scrubbed, and refilled the 110 gallon stock tank. And watered the chickens. And put a new bale in the hay feeder.